Creating a Classroom Culture That Supports the Common Core

Teaching Questioning, Conversation Techniques, and Other Essential Skills

Bryan Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317909255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Is your classroom culture conducive to the expectations of the Common Core? Teaching content is not enough; students need a classroom structure and atmosphere that will help them learn key academic skills. This practical book will show you how to transform your classroom culture, raise the level of rigor, encourage higher-level questioning and critical thinking, and promote academic discussions. You will also find out how to adjust your classroom management techniques so that students learn to regulate themselves while completing these higher-level tasks.

Special Features in Each Chapter:

• Key Idea—a summary of the essential idea that will be addressed in the chapter
• Practical strategies—a variety of easy-to-implement ideas that you can try right away
• Connections to the Common Core State Standards—how the skills taught in this book will help students meet the standards
• Reflection Questions—thoughtful questions that will help teachers apply their learning to their own classrooms. These questions can be answered independently or used in book study groups.
• Extend Your Knowledge—creative ideas for extending your knowledge beyond the ideas in this book

1
Creating a Classroom Culture That Supports the Common Core

Key Idea

If students are to exhibit the skills of the Common Core, the classroom culture, environment, and atmosphere must support the development of those skills. This necessitates specific attention, time, and focus. A supportive classroom culture requires that teachers embody respect in their daily interactions with students and that they spend time teaching the specific skills that will lead to student success. With a focused and positive classroom culture, students are more willing to take the risks necessary to build skills and deepen content knowledge.

Creating the Environment—Two Principles

As teachers, our job is to create, or craft, the learning environment for our students. Make no mistake, the classroom environment is either intentionally created by the teacher or it gets created by other factors including student personalities, class size, or the availability of resources and support. Either way, the classroom environment has a large impact on the development of student skills, attitudes, and mastery of content. The following two principles are foundational elements for creating the kind of classroom environment that will support the development of Common Core skills.

Principle #1—Embody Respect

Classrooms where students thrive are built upon respect and trust. Respectful environments and relationships serve as the foundation for students to build skills and expand their content knowledge. Disrespectful environments destroy trust and any willingness a student may have to take a risk. Concepts related to psychological safety suggest that students must first believe, often through concrete examples, that they are safe from teasing, ridicule, embarrassment, or shame. Richard Lavoie, in his book The Motivation Breakthrough, points to the connection between safety and motivation:

Children simply cannot learn if they feel unsafe, threatened, or insecure. The classroom environment must be tolerant, accepting, welcoming, and secure. One of the primary roles of the teacher is to protect the physical and emotional well-being of the students. Motivation cannot exist in an environment where children feel or fear embarrassment, humiliation, intimidation, or isolation. (p. 95)

In essence, we need to be the things we expect of our students. Respectfulness needs to permeate every interaction we have with students. Here are three ways to embody respect.

Build Positive Relationships

Everything we do in the classroom runs on the currency of relationships. The idea of currency is used here specifically to point out that relationships are not constant or stagnant, they change and evolve. Just as our bank accounts fluctuate every day based on expenses and income, relationships are fluid and ever changing. Once we establish positive relationships with students, we must always work to build on that foundation. There are times when you’ll ask students to do something they’ve not done before or to do something that is uncomfortable. In those situations, you’ll need to draw upon the currency that you’ve built up. If there is nothing “in the bank” it will be a challenge to get a student to take a risk. The book Quantum Teaching uses the term “affinity” to define the closeness, affection, and admiration that teachers should seek to develop with their students. Although we may get students to follow procedures or rules through the use of threat, intimidation, or negative interactions, true learning and risk taking require personal connections that result from trust. Rapport is built when individuals listen to each other, value each other’s background, and genuinely enjoy being around each other. When students know that the teacher truly likes them, that they care about them as a person, they are more willing to engage in the learning tasks and challenges in the classroom. Here are four easy ways to build relationships with students.

• Ask questions—Get to know the likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies, and outside-of-school activities of your students. Many teachers provide questionnaires or surveys at the beginning of the year. Use that information to build relationships with students.
• Make positive contact with home—Relationships need to be built with families as well as with students. Use positive phone calls, emails, notes, postcards, and home visits to open the lines of communication. As educators, we need to realize that there is a lot we can learn from parents about how to best educate their children. Plus, every parent loves to hear good things about their children. When we spend the time to make the connection with families, it pays off in the classroom.
• Share a laugh—Humor is a powerful tool in the classroom. It can relieve tension, liven up a boring lesson, focus student attention, and help create an environment where students want to be. When people share a genuine laugh together, it strengthens their bond, connection, and commitment to each other. Use stories, knock-knock jokes, funny pictures, or personal incidents as an opportunity to laugh. Make a commitment to spend just a few minutes each day laughing with your students.
• Share something personal—Most students want to know something about their teachers. While they won’t likely be all that interested in a teacher’s resume or career accomplishments, they still want to know a little bit about the teacher’s background, interests, passions, etc. Offer age-appropriate stories, artifacts, personal experiences, or pictures so students get an understanding of who you are as a teacher as well as who you are as a person.

Avoid Negativity and Sarcasm

Nothing will destroy trust or a positive classroom environment faster than negative or sarcastic comments. As will be outlined and repeated throughout this book, students need to be willing to take a risk in order to develop the skills necessary for success in the Common Core. As teachers, we simply cannot embody respect while at the same time infuse our daily interactions with negativity and sarcasm. Just as humor can open up and expand a relationship, sarcasm can close it off and destroy trust very quickly. Although negativity and sarcasm often appear together, they are not the same. Sarcasm is typically defined as negative humor and has no place in the classroom, even with older children. It should not be used as a teaching or classroom management tool because it destroys trust instead of building it. One of the challenges when working with older students is that they often recognize sarcasm as humor and will laugh. They may even provide sarcastic comments back to the teacher or to other students. Regardless, it is not a technique that builds positive relationships because students will be less likely to be vulnerable if they know they may be on the receiving end of a sarcastic comment.

