When a child arrives at school for the day, it is important that they are able to walk in to a welcoming, loving, and engaging environment – one that they feel empowered in and that gets them excited about learning. As educators, it is our responsibility to establish a strong classroom environment such as this one. Young children learn best through opportunities in which they are able to “play” and interact. Listed below are many approaches a teacher may take in creating a positive environment that promotes education.
- Take time to purposefully decorate your classroom.
- Start by filling the room with vibrant, colorful displays, carpet, curtains, activity centers, and manipulatives. When children enter a classroom, they should feel happy to be there. For 180 days, this is their home away from home. The environment should appeal to them and awaken their senses.
- Fixed Mindset vs. Growth Mindset
- Encourage students to have a “Growth Mindset”. Learning should neither be boring or overwhelming. However, students need to be taught from early on that learning IS sometimes hard. In fact, if it’s not hard, it’s not learning. Children need to establish a mindset that embraces challenges, values effort, welcomes feedback, and views setbacks as a learning opportunity. The best way to instill this mindset in our students is to model one ourselves.
- Develop an empowering phrase.
- In one British school whose mascot is a tiger, teachers and students both use the phrase “Tiger up!”. It is described as the opposite of “giving up”, and is used to remind students to push through a challenge.
- Collaborative problem solving.
- Allow students the time to learn from each other by collaborating on a group effort. All children need to be given the opportunity to bring their own ideas to the table. When they are able to talk and listen to one another for a common purpose, the ideas begin to flow and have the chance to open up many doors offering new perspectives aimed at reaching that end goal.
- Peer demonstration.
- Once students have reached their solutions, invite those with various techniques or methods up to the board or the document camera to lead the class through their process. Again, recognizing the many different ways students may use to arrive at the same solution or finding will help encourage others to be confident in their own unique problem-solving approaches.
- Manipulatives, manipulatives, manipulatives!
- One of my favorite phrases in teaching is a Chinese Proverb I first encountered as a High School student where it was painted on a classroom wall. It says: ” Tell me and I will forget – Show me, I may remember – Involve me and I will learn”. It is so important for students to get involved with their learning and to have hands-on access to items and tools that will help them work through the process. Manipulatives may be provided by the school, or the Math Department, or even the PTO, but they can just as easily be a bag of candy M&Ms purchased at the drug store, a sack of pennies changed in at the bank, or a handful of Cheerios from your pantry. Anything that children can get their hands on keeps lessons interactive and engaging.
- Make it meaningful.
- Students need to make connections with the things they are learning in order to see why it is relevant. Lessons should center around real-life applications whenever possible and relate to the current world in which our students are living and growing.
- Take time to know your students.
- Probably the most important thing on this list, above all else, is to know the strengths, weaknesses, personality, and interests of each and every student you are teaching. Not only does this feeling of closeness help establish trust in the relationship, but it also provides an opportunity to differentiate learning and design instruction with the child’s learning strengths and interests in mind. All of the above tactics and methods stem from first knowing your students, then putting each of them first in designing the instruction that follows.
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