A Checklist for the New School Year: Five Strategies for Building Community, Relationships, and Trust with Students While Maximizing Instructional Time
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"Effective instruction is a great relationship builder."
This quote, by principal Todd Whitaker, was presented to teachers to start our first faculty meeting last year. They were asked to share to what degree they agreed with the statement.
Their responses generally fell into two camps.
Some teachers agreed, citing appreciation for keeping academic expectations high every day, including Day 1.
Some teachers were unsure, noting that focusing on building community with their students paid off later in the school year in terms of better relationships and trust.
I engaged the teachers in this exercise to make a point that we sometimes view building community, relationships, and trust as something separate from focusing on core subject areas.
What if they are not mutually exclusive? In fact, could the affective and the academics be mutually beneficial? How might that look in classrooms where there’s never enough time and always more to do?
As a teacher and a school leader with a combined 40 years of experience, we have found the following five strategies to be effective in addressing the social-emotional and the academic needs of students. These strategies can be implemented on Day 1, they cost nothing, and they will guide your students to become positive leaders and contributors.
The result: a joyful and productive learning community.
#1 - Co-organize your classroom library with students.
It's important to teach readers, not just reading.
How will kids find a favorite book in your classroom? How can they guide a friend to find that same book? Putting kids in charge of organizing and managing the classroom library ensures they not only own their reading, but they also serve as influencers for their peers.
Start by spreading the books out on the floor or on tables. Invite the students to work together to group the texts by preferred topics and categories. We have found students read more when they have a say in how the classroom library is managed. The most successful experiences have occurred when teachers have fully empowered the students to make decisions together. They engage in creative thinking, learn how to negotiate and to compromise, solve problems, and develop a “we” versus “me” perspective.
#2 - Survey your students about their interests, challenges and goals.
If you truly believe you serve your students, then it's imperative that you know how best to support them.
A commercially-produced curriculum does not teach students. There’s no way a publisher can know their various interests, what is currently challenging them, or what goals they want to accomplish. A curriculum program or resource serves the student, not the other way around.
Existing surveys are out there that you can use to discover this information.
Linda Gambrell and colleagues developed reading engagement surveys for primary students and older readers (The Reading Teacher).
In their book Personalized Learning, Allison Zmuda and her co-authors share several student inventories around skills such as metacognition and self-directedness.
Using this information as a data point when preparing instruction will help make teaching and learning more engaging and relevant.
#3 - Dedicate regular time for student choice.
It can be a tough transition for students coming from a summer of freedom to a classroom in which every minute is planned.
You can provide a smooth entry into school by dedicating a fraction of instructional time toward student-directed learning. This may be 30 minutes at the end of each day, or the first 10 minutes at the start of a period. Structure within choice is fine. “You can read or write independently, or you can apply what you are learning to a question you want to explore.” Students can be supported in the beginning of the year with lots of modeling of processes, as well as starting with a teacher-led collaborative project.
A core need of everyone is a sense of autonomy and independence. Time for choice also offers an opportunity for students to transfer their learning to an authentic, real-world experience.
#4 - Confer with your students.
Conferring involves facilitating 1:1 conversations with students during independent reading or writing.
“Independent” is a bit of a misnomer. Most K-12 students need the support of a teacher to apply the skills and strategies they have learned while reading/writing texts of their choice. Conferring allows the teacher to meet students where they are through coaching and scaffolding.
Maybe equally important is the relationships that form during conferring. While the conversations are around a text, the ideas that often come up are timeless. For example, high-quality fiction touches on important themes and topics that gives students an opportunity to reflect on how these ideas apply to their lives. Teachers can help students consider new perspectives through the literature they read.
#5 - Celebrate daily.
One of the best ways to build community and relationships is to recognize the wins a group has accomplished.
This healthy competition, of getting better together, positions students as contributors to other students’ success. Celebration can be facilitated with a simple question at the end of each day, such as “What went well today?” Anchor charts can be used to chronicle the social, emotional, and academic achievements over time.
Running a school where the students all succeed, even if some students have to help others to make the grade, is good preparation for democracy.
William Glasser
We build trust by trusting others, especially our students to become leaders in their own learning. We establish relationships by getting to know one another; there is no reason this cannot occur within the context of academics. By embracing a more holistic mindset to teaching and learning, we honor the whole child at the same time.
How do you build community and relationships while engaging students in core instruction?
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