Creating a Positive Classroom Environment Essay

A schoolroom should be one of inquiry and open-mindedness. In order to foster a carve uproom of assimilators who feel comfortable asking questions and be open to some otherwise students ideas it is imperative to bring into being a positive, prophylactic environs and training community. I believe that students should feel equivalent their classroom has high expectations, in how ein truthone treated each other, and in how learning took place. Creating a classroom environment where all(prenominal) students feel emotionally and physically safe comme il faut to take risks is a real altercate and one that is worthy of the time it requires.The key to an inquiry-based curriculum is a safe, positive learning environment, therefore, it is lay downational that the instructor operate to provide, establish, and maintain that throughout the year. In the classroom, the teacher should be on the job(p) on counsels to develop a positive learning community by fathering out more abou t my students. For example, each student should fill out a Who Am I questionnaire so that the teacher mass get to befool their students personalities, hobbies, likes and dislikes and therefore include them in lectures, discussions and explanations through out the year.The teacher should also pledge in differentiated instruction in my classroom so that he/she can tailor precise lessons to fit different viewpoints, and abilities of students. This is also a demonstration of c atomic outlet 18 and respect for students as they see their teacher nonice trusted aspects about their learning or personalities and tailors their instruction to meet their needs. One of the ways I would engage in differentiated instruction is by passing around the room and constantly be available to assist students.By offering them one-on-one assistance I can better bore where their personal understanding and misconceptions are and tailor my teaching to them differently than I would to the class as a w hole. In order to maintain a positive classroom environment, a teacher must ingestion the ability to soak up quick decisions and to be flexible in the classroom. The teacher needs to make decisions and adjustments to grow the student motivation, engagement, and productive shit. One way I would make adjustments when there are issues in the classroom hindering the productive learning community is to create a natural seating chart.I find that this human action is often intaked enough to nip any potential social problems in the develop and leads a message to students that if they want to sit with their friends, they need to earn the privilege. You would be surprised with how a new seating chart for the class can affix productivity and engagement in core domain content instead of social life study. In a science classroom, experiments and lab work are an important way for students to engage in the content. All students in the class should work on labs at the same time with min imal supervision.The teacher must also be cognizant of how the resources of time, space, activities and attention are allocated to students throughout the short hour that they are in class. However, there are more traditional dodge for lab work. The difference comes in how many materials you have for certain labs, how much time it takes for each free radical of students to complete the experiment, and how tricky the directions are. Deciding which method to employ for a given lab and analyzing the classroom environment to decide which will work best in a given situation.In the Collier County condition District it is acceptable to have up to 30 students in each classroom. It is difficult in this character reference of environment for students to feel that they are an important member of the learning community. I found that it was easy for certain students to disengage from activities and it was hard for the teacher to pick up on their lack of involvement because of the sheer number of other students in the room. Therefore, I thought up of an activity that would give the teacher time to walk around to individual students and check their understanding of the material.This lesson was an ACT preparation lesson where the students would be functional on report organized essays by finding a thesis statement, supporting it and including evidence from newspaper articles. I found that students would initially be hesitant to show their work to the teacher, alone when they saw that the teacher would be deviation around to ein truthone at their table they became less nervous and more open to share their problems with understanding. When observing a classroom, one student even remarked as the teacher came to her, I dont eff what Im doing. She was a student that has never raised her hand to ask for help, but with the teachers inevitable stretch she was open to telling her teacher she did not understand. This showed me that if the teacher had not gone around to individ ual students she would not have told her teacher she did not understand. In order for a classroom to become a learning community it is important that it is organized, and meets clear standards of stockpile.An environment in which students are assuming responsibility, participating indecision-making, working collaboratively and independently, and engaging in purposeful learning activities that use higher order thinking skills and are all pieces of smoothly functioning learning communities.The first lesson that I would present to the class in the fall would be attempting to engage students in a purposeful learning activity that asked them to think deeply about the issues of a the subject that they are in class for. The students would first work together as a class and then the students work individually to show understanding.They were active members of the activity so they had a hand in the decision-making and therefore could assume some ownership and responsibility for the success o f the activity. A strategy for engaging students in purposeful activities that promote higher order thinking that is often used in classrooms