Building Community in the Classroom Wokshop

Building Community in the Classroom

On Monday, May 3rd, we held the third of six workshops in the "Collaborative Connections" workshop series. Here is a condensed version of what we did.

In this workshop we talked about how you (as the TA or instructor) can develop a sense of community in your classroom, and how this contributes to an effective learning environment for all of your students where they feel safe participating and learning from each other and from you.

We identified these learning goals for the workshop:

Understand components of successful and unsuccessful learning environments

Especially the role of community between teachers and students in these environments

Appreciate the diversity of factors that contribute to successful learning environments

Including factors related to learning activities and social and environmental activities

Reflect on and articulate the classroom community you want to create and the relationship you want to foster with your students

We tried to model classroom techniques that help facilitate an effective and collaborative learning community. We began the workshop with a 'group mingle', where participants talked to their 'classmates' to get to know each other and find out what they had in common and what was different.

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‘Group Mingle’ Activity

For four (or more) of the following statements circle the response that best describes you, and find someone in the room who is on the other end of the spectrum to initial the other response. You can only have each person on your sheet ONCE.

I prefer sitting at the front of class I prefer sitting at the back of class

I like working alone I like working in groups

In my free time I like reading fiction In my free time I like reading non-fiction

I am a night owl I am an early bird

(do my best work at night) (do my best work in the morning)

I generally speak up in class if I generally stay quiet in class

I have something to say and let others do the talking

I am older than most of my siblings I am younger than most of my siblings

In groups I tend to be a leader In groups I tend to be a follower

I am the most excited about this I am most excited about other

workshop workshops in this series

**This is one example of a way to get your students talking to each other at the beginning of class. Make the questions anything you like – for example, they can be personal, related to the class topics, or about how they typically prefer to learn. Activities like this can help set a tone for your class and help establish an environment where your students communicate with each other. Depending on the types of questions you ask, your students may meet other students that they have things in common with which can help establish collaboration outside of class.

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Successful and Unsuccessful Learning Environments: Reflecting on our Experiences as Learners

In order to think about how WE can create an effective learning environment, we reflected on the experiences that we had where we felt like we were successful learners, and unsuccessful learners, and defined successful and unsuccessful learning.

Participant folded their paper into four quadrants and brainstormed their thoughts about learning in each box.

#1 Your own definition of a learning success

#2 A personal example of a successful learning experience

#3 Your own definition of unsuccessful learning

#4 A personal example of an unsuccessful learning

**This activity generated a lively discussion about how we as instructors can contribute to successful learning environments.

Main ideas:

- Many different factors contribute to learning success. Many of these are related to the environment that the instructor can create in the classroom, and related to interactions between teacher and students.

- There are many things that we as teachers cannot control. For example, the physical space and set-up of the environment, and the experiences, perspectives, and motivation of our students coming into the class. By keeping in mind what these challenges are we can be better prepared to deal with them and create a successful learning environment.

Communicating with your students

After we spent some time reflecting on what makes a successful learning environment, participants applied their ideas to real classroom scenarios. These classroom scenarios included diverse physical and social environments (large lecture, lab, discussion) and different activities. For each of the following 'unsuccessful leanring environments' participants were asked how they would turn it into a successful learning environment:

Scenario #1: You are teaching a 7-10 pm lab and students have to stop all experiments and start cleaning up. the dispensary closes by 10pm and you as the intructor or TA would be held responsible for anything that happens after 10pm. you have a student who refusues to stop the experiment and tells his partner to do the same. You make an annocement 2 more times but you are just ignored The whole class is aware of this behaviour, what would you do to solve this situat

Scenario #2: You are the TA/instructor for a seminar of about 20 students in a small classroom with large tables and lots of chairs. Your discussion section meets on friday afternoon and most of your students appear tired and distracted. Every time you ask a question or solicit feedback from the group, it is always the same 2-3 students that respond. By mid-quarter, attendance has dropped and you had one section where only 1/2 of your students showed up.

Scenario #3: The TA/instructor is teaching a large class in a stadium-style lecture hall. The students are a mixture of majors and non-majors, with a large diversity in the amount of preparation for and interest in the course. The instructor would like to have an engaging and interactive class, but is struggling to get the students to engage and communicate with each other and with him/her during class, and with so many students, there's not a lot of time for one-on-one conversations/questions between instructor/student.

Successful learning environments in YOUR classroom

By this point in the workshop we had spent a lot of time thinking about all of the characteristics of an effective learning environment, and all of the factors that influence your classroom community. Then we asked participants to apply all of these ideas to a real life teaching situation for them.

Prompt:

Think about a class you have taught, that you will teach, or that you would be interested in teaching, and what your goals are for that class. Which characteristics of an effective learning environment are the most important for you to incorporate into your classroom community? What type of relationship do you want to have with your students? What tone do you want to strike with them?

After reflecting on our own classroom communities, participants wrote a mission statement to their students:

Write a letter to your students about the community that you want to create with them? Things to consider including: what should they expect from you? What expectations do you have for them? How will you try to create a community where everyone feels valued?

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Strategies for Creating a Community in Your Classroom

Value your students as individual learners that are part of the community. Students learn more when they feel valued as individual learners. Suggestions:

• Greet your students when they enter class.
• Make an effort to get to know your students.
• Start and end class on time. This acknowledges to your students that you value their time and their other commitments.
• Encourage questions.
• Give all students the opportunity to talk.
• Make time spent in class worthwhile.
• Acknowledge contributions .
• Gather information about the class and what they want to learn. (eg. student can fill out a KWL chart - what the Know, Want to know, and at the end of you class what they Learned)
• Consider asking them to write a letter of introduction.
• Give students opportunities to make comments and suggestions (eg. a comment box)

Encourage Participation. Create a classroom where students feel comfortable testing and sharing ideas. Suggestions:

• Get to know your students.
• Arrange seating to promote discussion.
• Use discussion techniques (eg. popcorn discussion, have students share work on individual writing exercise as a springboard to discussion)
• Encourage students to meet one another and provide opportunities (when possible) in class to facilitate group discussion and promote outside of class group work.
• Create opportunities for all students to talk during the first two weeks.
• Periodically divide students into small groups.
• Assign leadership roles to students.

Give timely and effective feedback. Giving feedback to your students is important for them to feel like you value their efforts and their learning, and that you are not just there to give them a grade. Suggestions:

• Give feedback as quickly as possible.
• Use praise judiciously - students can be particularly affected by specific positive comments.
• Try to cushion negative comments (eg. a criticism sandwich - try to bracket each constructive criticism with something positive about their work)
• Focus on the task, rather than on the learner.
• Provide guidance in manageable chunks.
• Give comments in writing.
• Emphasize learning rather than performance by acknowledging the role that mistakes play in the learning process.
• Avoid comparisons with other students.

Extending The Claaroom: One great attribute of effective communities is elimination of walls. The classroom is not necessarily confined to your assigned teaching space, you can extend it. Suggestions

• creating a chatroom for students for communication (participation)
• Students writing on note pads to account for participation
• Having a blog to keep the community alive
• Use of Social media Facebook, Youtube, Myspace
• Coffee bars and outdoor meeting points--- (limits)
• Wikis
• Having class projects that groow dependent that each person does their part
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