Everyone knows everyone

The first order of business in creating a sense of community is making sure that every student knows every other student in the class.  Especially in large schools, where it is impossible for anyone to know everyone, there are strangers in every room. Some students remain anonymous to their classmates for the whole year.  Anonymity is a serious barrier to creating a sense of community and must be actively challenged. It allows passive students to avoid being engaged, and creates a vague and nagging sense that not everyone is connected.

If students are to have a sense of belonging in your classroom, everyone needs to know more than just their classmates’ names.  To work well as a coherent group, they also need to know the strengths and weaknesses of all the people in the room.

This can be accomplished by randomly reassigning students to work with each other so that everyone meets everyone in the course of the first few weeks of school.  Students should introduce themselves at every opportunity and pay close attention to who they work well with.

Cultivating social cohesion

Lest we forget one of Glasser’s fundamental human needs, it is important that students — and you — have fun on a regular basis.  Many teachers don’t trust that they can maintain control of the class if their students are socializing and having fun. This is probably the source of the “don’t smile until Christmas” school of thought on maintaining a fearsome posture towards discipline.  Ironically, however, a lack of fun can often create disciplinary problems.

Socializing and other informal, non-academic activities are essential in building social cohesion, the glue that holds the community together.  Too much socializing can be chaotic and can take away time for learning, but too little undermines the sense of community and is therefore bad for learning as well.  The issue of productive socializing is discussed in depth in the next section.

You may have to contend with administrators or colleagues who are proponents of the bell-to-bell approach.  I would argue that that posture towards learning requires relentless control on the part of the teacher, which in turn undermines the sense of being a community of learners. Watch what happens to such a class when there is a substitute teacher in such a class.  There will almost always be sabotage and disrespect. Students will act out because they can, because they are frustrated, and because their motivation to behave well comes from the controlling presence of their teacher, rather than from within.

However, when a group of students has a sense of community and ownership, a substitute teacher will have a completely different experience.  I have seen this first-hand, many times. When students feel that the class is their own, a sub’s lack of familiarity is a mere inconvenience in getting done what they were going to do anyway.  They will stay on-task because they themselves wish to accomplish those tasks. They will learn because they want to learn.

Insisting on students being on task bell-to-bell may look more efficient, but in the long run, it does not promote self-directed learning.  Remember, doing school looks efficient too.

ANONYMITY IS NOT OKAY

DON'T SMILE UNTIL CHRISTMAS

Trust

One of the hallmarks of a functional community is the sense of trust that permeates the atmosphere.  That trust begins with you, the teacher. An ironclad rule of human nature is that when people are not trusted, they become untrustworthy.  I have found that the best posture is to trust my students as much as I can, and to deal with incidents where students betray that trust as teachable moments.

Beyond the trust that exists between you and your students, there is the broader question of them trusting each other.  In many classrooms, a student tends to only trust a small number of friends. Everyone else remains a stranger, more or less.  In a community, however, there are no strangers. Fortunately, there are many activities available that are designed to promote this sense of broad, mutual trust in the whole group.  These are described in “Starting the Year”.

The reason why this issue is so important is that making mistakes and learning from them is an essential part of mastering new concepts and skills.  Admitting failure in front of others takes real courage. Unless students trust each other, the sense of shame that they often feel when they do badly on a test, for instance, cannot be replaced with the posture of seeing mistakes non-judgmentally.  Students cannot see mistakes as feedback, as an essential part of the learning process, in the way that missing a lot of free throws may be an important step toward mastering that skill.

Trust is also a key ingredient in creativity.  As Ken Robinson, the maven of creativity, says, “If you are not willing to make mistakes, you will never do anything original.”

School unintentionally teaches students to be risk-averse.  Successful students become preoccupied with getting the right answer, which subverts creativity and risk-taking.  Unsuccessful students are, in one form or another, trying to avoid being humiliated by their failures. If we, as teachers, intend to foster creativity and critical thinking skills in our students, we have to find ways to open them up to taking chances, and that requires trust.

ASK ME ANYTHING

Respect

Mutual respect is another essential ingredient in building a sense of community, and again, it begins with you.  A teacher’s respect (or lack of it) for students is telegraphed through his behavior, his rules, his classroom strategies.  If we believe in the common purpose described above, and if we truly feel we are in it together with our students, that posture comes through and improves the working relationship.

One of the best guides to treating students with respect is simply applying the Golden Rule:  How would we feel if an administrator treated us the way we are treating our students? Many teachers I talk to feel they are not respected by their administrators, who sometimes make decisions without even considering how it affects teachers, and never ask for input or feedback on how well those decisions are being made.  Recognizing that this is often the way our students feel about us is sobering.  It should cause us to rethink our use of power.

Of course, another essential piece of community is that students show respect to each other.  That means no bullying or teasing, no demeaning comments. This must be one of the fundamental rules that you enforce vigorously, because allowing disrespect between students sabotages the sense of community more directly than almost any other behavior.

Class contributions

The shift from a top-down, teacher-directed classroom to a community of learners gives students a more active role in the learning process.  It also calls for a greater responsibility on their part in making the class run smoothly. An autocratically-run assembly line can be handled smoothly with one foreman.  A community, with all its freedom and messiness, requires a communal sense of responsibility.

One way to distribute that responsibility is to have students take on jobs, which I called class contributions.  In my class, these jobs included maintaining the room, becoming a mentor for other students, organizing lab equipment, maintaining student portfolios, watering the plants, and so forth.  Depending on your subject matter and your student body, of course, your list might look quite different.

These contributions come in a wide range of levels of responsibility.  Being a steering committee member (more on that shortly) who helps make executive decisions on the functioning of the class requires a larger commitment and more responsibility than, say, watering the plants.  Nevertheless, having every student contribute to the good of the group enhances the sense of belonging and ownership that is so important in building community.

THE GOLDEN RULE REVISITED