is asking students to work in pairs to create a concept map from a list of content words. By working in pairs students are collaboratively building understanding and taking responsibility for their own learning plus their assistants.As mentioned above, in order to have a smoothly functioning learning environment, clear standards of conduct must be established and enforced within the classroom. In order for students to feel safe enough to ask questions, engage in inquiry activities and take risks in their learning. They must feel secure and know that their teacher has clear standards of conduct that will be enforced. The first day of school is a very important day for establishing the standards of conduct that all students are expected to delineate.It is also important that student demeanor is monitored in a preventative way. One way is by a sking a student who is very high-energy and can become disruptive to do small tasks during the hour to keep him engaged, such as feeding the class fish, or putting up the class grade sheet. This particular student can be disruptive and cause problems with other classmates, but with the teacher keeping him engaged when she sees him getting off-task, she is signal to him that she notices him and has her eyes on his actions.This has been a successful strategy in keeping him out of trouble. However, all issues in a classroom cannot be prevented. Things do sometimes happen despite the best efforts of the teacher to create a safe learning environment. For example, say that you, the teacher had an incident in your classroom where two pistillate students got very angry with each other and yelled loudly and violently at each other and refused to stop. This behavior is very upsetting to the teacher and to the class.And to be successful in resolving the situation, you just have to remove the two students from the class and separate them. In this situation it was important to thoroughly pick up the pieces after the incident was over. This is a very helpful way for a teachers peace of mind and tho ability to create a safe learning environment. The teacher should also have individual dialog with the students that created the problem. One student in particular would most likely have a very changed berth about the class after the incident.In order to bring her back to being her enthusiastic self, the teacher should have a one-on-one talk with her, which greatly improved her attitude towards the class. One of the things that would help you to act appropriately when the incident happened in the classroom was the established standards of conduct and consequences that occur if students do not follow the standards. One way to foster students ability to engage in dialogue and argumentation and develop the linguistic communication of thinking is to participate in Socratic semi nars in class.Socratic seminars offer a tangible, engaging way for students to develop both ethics and critical thinking, actively and cooperatively. A discussion technique that I would use in my classroom would be an ethical discussion based on the merits and problems with new transmitted test that is available. Students engaged in small groups, then in the king-size session to discuss their opinions about genetic testing, based on a text they had all read. In order to help the discussion stick civil and productive, I used an ethical discussion framework that was very helpful.In a large classroom of 30 students it is often difficult to make time to meet with students individually to discuss their occur, but it is an important part of teaching that time must be allocated for. Therefore, a lesson plan that can provide the teacher to talk with students individually about an essay they had pen. Lets just say that while students were in the subroutine library Center working on A CT preparation tests the teacher then would be able to make time to talk with students individually about the strengths and weaknesses of their essays and what specific things to keep in mind when writing their following(a) essay.This lesson shows a good allocation of time and attention so that students could take away concrete information from the lesson about what they need to work on with their writing and they also saw that their teacher cared about their progress enough to plan a special meeting with them. This one-on-one discussion time between teacher and student is something I do not see a lot of in school and I feel it is very important to include meaningful time talking with each student.In a science classroom it is very important that resources be used appropriately to help promote in-depth, inquiry-based understandings of content. I include it here to demonstrate how helpful it is for teachers to keep up-to-date on literature that is being written on the topics they are teaching. Through reading academic literature they can gain new ideas and insights on how to use technology effectively in their classroom in order to enhance learning and the classroom environment. Creating a positive classroom environment is a very important aspect of effective teaching.In a teachers student teaching placement it has been a priority for to establish and maintain a safe and positive environment where all students can grow, inquire, and learn. I feel strongly that a classroom should forever and a day be a safe one for students physically. At times there are going to be things said between students that cannot make it emotionally safe, but you, the teacher can always deal with the issues to send a strong message that your classroom is not a place to come down on peers.I do feel I have more to learn about enacting a adjust inquiry-based classroom, however. And I know that there are going to be times and lessons where I believe students should be actively involved i n inquiry-based projects and if so, I would be very proud of them for their efforts. However, I would like to increase the times that this occurs and make my classroom into a place where students know they are going to question, explore and learn, and not just another stop on their school day schedule.