A Reminder About Classroom Culture

For several weeks now I've been planning a post on classroom culture, which is a pretty big topic on which I am admittedly not an expert. I'm reading and researching and will circle back to this in the future. But today, rather monumentally, my school began Hybrid learning, and it was my first day teaching in a physical classroom with students in over a year, and I was reminded of what it actually feels like to participate in a classroom culture, and the emotion and excitement of being there with students is still resonating with me.

My own understanding of a classroom culture grew out of an observation I made in my first year teaching, which was that each different group of students had a wildly different emotional "valence," or just a different feeling in the room. As a middle school teacher, I teach the same class to many different sections, and while I didn't personally change and neither did the curriculum, some of my sections were joyous, others were boisterous, others felt bored (or boring), and others downright spiteful. My ad-hoc take on this is that each individual in the room contributes to an overall group dynamic; I've seen the difference that adding or removing just one student can make in the way a group feels.

This feeling is what I mean when I talk about classroom culture. I do think it comes predominately from the diversity of personalities in a group of 20-25 people that become a small community over the ten months they spend together. However, I also think that one of our main roles as teachers is to ensure that community is one of kindness, respect, and safety, as well as one of academic rigor and curiosity. When students walk into my classroom, I want them to feel comfortable taking risks, asking questions, making mistakes, and also being themselves - I mean that in a very tangible way, referring to the actual feeling of walking into the room, into a space, and that's what I think classroom culture is.

Developing a culture in which students feel like they can learn and be themselves takes work and intentionality. On the other hand, anyone who's read my writing knows how strongly I feel that everything we do in the classroom should feel authentic and clearly contribute to whatever outcome it's in service of, and I feel awfully self-conscious standing in front of a group of kids and asking them to sit quietly while I lecture and explain to them how our community will run. Of course, I still recognize the importance of messaging and modeling the behavior of a respectful and mature participant in a strong classroom community. One of my biggest struggles as a teacher and a group leader has been balancing the authentic with the new, and finding the sweet spot in which a positive, productive, safe, and fun community can develop and thrive organically - and it continues to be a struggle for me, even today as I welcomed small groups of 12 kids into my undecorated classroom, I felt conflicted between pressuring students to finish their work (it was a graded final reflection assignment, a pretty big deal) and letting them live out in real life the relatively informal, open-chat community we've had on Zoom up to now. We can't decorate the walls because we share classrooms - it's fine this year, but the posters and record albums that go up on my walls are chosen with an eye toward the decolonization of the curriculum experienced by my students, and I chose very intentionally who is venerated and held up as a positive example, which also shapes the culture of my classroom.

Generally, I land on the side of "Relationships before Rigor" (a phrase I first heard from Brad Johnson and one that succinctly sums up just about everything I think about teaching). Today, I didn't sit them down and give them a long (or short) talk about how our class community would run now that some of us were in-person, because what matters most to me is that we maintain the really positive, cheerful but also productive community we've had up until now and that grew organically out of thousands of tiny interactions I've had with students and they've had with each other. I think some of my students were surprised that I wasn't more strict - that I didn't become angry when some people talked during work time, or that I engaged some of the seemingly unrelated questions that they saw other students asking me in a room that, I presume, they expected to feel much more locked-down socially. I could probably have done a better job keeping my students from distracting one another, but I followed up with them afterward and reached out to families as necessary (not that my room was in chaos, or even unproductive - actually, more students submitted complete assignments than any previous reflection we've done this school year, all of which were done virtually).

There's a lot we can do to shape our classroom culture, and I have more to say (and write) on this, and I will. But today, my first day back in a physical classroom in 14 months, was a reminder for me just how much it matters that we intentionally craft the emotional and social environment we want our students to walk (or log) into. It didn't go perfectly, but like I said, I'm still finding the balance.