When considering if your interactions with students are sarcastic, think about intent. If the intention of the comment or statement is to ridicule, point out errors or faults, or to mock a behavior, it might come across as sarcastic. Both sarcasm and negative comments often result from frustration or lack of student compliance. For example, the following response to a student’s cell phone ringing in class would be sarcastic, “Uh, EXCUSE ME. I guess the rules don’t apply to you. Why are you so important that you need your phone on? Are you expecting a call from your girlfriend? Wait, you don’t have a girlfriend, do you?” To gauge if your daily interactions are often negative or sarcastic, you have three valuable resources. First, ask your students if there are times when your comments, jokes, or interactions come across as negative, mean, or impolite. In some cases, you may need to apologize to students that you have offended. Second, seek the advice of a trusted colleague. Talk to a fellow educator who is willing to provide an accurate assessment of your interactions with students. Ask your colleague to observe your classroom with the goal of providing feedback about how you interact with students. Finally, consider audio recording a class. An audio recording has several benefits over a video recording. It is much easier to set up and, unlike a video, there is no worry about getting focused on the wrong things. The sole focus should be on the verbal interactions that take place in the classroom. When used as a personal reflection tool, it can provide valuable insights into the classroom environment. (Some schools or districts may have a policy providing guidelines for the use of audio recording so consult with an administrator prior to using this strategy.)

Model Behaviors

We are always modeling behaviors, deliberate or not, positive or negative, we are always modeling. In the context of embodying respect, we need to model the positive behaviors we expect of our students. If we want students to be patient and forgiving, we need to be patient and forgiving. If we expect students to say “please” and “thank you” we need to do the same. Our profession is unique in the sense that our customers, our students, are always watching us. They watch how we handle frustration, how we handle good news, how we deal with unexpected events, how we deal with deadlines, how we organize our own materials… they watch everything. Knowing that their eyes are always on us, we have a duty to demonstrate, in our daily behaviors, what we expect of students. If we do not, we run the risk of (rightfully so) being labeled a hypocrite. In addition to ensuring that our personal behaviors are congruent with our expectations of others, we can use strategies such as Think Alouds (see p. 7) to help students understand how we think, process, and come to conclusions when faced with problems or challenges.

Principle #2—Teach Skills

It can be frustrating to attempt to teach a group of students who don’t know how to think critically, how to resolve conflicts, how construct an argument, or how to critique ideas. However, consider the fact that if students came to us as they should be, there would be no reason for teachers in the first place. When our students lack the necessary skills to be successful in the classroom, it is our duty to teach them those skills. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to resolve conflicts, and how to critique ideas. Remember that the Common Core is a game-changer in the sense that the focus is on both content knowledge and skills. The skills are those verbs in the standards that require action based on content knowledge. If we expect students to demonstrate knowledge, we need to teach them both the knowledge and how to demonstrate it. For some, this will require a shift in thinking away from solely focusing on content mastery. Content mastery alone, as will be outlined in Chapter 3 will not be sufficient in preparing our students for the challenges of the next century.

Outlined here are four general strategies that make skill development fun, interactive, and effective.

Looks Like, Sounds Like, Feels Like

This strategy offers teachers and students alike the chance to clarify expectations and state them in concrete terms so that everyone has a clear understanding of what the skill looks like, what it sounds like, and what it feels like. This is particularly useful for helping students understand abstract skills such as evaluate or persevere. Children are implored to think critically, describe thoroughly, or compare ideas only to find the teacher’s expectations are very different from their own. Nowhere is this conflict more evident than in the classroom. Teachers often tell students to behave in terms that are abstract and open to interpretation. Provide students with a handout that has three columns: one labeled Looks Like, another labeled Sounds Like, and another labeled Feels Like. At the top of the sheet, list one specific behavior or skill, such as engaging in a collaborative discussion. In partnership with the student(s), brainstorm the specific behaviors that you expect when students are in that situation. The first two columns—Looks Like and Sounds Like—focus on external behaviors that can be seen and measured by both the student and the teacher. The Feels Like column lists how students would expect to feel if they were meeting expectations and demonstrating that skill.

Photographic Evidence

Many students respond well to visual images that provide support, examples, and evidence of expected appropriate behavior. This strategy uses images and pictures to demonstrate what a skill might look like. Gather images and pictures that demonstrate expected classroom behaviors. For example, what does the mathematical practice of attend to precision look like? Compile images and pictures in a folder or envelope, or tape them onto the surface of a desk for individual students. Include a brief description or title for each photograph, such as “When tackling a tough problem.” Some teachers use plastic picture inserts, the type that come in wallets, and give one to each student. When providing direction, support, or guidance to students, refer to the Photographic Evidence in addition to providing verbal redirections or reprimands.

Fish Bowl

Just as we observe fish in a bowl, this strategy allows students to see, hear, and observe what other students think about a concept, question, or scenario. As an analogy, tell students that fish in a bowl live in an environment where everyone can see what they are doing. When we watch fish in a bowl, we observe how they live. Although we can’t see what fish think, we can observe how they act. Place two or three students in chairs in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Creating a Classroom Culture That Supports the Common Core
• 2 Managing Behavior in the Common Core Classroom
• 3 Rigor in the Common Core Classroom
• 4 Questioning in the Common Core Classroom
• 5 Critical Thinking in the Common Core Classroom
• 6 Academic Conversations in the Common Core Classroom
• References