Relating to Eachother

Building Trust and Motivation and Promoting Interactions

The classroom is a learning environment. I encourage students to discuss papers, assignments, and projects. Just like in the workplace, discussing problems and sharing information helps us learn to communicate effectively and work together to solve problems. We will spend several weeks at the beginning of the school year learning how to interact in positive and supportive ways.

By treating all students as responsible, trustworthy young people, and establishing classroom expectations early on, students will typically step up and become more engaged and motivated.

Teacher - Student Interactions

I will offer students emotional support - My goal is to help students develop warm, supportive relationships, experience enjoyment and excitement about learning, feel comfortable in the classroom, and experience appropriate levels of autonomy or independence.

This includes:

Establishing a positive climate — the enjoyment and emotional connection that teachers have with students, as well as the nature of peer interactions;
Teacher sensitivity — I will do all I can to be responsive to students’ academic and emotional needs;
Adapt and listen to student perspectives — I will do all I can to have positive interactions with all students and classroom activities. I will place an emphasis on students’ interests, motivations, and points of view; and
Encourage and support communication - If a student has a problem and is unwilling to come discuss this with me they are encouraged to; seek out the school counselor, e-mail me or to leave a message on my front desk, or in the homework bin. In this way I can address problems as soon as they arise.

Student to Student Interactions

I encourage students to interact at multiple levels and engage in discussion with all their peers as well as the adults who are involved.

Some of the methods we may use are:

In-class assignments where students think individually about a question, talk to their peers about an idea, and then report their findings back to the class. Think, Pair, Share activities for situations when there are multiple answers to a question (nurturing and valuing divergent thinking).
Conceptual multiple-choice questions about themes from the lesson mingled with peer instruction. The use of online learning like Kahoot It! can facilitate this technique.
More structured discussion exercises such as jigsaw activities where students become experts in some facet of a topic and then work as teams of mixed experts to further explore a topic.

I support students working on open-ended problems to encourage in-depth conversations with each other and with me.

In this we may apply;

Open-ended questions. These are questions with more than one right answer and encourage students to make a judgment call. Sometimes such questions can foster in-class debates.
Classroom debate or compare and contrast, in which small teams of students learn about a controversial issue from multiple perspectives and attempt to come to consensus.
Explorations of data to encourage students to delve into the real data to decide how best to use/interpret/display it.

I assist students in presenting their ideas to others and to having all ideas respected.

To achieve this, the class will create;

Oral presentations and video presentations that involve students in the presentation of their ideas as oral or poster presentations.
Incorporate gallery walks to encourage groups of students to build a class response to an instructional prompt. Students are actively involved in synthesizing important concepts, consensus building, writing, and public speaking to share their findings.

Much of the first months of class are lessons taught whole group, learning all the daily procedures.

As the year progresses we learn to work in pairs and small groups as well as independently.

By the last months of school students have acquired the skills to work through most of the day as they need, attending to their assignments and managing their time efficiently.

Ultimately, the classroom becomes a student led environment with the students taking an active part in directing the learning and the teacher providing guidance, encouragement and support for their learning.

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