Learning-focused Culture

I have felt quite challenged in my second year of teaching to develop a learning-based culture in my class. I struggled for a large part of the year to settle on strategies that would support student learning. Problems ranged from violence to walking around, poor talk/listen ratios, bickering, theft, poor management of materials, introduction of new students bringing back bad habits, etc.

Part of the problem was the disruption of student rhythms due to Covid over the past 2 years, but also due to me finding my management style. My desire is for an intent-based environment, where students inform their intent rather than a top-down environment where the teacher holds all the knowledge and power. Unfortunately, this can only work if the students have the skill to take advantage of this environment and I made some assumptions that were not true about social ability in my group.

We finally became more settled in the third term after settling on some things:

• I appointed task monitors for my groups, so the students could show them their task when finished instead of coming to the teaching group.

• I used programmed specific levels for students in prodigy maths and English so fast finishers would have some engaging tasks to complete.

• I changed the seating so that independent students were seated so that multiple teachers could see them and intervene if off-task.

I created a roster of duties and the students wrote which ones they wanted to be involved in.

These changes, combined with reinforcement to always refer to the learning intention, success criteria, and on-task/off-task posters have made improvements in our behaviours. The class is still developing in how they interact with each other but learning has become much better as evidenced by the amount of work completed.