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Another tool that I frequently use to aid relationship and community building in my classroom is activities that create a fun environment for students. Especially in the advisory setting, students frequently have space to converse with classmates and play games or do activities together. This helps students feel more comfortable and can increase engagement and academic performance by providing breaks from ELA content every so often. Students pictured below are playing games together and decorating the white board during free time for our combined September and October birthdays and Halloween celebration. These practices act as culturally responsive strategies because they allow students to experience freedom and fun in the classroom. This is a crucial step for creating a space where students feel comfortable showing their personality and eventually advocating for their own needs. Games, celebrations, and anonymous question opportunities allow students to engage with one another and with their teacher outside of the bounds of strictly academic time. Fostering these relationships improves students' overall enjoyment and comfortability in school, which is a key hallmark of culturally responsive strategies.
I also give students space to ask anonymous questions about school or life as they please. When we do this, I give each student a sticky note and tell them to write any questions they would like to know the answer to on the sticky note. Students are allowed to do so anonymously, and I let them know in advance that I will do my best to answer the question or track down someone who can. Students then submit all of their sticky notes and I read through the questions and answer them to the whole class. This exercise is fun for the group and always results in a wide variance of questions, such as "how do I do my taxes?" to "who is your celebrity crush?". The freedom built into this allows students to ask questions to get to know me better and find solutions to things that they might be wondering about.
Included on the left is an example of the range of questions students will ask during this exercise. This student wanted to know why all of their teachers were white and was also curious about who my celebrity crush was (and if they were my favorite student). This demonstrates both the community building that happens in my classroom that allows students to feel comfortable asking these questions as well as the types of higher-order thinking happening. This opened up a discussion about the importance of questioning who the people in power are and why those people don't look or sound like the majority of the student body. Students responded with thought-provoking reflections about the people they observe as role models and why those people are not more diverse at our school and more specifically, on our team. Students felt comfortable in this space having such a discussion because of the community building we have done as a group and the ways the curriculum has guided them to have higher-order thinking skills as we navigated questions of historical oppression and injustice in the world.
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