Encouragement in the Classroom

How do I help students stay positive and focused? (ASCD Arias)

Joan Young

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781416619185
• eBook ISBN: 9781416619215
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

We all know the factors that can threaten a positive classroom environment: stress from testing, lack of motivation, and problems that students bring from home, for a start. What if we could implement some simple practices to buffer against these factors' negative effects?

The good news is that we can. Encouragement in the Classroom explores the small yet high-impact changes that teachers can make to transform students' school experience every day. Drawing from positive psychology research, educator Joan Young explains how fostering humor, mindfulness, resilience, curiosity, and gratitude in the classroom empowers students to learn from their mistakes, celebrate successes, and actively engage in learning. Filled with examples, this publication offers practical, classroom-tested strategies, routines, and rituals that teachers can use immediately to defuse the negative effects of stress and create a stimulating and supportive classroom culture.

The Importance of a Positive Classroom

Classroom environment is one of the most important factors affecting student learning. Simply put, students learn better when they view the learning environment as positive and supportive (Dorman, Aldridge, & Fraser, 2006). A positive environment is one in which students feel a sense of belonging, trust others, and feel encouraged to tackle challenges, take risks, and ask questions (Bucholz & Sheffler, 2009). Such an environment provides relevant content, clear learning goals and feedback, opportunities to build social skills, and strategies to help students succeed (Weimer, 2009).

We all know the factors that can threaten a positive classroom environment: problems that kids bring from home, lack of motivation among students whose love of learning has been drilled right out of them, pressures from testing, and more. We can’t control all these factors, but what if we could implement some simple strategies to buffer against their negative effects?

The good news is that we can. We can foster effective learning and transform the experience of our students every day by harnessing the power of emotions. If you’re already objecting that you don’t have time for that kind of thing, don’t worry: I’m not talking about holding a daily class meeting to talk about feelings. The strategies I offer in this publication can be easily integrated into your instruction. What’s more, they are not a luxury or a frill: we ignore the power of emotions at our peril. When we dismiss the effects—both positive and negative—that emotions have on learning, we make our jobs much harder for ourselves.

A bounty of research outlines the impact emotions have on learning. Stress, for example, has a significant negative effect on cognitive functioning (Medina, 2008). Unfortunately, when it comes to learning processes, the power of negative events greatly outweighs the power of positive events (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001). As a result, we need to prepare ourselves with an arsenal of strategies that inoculate our students against the power of negativity. By providing enough positive experiences to counteract the negative, we can help students avoid getting stuck in a “negative spiral” (Fredrickson, 2001), which can be set off by something as seemingly innocuous as a critical comment from a peer or a stressful test moment. Being caught up in negative emotions in this way impairs learning by narrowing students’ focus and inhibiting their ability to see multiple viewpoints and solve problems.

This publication is not a cheat sheet, a “happyology” manual, or a Band-Aid that will fix that distressed kid and send him to a magical haven of learning. Instead, it is a guide to simple routines, strategies, and structures that take little time to implement yet yield immeasurable results. Creating a positive environment produces a powerful ripple effect that continually enhances learning: when students can see the humor in their mistakes, celebrate their successes, and feel empowered as change agents, they will actively engage in learning and, consequently, learn more effectively. Far from promising easy solutions and instant results, these strategies will increase students’ capacity to tolerate the discomfort that comes with working hard and to accept that there are no easy answers—that only critical thinking and perseverance lead the way to mastery.

The principles and strategies that follow will help you evaluate the challenges you face in the classroom and address them by infusing your practice with positive elements like humor, novelty, and fascination. The first step is to examine the current state of your learning environment and assess how effective it is.

A Learning Environment Analysis

Take a day or two to be an observer in your own classroom, or invite a colleague to partner with you in reciprocal classroom observation. It is helpful to conduct at least two observations: one on a day when you perceive things to be going smoothly and another during a high-stress period when you feel particularly overwhelmed—for example, around testing or report card time. Obviously, if you’re working alone, you can’t just stop teaching to observe your class, but take a step back whenever possible and record what you see (for a technology-assisted boost, film the class period). Then answer the following questions:

• What is the ratio of time students spend off task to time students engage in authentic work? To make this data collection manageable, pause every 10 minutes and simply observe how many students are actively engaged and how many are off task. Alternatively, you could closely observe just a small sample of students throughout the entire period.
• How many times each hour do you encounter a student behavior issue? If it is too challenging to chart the behavior of each student, you can choose a sample of the class to observe.
• What are some of the precursors to these behavior issues—that is, events that occur just before the problems arise? Remember to keep a full observation stance, and try not to leap to judgment. Keep in mind various “factors of mass distraction” that may contribute to problems, such as people entering or leaving the room, noise level, students’ seating locations, and time of day. You might also want to note the affect or mood of students as they come into class that day.

