Classroom Environments and Their Impact on Classroom Management:
Building a great classroom environment starts from day 1 and is vital to the success of your classroom. There are several components that make up a classroom environment that I believe have a huge impact on classroom management. Those components are: building relationships, trust, respect, and establishing rules and procedures. If time is taken at the beginning of the year to focus on these issues then management problems will be minimized later on. As new teachers it is vital that we see the importance the first few days of class will have on the success of the entire year.
I have chosen an article that discusses making the first few days of class a success for the students as well as the teacher. The article: Opening Day: Getting Started in a Cooperative Classroom by Frank Dinan discusses the importance of taking some time at the beginning of the school year to build relationships with your students to help create a cooperative learning environment. In order to help support the ideas put forth in Dinan’s article I will reference other author’s works on the same subject area like; Harry Wong, Barrie Bennett and Peter Smilanich. One thing these people all have in common is that they believe in taking the time to create a safe, respectful, cooperative, and balanced classroom environment. If this framework is set up properly, as a teacher and student you will have success throughout the year and it will minimize classroom management issues.
Opening Day: Getting Started in a Cooperative Classroom
Frank Dinan begins his article by recapping the first few days of school from his organic chemistry class. He outlines the activities and procedures he commonly implements in the first few days in order to set the students up to work cooperatively throughout the year. His belief is that if you take the time to build relationships through cooperative activities and social bonding games, that you make students aware that learning can be enhanced and even made easier by working together. These activities are designed to make the students feel like they belong and that the environment in which they learn is providing all of their basic needs, so that they can focus more on being academically successful.
He mentions that he uses a few icebreaker and name game activities to get the ball rolling, but it is in fact the cooperative tasks he assigns that really bring the students together. His ultimate goal is to show the students that they need each other to be successful, so working well together and creating a healthy, happy, and safe classroom environment is in everyone’s best interests. In order to prove this point Dinan’s favorite activity for the students to do is the NASA game. In short, students are given a list of limited materials to complete a task in space and asked to rank them by importance individually. Then they are asked to repeat the task in a group working collaboratively. In the final step they are given a ranked list created by experts at NASA and asked to calculated how different their individual list was from the experts list and the same for the group list. “Almost always, the team rankings are much closer to the NASA rankings than are those made by any of the individual students.” (Dinan, F. 2006) I think that it is also important to highlight with your class that everyone is different and brings something unique to the table. One way of doing this might be a learning styles survey that is then published to the classroom wall. He then explains to his students that throughout the year their grade will be comprised of a variety of assessment tools, some of which are cooperative tasks or peer evaluations. In order to make these assessment techniques successful he describes the need for classrooms to have a safe, respectful, and cooperative environment. The route to this classroom environment is through building relationships.
The First Few Days of School and the Classroom Learning Environment
Building Relationships and Creating Cooperative Learning Environments
Elaborating on Dinan’s views, Harry Wong and Bennett and Smilanich both agree with the importance of relationship building and its positive effect on classroom management. I have seen this first hand, knowing your students and vice versa creates an environment of trust and respect that minimizes management problems. The first few days of bonding in a classroom are beneficial to both the students and the teacher. From a classroom management standpoint, just knowing your students names helps you to be a more effective teacher and organize the classroom. Taking time to bond with them and letting them bond with each other helps to create a safe learning environment where students feel free to take risks and focus on their learning. Even if you don’t ‘click’ with every student taking the time to bond with them shows them you care and gives them a piece of who you are so they can have some kind of connection with you. If you have built some kind of connection with a person you are less likely to disappoint them, anger them, or disrespect them. If you apply this principle to teaching, connecting with students, minimizes the risks of negative disruptive behavior and problems solving issues if they do arise. Relationships with your students also create a more positive learning environment, if you feel a connection with your teacher and you like him or her on a personal level you are more likely to enjoy class, participate, and engage in the learning.
Taking time to have the students understand the importance of cooperative learning will help make group activities the classroom seamless. Starting with icebreaker activities and having the students get to know each other is the first step. This social bonding will help enhance the learning environment by promoting peer tutoring and support. Having the students complete a team classroom scavenger hunt will build collaboration as well as introducing the rules, procedures, and organizational system of the classroom. This could be an alternative to Dinan’s NASA activity. If students can work well collaboratively in a classroom then you have already set up the foundation for respect and trust among the members of the class, another important framework for successful classroom management.
Trust and Respect
Creating an environment of trust and respect is vital to student learning and classroom management. Similar to building relationships and establishing rules and procedures, creating a respectful environment should be done in the first few days of school. There are many different activities and approaches to doing this, you just need to find a method that works for you. Involving students in the process of creating classroom rules will earn their respect because they feel like their opinion matters and have a say in shaping their own learning environment. If there is an environment of trust and respect students can feel safe to step out of their box, take risks, and enjoy learning. It will also help them work well with others, reducing management issues.
Procedures and Rules
Although rules and procedures are important and should be established in the first few days of class, they will mean nothing if your students don’t respect them or you, and feel safe in their environment. This is why establishing relationships and creating a good social environment in your classroom first will make enforcing the procedures that much easier because problems will be minimized. This does not mean you should not discuss your expectations and practice procedures during the first days of class, it just means that you should start by building relationships and then involve the students in the rule making process. Bennett and Smilanich discuss how this puts the responsibility on the students and creates a community of respect in the classroom. The teacher becomes a facilitator rather than a dictator, it allows for community building and cooperative learning.
Conclusion:
It may be hard to find comprehensive scientific research that gives teachers laid out steps as to how to create a beneficial classroom environment however; the positive end results of taking the time to create a good environment are undisputable. What may work for one teacher might not for another, each method of getting there will have to be unique to the teacher and the student’s styles. In order to have a well managed classroom you need to make achieving the above mentioned classroom environment components a priority. Bennett and Smilanich discuss the importance of preventative classroom management, which is established in those first few days of school by creating relationships and establishing rules and procedures. If time is taken to do those things - you prevent most classroom management issues. This again enforces the importance of those first few days of class and using them to set up your classroom environment.
References:
Bennet & Smilanich (1994). Classroom management: A thinking and caring approach. Toronto, ON: Bookstation.
Dinan, F. (2006) Opening Day: Getting Started in a Cooperative Classroom. Journal of College Science Teaching: January/February 2006. PP. 12-14. Retrieved May 14 from ERIC.
Wong, H.K. & Wong, R.T. (2009). The first days of school: how to be an effective teacher. Mountain View, CA. Harry K. Wong Publications.
