Building Successful Learning Communities in the Classroom
Why do It?
Email from Dana Minard, Sequim High School Teacher, 9/4/13, 2:32 PM:
This
was the BEST first day I have had in my 14 years of teaching!!!! Thank
you Matt for introducing me to this approach. I can see were this will
lead and hopefully the results will be AWESOME!!!
Here's why the results will be awesome:
Building
Successful Learning Communities in the Classroom is a method used to
develop a classroom environment that fosters engagement in learning by
creating a classroom environment that is physically and emotionally safe
for the student and promotes academic risk-taking. Students make
academic growth when they are willing to try something new and risk
being wrong. Nadler and Luckner (Processing the Experience, Second Edition) called this “Edgework.” Research by Walberg and Haertel (Psychology and Educational Practice)
demonstrates that nine areas having to do with classroom climate and
environment have greater impact on student learning than classroom
instruction, curriculum design and assessments (see chart below).
BuildingSuccessful Learning Communities focuses on those nine areas.
In
addition to being good for students and classroom environment, teachers
may be interested to know how using the Building Successful Learning
Communities model may impact their performance regarding the TPEP. For
information on the TPEP and Building Successful Learning Communities
click on the link in the menu to the left.
What Impacts Student Learning
Source:
Psychology and Educational Practice
By Herbert J. Walberg and Geneva D. Haertel
The Method
Building
Successful Learning Communities in the Classroom involves a four-step
process. Activities are sequenced and carefully adjusted by the teacher
throughout the process to bring students to the point that they are
getting along with and working well with their classmates and are
willing to take academic risks. The steps are:
- Warm-up, Ground Rules, Get to Know You Activities – designed to break the ice and help students get to know each other including:
- Full Value Contract – behavioral agreement among the group
- Challenge By Choice – all are expected to participate, but none are forced
- Deinhibitizer – activities designed to help students become less self-conscience and willing to try things in front of classmates.
- Trust
– activities designed to create trust in and among the students so that
they will support each other’s academic efforts and to encourage
academic risk-taking.
- Group Problem-Solving –
opportunities for students to work together to solve problems and
achieve tasks that they cannot solve or achieve on their own. In this
step students learn to work effectively with others and hopefully
generalize those skills to situations outside the classroom.