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.

Can Teachers Find A Better Term Than "Relationships?"

Teachers, especially new teachers, are bombarded with buzzwords, and perhaps the one that comes up the most is "relationships." I've heard the term at every PD I've ever attended; I myself use it liberally and even hosted an episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast on the topic.

When I was a brand new teacher, this was one of the buzzwords I most struggled to decode and translate from theory into practice. As a pretty mediocre (to put it very, very kindly) first year teacher, I didn't really understand how I was expected to forge "authentic relationships" with over 180 different kids, many of whom really didn't like me. Relationships take time; they require trust and commitment from both parties, and being told to undertake that journey with 20 different young people at the same time, five times a day, while also teaching content, was not only daunting but also demoralizing as I constantly found myself grasping for control or getting into petty arguments with kids, utterly failing to develop anything resembling positive relationships.

I wonder if the term "relationships" is part of the problem here. I'm at a point in my career where I understand what is meant by that term, but I also remember the feeling of emotional overwhelm around how to build up so many relationships in such a short time, again and again, year after year. Perhaps the focus on the individual relationships between teacher and students has us missing the forest for the trees - some students will resist relationships with some adults, and this is something we can't control, so the term itself establishes a fail-state. What we can control, however, is our attitudes and the way we interact with our students in general, and we can measure our progress here by our own actions rather than staking our success (or failure) on the particular relationships we develop with each student.

The secret isn't in the development of the individual relationships themselves; it's in the mindsets, the attitudes, the way we respect our students and value their voices each day that can create an environment, a classroom culture of tolerance, empathy, and open-mindedness in which authentic relationships can be formed. I can't control who chooses to form a positive relationship with me, but I can control my attitude and broader approach to interacting with the young people who, for better or worse, learn from me as I model positivity and emotional maturity, and respond best, just like we all do, to kindness and warmth.

I've made relationship-building my central focus, and the defining aspect of my identity as a teacher, because I've seen how beneficial positive interactions with students can be (as well as the importance of modelling active listening and positive ways of dealing with disagreement). Kids seem to like me and my class, despite the fact that my curriculum is rigorous and my grading is unforgiving, which I think speaks to the incredible value of sheer, unrelenting kindness. This isn't something that comes intuitively to young teachers who just want to be popular. We all want our students to like us and our class, of course, but when we're more focused on getting our awesome content into the kids' brains than on hearing and valuing whatever is in those brains already, we wind up, despite our best intentions, grasping for straws amidst a large group of people who want remarkably little to do with us.

What shall our new buzzword be, then? What umbrella term can encompass those strong relationships we develop with kids but also the broader mindsets we adopt in order to transform our classrooms into positive environments where they can flourish? "Kindness" does the trick, but it doesn't have the same buzzword-worthy ring to it, since kindness is a virtue in all walks of life. But then again, our classrooms are no different from the rest of the world, and our students are just as deserving of kindness as anyone else in our lives. As we gather experience and learn to forge positive relationships with our students, perhaps we can broaden our horizon and take notice of how we're able to forge those relationships, and the conditions that make them possible, so that new teachers can better learn that kindness and respect should be a higher priority, a more central focus, than any individual relationship.

What Really Matters in the Classroom?

Spoiler Alert: It's not teaching content.

On a recent episode of the Modern Classrooms Podcast, my cohosts and I discussed of the shifting role of the teacher, both in a Modern Classroom, and in general as we strive to improve our teaching. The discussion was rather cathartic, frequently returning to the frustrations the three of us shared in our early careers - principally, the frustration with feeling like we knew what we wanted for our students, but also feeling unable to provide anything even close to our ideals of student-centered, authentic learning environment. As the discussion developed, it dawned on me just how much teachers seem to agree on what actually matters in a classroom, but how much we universally struggle to implement it - and that it's not necessarily teaching our content all the time.

Actually, let me not hedge or bury the lede any further: teaching content is not my priority, especially right now. But even putting aside the pandemic (and the myriad swirling uncertainties and anxieties to which my lessons pale in comparison, making the point of my argument rather obvious), I still think that our biggest priority - what really matters - should be to foster a love of school, a strong academic self-concept, and for our students to feel nurtured and cared for in our classrooms and see school as a part of their identity.

I don't think this is a particularly contentious opinion, but many of the struggles we face as teachers arise from the fact that we focus our time in class pushing our kids to succeed academically when they have other things going on that may or may not be a bigger deal, but are certainly more important to them in the moment. By forcing our content upon them and positioning it in opposition to what matters to them, we degrade its importance in their minds; even if we purport to care about them, we contradict ourselves if we constantly redirect students away from their interests in pursuit of success on some test we wrote. After 13 or 14 years of being told implicitly that their interests (and maybe their trauma) are less important than some numbers and symbols or some grammatical structures, it's not hard to understand why many people don't feel so fondly about school.

Responsive music educators recognize that our job isn't to churn out hundreds of professional musicians every year, and likewise it shouldn't be the job of a Math or English teacher to churn out professional mathematicians or authors or critics (students, of course, will follow their own path after school). I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most teachers know and feel this at least subconsciously, but external pressures are placed on us such that we tend to forget. We seek out strategies for classroom management rather than teaching for mastery or building relationships, focusing on what works without questioning (or at least, without listening to the nagging internal critic who questions everything) whether this is what matters.

There's a disconnect between the amount of professional development we receive on trauma-informed teaching, authentic relationships, and the buzzwordliest of all, Social Emotional Learning, and the way we're evaluated based on student achievement, or more specifically, classroom compliance (classroom management) and grades, which take a great deal of nuance to achieve without alienating students or silencing their voices (this disconnect also plays out in the types of PD teachers prefer and the types they actually receive. I have a future post planned on the kinds of PD I find most valuable, but the data in this report certainly validate the idea that we're evaluated on different standards than what we're trained on - poor pedagogy indeed!).

Of course the tricky bit here is that we do still need to teach our content, and our students need to learn it. While I think that systemically, we might be stuck in a loop where school only exists to teach students how to succeed on tests (particularly high-stakes tests) that school itself imposes on them, teachers themselves do aspire to develop kids' critical thinking skills and impart to them the knowledge and understanding that will bring them success as adults. It strikes me that our priorities (and the world of standardized testing) tend to focus on teaching students what to know rather than how to think. It feels like ubiquitous, common knowledge that kids just forget content after the test (and it might be true).

So, what does really matter then? How can a teacher, in his classroom or in her Zoom call tomorrow, put their students' needs before their content, while still pushing students toward mastery and academic growth but without pushing them away from a love of learning? I know how frustrating it is as a new teacher to hear "build authentic relationships with kids," and it's taken me until now (my fifth year) to actually understand what it means, so let's avoid that buzzword and get right to the nitty-gritty. Here's what to do: if a kid wants to talk to you about soccer during independent work time on some practice problems, listen to her for a few minutes. If some kids start blowing up your Zoom chat asking "who's the imposter" (it's from Among Us), play along for a little. If a student wants to tell you all about Fortnite or asks you who your favorite rapper is but you know she has a sentence to diagram, let it go and indulge her, even just for a bit. Listen to them. It humanizes you, and in their eyes, you are school, so you'll be modeling what it looks like when school becomes a place to be heard. Afterwards, you can direct these kids back to work, but they'll remember that you made their interests compatible with learning by making some time for them during class - time spent building relationships is not time lost . After 13 or 14 years of that, I can only imagine the kinds of curious, inquisitive young adults we'll see coming out of our schools and taking on the world as truly lifelong learners.

You can listen to this post as an audio podcast, here: