My Ideal Classroom Environment, Essay Example

When I imagine my ideal classroom environment, the autonomy and independence of my students is a major feature.  Even though my school is quite small and the teacher/student ratios tend to average around 10:1, I have found that I still have the tendency (as do my colleagues) to talk at my students rather than talk to them.  I often become very invested in my curriculum, to the exclusion of other learning opportunities.  This problem extends to the relationship that my students’ parents have with our school environment.  I will tell my students that their parents should become more involved in our classroom activities without really considering what that means.  In a sense, I’m merely playing lip service to the notion of parent involvement.  This is especially easy to do at my school because the majority of our parents are busy, affluent professionals who only get involved in the school environment when something is wrong.

I would like to create an atmosphere in which parents are involved in the classroom when their children are doing things ‘right’, but it’s difficult to figure out a way to accomplish this in a productive way.  While there aren’t a lot of cultural barriers (that I’m aware of) to impede parental involvement, I find that the biggest obstacle to getting parents invested in the literacy (and other) goals of their children lies in the way parents view the parent/teacher/student relationship.  Most of my students are high-performing and I have few discipline problems in the classroom.  When students have academic difficulties, their parents are more likely to hire a tutor than come into school to speak to me about how they can best help their children.  While I don’t mean to judge or complain about my students’ parents, they seem to come from a place where they are used to delegating tasks and are very focused on concrete learning goals rather than the overall learning experience.  For example, we get a high level of parental involvement when we hold college application information night, but much less of a turnout when we had a literacy fair last year.  The general attitude (with the exception of a few core parents who are deeply involved in the school) seems to be:  don’t bother me unless my kid is in danger of flunking out/not getting into a good college.

This sends a terrible message to my students, I think.  In trying to come up with a classroom action plan to strengthen family involvement, I asked some of my senior English students how they thought their parents could be encouraged to take a more active role in the classroom.  Overwhelmingly, they responded with apathy, and several of them stated that they didn’t think their parents cared very much about the day-to-day aspects of their school experience.  I am really baffled as to how I can develop a better relationship with my students’ parents so as to demonstrate to them that they can play a pivotal role in their children’s literacy and overall scholastic achievement.  The best I’ve been able to come up with so far is to remain very concrete and goal oriented (which they seem to prefer), perhaps using statistics to show them that students with involved parents do better on their SATs and college applications and are therefore better able to get into good colleges and find good jobs post-college.  These are the types of things that seem to motivate the majority of my students’ parents, so I may have to tailor my approach to meet their interests.

More ‘Edu-speak’ Terminology

Authentic Performance–Developing curriculum and assessments that integrate meaningful performances in real-world contexts.  Assessments are used to determine how students think and learn along with what they can do and know.

Community-Centered–School structures and practices that work to create a community of learners within the school that will support the learning of all students.

Emotionally Safe Classrooms–A classroom environment in which the teacher has created a supportive and responsive culture which encourages independent thinking and intellectual risk-taking because students know that they won’t be punished for speaking their minds.

Learning Communities–Classroom or school environments in which students work together using group projects or collaborative activities to build both their knowledge and their sense of how to apply this knowledge in real-world settings.

Overlearning–The practice of studying and practicing material after it has already been mastered.

Prejudice Reduction–Interventions employed by the teacher or school to assist students in developing positive values and attitudes towards race.

Zone of Proximal Development–Information or skills that are considered the ‘next step’ for students based on their development and the tasks that they have already mastered.  This type of education is intended to give students tasks that challenge them while not being so difficult as to discourage them from attempting or completing the task.

References

“The Learning Classroom: Theory Into Practice.” (2012). The Annenberg Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/courses/learningclassroom/index.html