Building A Classroom Community
Building a Classroom Community
During my teaching career, I can remember learning a very valuable lesson while preparing an activity I had planned for the class. In my early days of teaching, I was pretty much a lecture teacher. Almost every day the students would come into my room and take their assigned seats. I would present the topic of the day to them and then they would take notes based on my lecture. At the end of the first quarter of the school year, I decided to do a group project with the class. I broke the class up into groups of 4 to complete the project. I went from group to group at the beginning of the activity to make sure things were getting off to a good start. To my horror, I discovered that many students who had sat in my room for almost 2 months, really did not know each other. At first, I thought how could this be? But then it made perfect sense to me. Most of the time students spent in my class, they were either engaged with me in a classroom setting or taking notes alone. I realized at this moment how very little time was allotted for them to engage with each other.
If we as teachers want to build learning communities, we must first build classroom communities. The key premise of this idea is that students must be given proper time to get to know their classmates. For students to become acquainted in a meaningful way with other students, the teacher must early and often create activities that will foster this to occur. Projects and activities that involve collaboration will be much more successful if the students are more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the people in their group.
So how does a teacher begin to develop a community within the classroom? One activity I have used for students to get to know one another early in the school year involves using a set of index cards. Place a pack of blank index cards on your desk. When the students come into your room, they will each grab one blank card. On the top of the card they will place their name. On the card they will write 5 things about themselves. At the end of the class they will hand their card back into me. The next day in class, I will pick a card randomly from the stack and give a fact or two from one of the cards to the class. I will see if they can possibly guess which student in the class the card belongs. If they cannot, I will give a more facts from the card to the class. This activity is a great way for students to learn more about their classmates early in the semester.
Another way to foster community in the room, is to leave plenty of wall space for student work. You get to know the students very well through the work they hand to you. Let the classmates see all the great work others are doing in your room also. Put good essays, lab reports, written activities, in places where the class can see them. This serves a dual purpose of highlighting good student work and to let others in the class know about the talents and skills of their classmates.
Another method for community building that I have had quite a bit of success with is an activity I like to call “the job interview.” I match all students up in the class with a partner. One person in the group takes on the role of a CEO at a company, that is looking to hire someone for a particular position. The other person in the group adopts the role of the applicant for the job. At the beginning of the activity I tell the class the type of company involved and what position it is looking to fill. Homework that night is for the students to do any necessary research in preparation for the interview the following day in class. The interviews that take place in class allow for plenty of good dialogue between students which will foster good working relationships throughout the school year.
Classrooms should be communities of learning. If your classroom is a true community, over the course of the school year, your students will be much more engaged and learn not only from you as the teacher but from their classmates. How is your classroom? What do you do to build community? What benefits can you see from building this community of learners?
