Classroom Culture

I changed my seating chart in August 2015 from this…

to this…

If you are curious about that journey, you can read about it at My Journey from Rows to Groups.

One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed is how changing the furniture arrangement and then incorporating more cooperative structures has changed my classroom culture.

I’ve been teaching since fall of 2003.  I would frequently ask students to pass back papers and they would always bring me back a stack of 5-6 papers of different students that they did not know.  And this frequently happened even at the end of the year.

What kind of culture did I have in my classroom those first 10-11 years, if there were students who did not even know the names of all the other students?

That means, there were students sitting in my classroom, who WERE NOT KNOWN BY EVERYONE IN THE ROOM.

That is NOT acceptable to me.  It’s not what I want for any of my students, to feel invisible at school.  School is a place where they spend 1/3 of their day.  As a parent, it’s the last thing I want for my daughters.

We live in a culture where our students are “connected” (supposedly) now more than ever.  But are the connections they make on social media and via texts, enough?

When my students come into my classroom, I want them to feel like they are seen and heard by both myself and the other students in the room.  So that when they leave my room and walk across campus, there are 36 students that know them.

Check out this video below.  I took this on Monday: the Monday returning from Spring Break.  This is my FIRST PERIOD class of Integrated Math 3 students.  They have math first period.  (Do you get my point?)  The volume was soooo loud, I had to get out my phone to record this reunion.  The tardy bell had not even rung yet, and they were greeting each other and talking and sharing.  (Our tardy bell rings at 7:40 AM.)

This is the  Class Culture I want.  And I want them to do some math.  But first, I want them to be in a community that sees them and values them. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

(PS.  Yes my desk is a mess.  I need Marie Kondo to come and bring joy and peace to my classroom. LOL)