This stage is about asking questions and uncovering the root causes of the problems that impede learning and engagement in your classroom. Engaging in this process with a partner after the class has gone for the day should prove helpful. The Encore section of this publication provides further questions to explore.

In conducting this classroom “autopsy,” you should be able to pinpoint the moments when teaching and learning are most effective, analyze what leads to these moments, and find ways to create more of these experiences. As for the less productive moments you identify, the following strategies will help you create an environment that is more conducive to engagement and learning.

Harnessing the Power of Humor

Although humor is not the solution to every problem, it can be a powerful ally in the classroom. Think back on your own experiences as a student: who were your most effective, memorable teachers? Odds are, they were the ones who had a sense of humor.

Humor is a valuable hook and engagement strategy (Banas, Dunbar, Rodriguez, & Liu, 2011) that activates the mesolimbic region of the brain—the part that processes rewards (Hack, 2012)—and positively affects students’ interest, attention, and tendency to remember (Neely, Walter, Black, & Reiss, 2012). In addition, laughter defuses moments of stress and bonds members of a community.

Both intentional and spontaneous uses of humor have transformed my own teaching. In my classroom, laughter has provided catharsis when students feel stressed out about impending testing and has helped my students and me learn from and even celebrate mistakes. I am delighted when former students return to share stories of how “funny” it was to be in my class. They recall times when potentially stressful moments became playful reminders not to take ourselves too seriously: “Hey, Mrs. Young, remember when you tripped and almost fell on Daniel sitting on the beanbag behind you?” Uh, how could I forget? As my hand shot down to break my fall, my legs flew up in the air, revealing (thankfully) only my black tights: as a first-year teacher, the last thing I needed was students spreading the word that they had seen up my dress! Once I recovered from my tumble, I laughingly commented that I really needed eyes in the back of my head, which became a running joke in my class. Because we had fun with the incident, students remembered it as a time I could have been totally embarrassed. (They were also a bit more careful from then on about where they placed their beanbag chairs!)

The following tips offer some ways you can use humor as a “vaccine” to protect your students (and you) from factors that negatively affect engagement and learning.

Integrate fun, humorous images and videos. It turns out that those funny baby animal videos not only are proven uplifters but also have academic benefits: research (Nittono, Fukushima, Yano, & Moriya, 2012) shows that viewing pictures of baby animals leads students to narrow their focus in subsequent tasks. Visuals in general have great engagement potential, and smart teachers use them to create effective lessons.

Try kicking off a lesson by showing a funny picture that segues into the content or provides a prompt for a writing exercise. Post the image on the board (or let students choose their own picture from a “mystery bag”) and ask students to write descriptions of the image. If you want to make the activity collaborative, have each student share his or her written description of the mystery image with a partner, and then ask each student to draw a picture based on his or her partner’s description. Afterward, students can compare the drawings with the original images.

Consider introducing topics with funny but educational videos, such as those on the CrashCourse channel on YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse), which teach history and science topics in a dynamic, humorous manner. You can also use videos as a transition to get kids in a positive, alert mental state. The YouTube channel SoulPancake (www.youtube.com/user/soulpancake) offers videos that encourage creative, prosocial behavior and use uplifting, humorous content to get students in an open and ready state for learning. It’s powerful to engage students in opportunities to laugh that don’t rely on putdowns or inappropriate language.

Short on time to collect these resources? Sounds like a good opportunity to assign some engaging homework: let students find or create humorous pictures or videos that introduce a topic or show a funny mistake found while researching the topic (e.g., an image of a sign with a typo that changes the sign’s meaning). In my own 4th grade class, I created the job of “classroom environment engineer,” which is assigned to a different student every week. Once a week, the student in this role brings in a funny picture or story to share with the class. This is a particularly good strategy to use during tricky transition times: knowing they will be seeing something funny right after recess inspires my students to come in ready to engage.

Understand the educational potential of comics and wordplay. Humor isn’t just for fun; it actually propels students to become more engaged in thinking (Hack, 2012). A clever comic or cartoon can alert students to inconsistencies and exaggerations in everyday life and engages them in trying to understand the context. By brainstorming and generating possible meanings for the cartoon, students are using higher-level thinking skills like inference. Many upper-level social studies teachers use political cartoons in this way.

Comic strips can find their way naturally into almost any subject and are an excellent way to demonstrate irony. Calvin and Hobbes, for example, pokes fun at the idiosyncratic ways school sometimes asks us to learn—the way we do things we don’t necessarily want to do, like memorize facts, and then forget what we learned right after the test. Comics also illustrate multiple meanings of words and phrases, introducing students to the joys of wordplay. In the secondary grades, try additional avenues to explore wordplay. For example, English classes can consult Grammar Girl (www .quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl) for humorous discussion of grammar mistakes and proper usage. Who wouldn’t chuckle at the difference a well-placed comma could make in the sentence “Let’s eat Grandma”?

