I am a strong believer that to build and establish a positive and safe classroom environment teachers need to address two or tree things tho theirs students:
First and foremost, know your students. In international schools, it is common to find one small world in every classroom, with a rich and multicultural background and different life experiences, so is mandatory that teachers know where their students come from, their likes and dislikes, families. This should be enough to get started, but still only the first step. In order to build strong relationships with each other, there must be an exchange of experience and information. Teachers need to get students to know them as well, and as the interactions move on, students will provide valuable information about themselves, which leads to the second pillar of this post.
Create a safe environment for everyone. By knowing the students, teachers can plan and design the classes and the classroom accordingly. A place where everyone feels safe, respected, represented and
encouraged to participate. All the information students provide (and of course, the teacher must keep on record) is essential for this. After all, they will spend as much time as home, if not more, at school, in classrooms. There are numerous strategies that teachers can adopt, but I have identified myself with these two:
- Give them voice: students need to feel they count, they are relevant for the learning experience. Allowing them time to reflect and speak up can build up self esteem, create alliances among peers, encourage others to speak. Then respecting their opinions and building content around it will be the climax for the students, making students take ownership of their learning.
- Use anti-bias materials and avoid and challenge bullying behavior: In an effort to build up respect, compassion and empathy for their peers and themselves, teachers should emphasize the importance of this subjects through their practices. Creating a clear set of rules and a classroom contract, for example, with expectations and consequences aligned to schools policies, but with focus on growth, not punishment, is the ideal tool to provide structure and build a safe environment for students.
The third pillar I would like to mention is communication. Teachers and students should have enough trust in each other to communicate properly, and through many channels. In fact as many channels as possible. There should be specific channels for bureaucratic interaction (assignments, requests) but teachers should make themselves available as much as possible. There will be students that need more attention and those that need more time to trust, but teachers should take the initiative and approach them, make themselves available, maybe even give an extra incentive in order to solidify a good trust relationship. It is extremely important that students feel they can count on their teachers to externalize their struggles, being emotional, on merely instructional.
There are hundreds of other good practices and strategies to build a positive and healthy classroom environment, that values the students diversity and learning styles, but they all converge to the same objective: putting the students on the center of their learning experience, with the best environment and resources as possible, so they can develop and discover themselves as learners, and be happy with it.
