Creating a Community of Learners and Motivating Students to Learn

Creating a Community of Learners and Motivating Students to Learn:  Explain how you will get to know the students and how the students will get to know you in order to promote positive relationships in the classroom.   Describe how you will build positive relationships with the home.  Describe how you intend to encourage and respond to positive behaviors and how you will manage negative behaviors.  Describe the techniques and strategies you will use to encourage self-motivation for student learning and to keep students actively engaged.

Getting to Know the Students

           Regarding getting to know my students and my students gaining a holistic understanding of me, I think that relationship and community building is critical in the beginning weeks of school. For middle school students especially, building positive relationships catalyzes students’ trust in teachers and in return their compliance and respect during the course of the year. After a year of experiencing continuous relationship building with students in my host teacher’s classroom, I found that the best way to “break the ice” is to open the students to my own life, goals, interests, and family. By making yourself vulnerable by sharing details about your personal life, students take an interest and feel more comfortable sharing personal stories of their own lives, goals, interests, and family. I particularly enjoy doing this with an art project such as a collage or autobiography where students can think about what they would like to include for other students and the teacher to know about themselves. Following critical thinking of the components they would like to share about their life, I can survey students’ talent and artistic interests in the methods they choose to express their personal story. Allowing students multiple options to choose their mode of expressiveness builds student-teacher trust because it instills the values of respect and accommodating for a variety of interests, needs, and learners.

                  

In addition to these initial community building activities, it is critical for students to be able to discuss non-school related topics at least a few times a week. For this to occur, I plan to instill morning meetings in my classroom where a topic is randomly chosen from a list of topics in a “hot-topic box” and students spend fifteen minutes during homeroom time discussing the topic in a Socratic seminar fashion. Mimicking the reality of respectful conversation, Socratic seminars with student-developed topics of interest allow students the opportunity to see other students’ point of views and even the teacher’s point of views regarding certain issues or topics. For example, on the topic of “texting,” the conversation around the topic allows students to open up about their opinions and build their comfort level for contributing and responding to a whole-group conversation. Morning meetings from the “hot-topic-box” also allow students to practice respectful conversation, listening skills, and interpersonal skills among many other benefits. Overall, allowing students to be a part of the classroom with a sense of purpose and direction allows students to establish goals, fulfill their goals, and feel and witness their contribution to the whole classroom. A student’s sense of belonging is a critical aspect particularly in the middle school years; therefore, it is important for teachers to advocate for a respectful sense of belonging to all class members by having honest, thoughtful, and respectful conversation among the class on a regular basis.

Building Positive Relationships with Home

              In order to build positive relationships with the families of my students, from the beginning of the school year I hope to build relationships with parents through a phone-call introduction to each student’s parent to introduce myself at the beginning of the school year. Even though it may seem time-consuming, attempting to contact and finding success in introducing myself to parents allows the parents to build trust within me that I am motivated and proactive about helping their child and anything that the parent might need to support their child in their academic endeavors. In addition to this, I would like to host at least two Science Nights a year where parents and families are given the opportunity to come after school for two hours and they are provided snacks, lab activities, and a walk-through of student work so they are familiar and proud of the work that their children have completed in science. Keeping parents in the know about what units students have studied and actually allowing them to complete some of the labs themselves encourages discussions pertaining to school and my classroom at home. These discussions are what keep students on track and the ongoing involvement and interest of parents, guardians, and families.

Encouraging Positive Behaviors and Managing Negative Behaviors

              To encourage positive behaviors and manage negative behaviors in students, it is of utmost importance for the content that I am teaching to be engaging. Without engaging content, students are easily bored and this often results in the off-task and disrespectful behaviors that I have previously seen in the classroom. Just as it is important to keep myself on my toes to stay busy, it is critical that I set the same expectation for my students. Allowing students to participate in inquiry-based science stations always keeps their curiosity and keeps them on the move. With stations, students are continuously exposed to new materials and new methods of learning the material in a single classroom. This keeps students engaged, curious as to what comes next, and responsible for completing the tasks at all stations. Keeping students engaged, I believe, is the most important way to minimize classroom disruptions or off-task behavior, so I intend to create lesson plans and activities that will both challenge and be enjoyed by the students. Lastly, the content that is addressed in the classroom absolutely must be relative to the students. If students do not understand why they are creating edible animal cells or why they are creating simple circuits, as a teacher I have missed a critical teaching point. Acting on students’ prior knowledge and building new connections to the outside world they experience everyday allows the students to make more meaning of what they are learning and inevitably retain the content substantially more effectively.

                           

                                                      Making Connections in the Brain.

              In addition to these aspects surrounding the content and pedagogy of my teaching, I will certainly implement incentive systems so that students feel rewarded for achieving their goals. In my classroom specifically, I would like to implement a “Be-like-me!” person of the week. This person will be someone who over the course of the week exemplified admirable interpersonal skills, model-behavior, an impressive grade on an assessment, or extreme creativity and thoughtfulness towards an assignment, lab, or project. Setting up the expectation of how students can achieve this gives them short and long-term incentives that may include lunch with the teacher, positive phone calls homes, a gift from the grab-bag or a homework pass. The recipient of the incentive is likely to become even more motivated by receiving the incentive and other students who are not as motivated may strive to become the “Be-like-me” person of the week to gain access to prizes within the incentive-system.