Consider creating a place in the classroom or a virtual board, such as a Padlet (http://padlet.com), where students can share cartoons they create or find. Tools like Bitstrips for Schools (www.bitstripsforschools.com) make it simple for students to create their own comics while also providing a safe community to share appropriate comic strips.

Use photos to capture spontaneous moments. Photos can be a powerful way to infuse humor and transform the classroom into a place that truly belongs to students.

For example, a while back my students took the yearly ERB test, an important assessment that affects their admission to private middle schools. As I walked around the room before the test, I could see the anxiety on students’ faces. The collective sense of panic in the room floored me, and I knew I could not administer the test before staging a quick intervention. To lighten the mood, I walked around with a camera and invited students to ham it up and show me their most stressed and worried faces. As I took the pictures, I told them not to smile. Of course, this led to a breakout of spontaneous laughter. We followed up with a quiet 60 seconds during which I led them in visualizing a pleasant experience. We then got up and jumped for joy, envisioning that we had just done our best on the test. With calm restored, students were ready for the test.

This spontaneous three-step sequence of laughing, visualizing a positive experience, and celebrating success discharged the tension in the room. For added comic relief, I posted the photos on the class blog for parents to see. All around, it was a positive experience and one students remembered when they came back to visit the following year.

Reframe mistakes as learning experiences. A classroom culture that defines mistakes as powerful yet safe learning opportunities opens everyone up to having a bit of fun. In my class, we collect and share our bloopers. Bloopers are a powerful strategy because the humor and interest they evoke reinforces learning. By modeling when I catch my own (sometimes intentional) mistakes, I encourage students to begin laughing about and learning from their own. Of course, each student nominates his or her own bloopers and gives me permission to share them anonymously with the class. This is not an opportunity for students to mock their peers, but a chance to normalize mistakes and recognize that we are all capable of some pretty funny ones.

For example, one of my students working on a winter picture book wrote slay instead of sleigh. After catching his mistake, he enjoyed creating a quick cartoon depicting the difference between these homophones, and we began a class “blooper book” to celebrate our funny mistakes. Your class can share its bloopers on its blog or a virtual display board, such as a Padlet, or in a Google Drive document that enables students to add to the list independently. Students can also create narrated screencasts describing their bloopers with an application like ShowMe or EduCreations.

Some of my students do this “extra homework” because they love celebrating the funny mistakes we have made. I even invite them to create narratives about my bloopers, once we have talked through the importance of asking for permission and considering how what they say affects the audience.

Redirect disruptive humor into positive channels. All of us have likely experienced the chaos resulting from the antics of a class clown, and most of us probably know a few of those verbally dexterous students who can take a class on a wild tangent before we realize what’s happening. I call these students “verbal acrobats.”

It can be incredibly frustrating when these students derail a lesson, but I have found that it’s more productive to work with them than against them. Many students are actually quite funny, so why not celebrate their talents and give them an opportunity to get a little of the attention they crave? By creating scheduled humor breaks (through weekly “open mic” times that allow students to share jokes and anecdotes, for example), we can boost students’ self-image while driving home the idea that there is a proper time for everything.

The best way to get students to stop spontaneous sharing is to provide a structured way for them to think before they act. Tell students that whenever they are tempted to blurt out something funny, they should instead jot it down and decide later if it

• Was truly appropriate to say.
• Is as funny as it seemed at the time.
• Leads to an even funnier scenario that the student can share with the class during a designated humor break.

One habitually disruptive student I had—I’ll call him Nick—welcomed the chance to be a comedian on Friday afternoon. He would bounce into the classroom on Monday, already talking about what he was planning for Friday. I would encourage him to write it down for three reasons: (1) the joke would be much funnier if neither his classmates nor I had heard it already; (2) I wanted him to carefully consider his timing and delivery, thinking over his material and practicing the important skill of planning; and (3) we had a class agreement that all Friday “open mic” material required my approval. Our main rule was that it couldn’t offend anyone or include inappropriate content or language.

Nick did not magically stop disrupting class, of course, but our agreement forged a partnership and helped him improve his self-regulation while understanding that I did appreciate his humor. Instead of being annoyed at Nick’s regular disruptions, classmates began to look forward to his jokes. A serendipitous effect was that quieter students began to ask if they could bring in a joke on Friday, too. What began as an effort to rein in classroom chaos beca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• The Importance of a Positive Classroom
• Encore Divider
• Encore
• References
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright