With so many items on a teacher’s to-do list each day, building classroom community may not be on your list of urgent priorities.
With preparing lesson plans, helping students meet benchmarks, fulfilling administrative duties, maintaining discipline it’s a wonder that you can fit anymore into your day.
Finding extra time to do community-building activities might feel overwhelming but building classroom community is one of the most effective ways to give students ownership over their own classroom, has been known to help with discipline problems and helps students feel more comfortable about speaking up.
If you’re interested in helping your classroom evolve into a community then why not try some of these strategies this term:
Hold Weekly Class Meetings
A simple but effective way to build classroom community is to hold meetings with your class once a week. These meetings don’t need to be long; they can simply provide a way for students and educators to see how everyone is doing.
Teachers can give three students a chance to ask a specific classroom-related question or share a highlight of the week.
The content of the meetings will depend on the age group of the students in your classroom, but if students know these meetings are coming up, they have a small event they can look forward to beyond the regular curriculum.
Focus on Gratitude
Focusing on gratitude can be an especially fun way to build community in the classroom.
Teachers can tackle this community-building strategy in various ways. For example, you could introduce a gratitude journal and ask pupils to write five items in the journal at the start of each class. Teachers can then ask a few students each class, either at the beginning or the end, to share what’s on their list. This will help other students get to know each other and also help teachers get to know their students and what matters most to them.
Work Together Toward a Shared Goal
Educators are already well aware that many students respond well to rewards, like time during class to play games.
A great way to keep the class connected and also give students an incentive to behave is to create a shared goal for the class, based on performance or behaviour, and then have a reward listed once students reach that shared goal.
Teachers can keep track of students’ progress toward this goal by using a board at the front of the class, a diagram, or another visual cue so students can see how far they’ve come toward the goal. This will keep them driven to meet it and allow them to work together to earn the reward they want to enjoy as a class.
Give Daily Shout-Outs or Compliments
A simple and quick way to build community in the classroom is to create a shout-out or compliment ritual. When students hear that they are doing well, they are more likely to keep trying to do well and get more shout-outs or compliments.
This strategy takes nearly no time but gives students the opportunity to recognise one another for good work and also gives teachers the opportunity to showcase positive examples for the rest of the class.
Let Students Have a Voice
Teachers can do this through comment cards, weekly notes to the teacher, or classroom forums.
For example, teachers might pass out cards to students every so often with a prompt like, “One thing I wish my teacher knew…” with blank lines for students to fill out the rest.
Students then have a chance to share with their teacher, and teachers have the opportunity to learn more about their students. This will, in turn, build community.
Teachers might also choose to have students write fun facts about themselves on note cards and pass them around. Then other students have to guess who the card is about.
