M1- Building a Community Heuristic

Building a Positive Classroom Community

Meeting the Needs of All Students

Why is Classroom Community Important?

• Classroom community creates a place in which students feel cared about and are encouraged to care about each other
• This is key to civic engagement and contributing to creating a more caring world

Benefits of Classroom Community

• Students who experience a sense of belonging in their classroom:

Think more positively & enthusiastically about their academic learning

Better manage conflict resolution

Care more deeply about their peers

• According to Piaget, cooperative relationships are key to moral development

Learning Readiness

• Learning readiness is influences by a student's background knowledge and experiences
• However, learning readiness is also greatly influenced by a student's:
• Prior learning success & failure
• Self-esteem
• Sense of efficacy
• Cultural norms
• Social status within the class
• Life experiences
• Dispositions & attitudes
• Habits of mind
• Educators who know their students deeply consider all these factors and determine individual readiness with greater accuracy, resulting in instruction that more precisely targets a student's optimal zone for learning (Powell & Kusuma-Powell, 2011)

Building Classroom Community

Building classroom community requires:

Strengthening teacher student relationships

Building connections between students

Providing opportunities for varied class-wide and school-wide activities

Weaving the goal of community through academic instruction

Three Challenges to Building Community

Tradiitional discipline

Kohn (1996) points to the following practices that are contrary to building authentic caring classroom communities:

Grouping students by ability

Competition

+ info

+ info

+ info

Click on the info button under each figure to learn more.

Building Classroom Community

To build a community, you must create a Caring Classroom Community, which is a place students feel cared about and are encouraged to care about each other.

Students must feel they are valued and respected

Students must feel safe physically and emotionally

Learning should be fun and engaging

+ info

+ info

+ info

Click on the info button under each figure to learn more.

Solving Problems Together

• When teachers involve students in problem-solving, they build self-efficacy and increase personal responsibility
• Solving problems together requires:

• Constructing an authentic solution
• Making restitution or repartition meaningful vs punishment
• Reviewing the resolution and reflect on the outcomes
• Ensuring flexibility
• Minimizing the punitive impact

• Trusting relationship between student & teacher
• Skills: listening, self de-escalating, generating alternative view points, problem-solving
• Diagnosing what's happening
• Questioning one's practice
• Maximizing student involvement

Community Heuristic

• Throughout the semester, we will build upon our understanding of the community heuristic
• Therefore, an understanding of the importance of building a classroom community for our students with disabilities is important
• Teachers often skip this essential step of building community and employ top down methods
• While reviewing the rest of this presentation, consider the implications of not building a positive learning environment

Developing Classroom Community & A Citizenship Heuristic

• Students need to experience:

Belonging

Joy

Respect

Building the Heuristic

• As students experience Joy, Belonging, and Respect in the classroom, they are able to develop:
• Self-Control
• Personal Responsibility
• Self-Advocacy
• Self-Direction
• Self-Efficacy
• The 5 attributes listed above are essential for all students to experience, especially students with disabilities, in order to become productive and contributing members of society

Defining a Heuristic

willingness to accept societal standards for individual behavior and make efforts to live by those standards; when individuals fail to meet expected standards, they do blame outside factors.

ability to control oneself, in particular one's emotions and desires or the expression of them in one's behavior, especially in difficult situations.

Personal Responsibility

practice of speaking and acting on behalf of ones selves and the ability to control one’s own affairs.

ability to determine and set goals to achieve one’s goals.

the capacity for producing a desired result or effect.

Self-Direction

Self-Efficacy

Self Advocacy

Self-Control

Click on the return arrow to view the definition of each term.

Understanding the Heuristic

• Attributes are developmental and sequential. Students who do not have self-control cannot exhibit personal responsibility, self-advocacy, or self-direction. Therefore, to build a student’s self-efficacy, teachers must begin at the students’ developmental level

• Creating a learning environment in which all students are contributing members allows students to experience belonging, feel their ideas are respected, and experience joy. This facilitates the development of the 5 attributes which will ensure they become contributing members of society

You have reached the end of this presentation

You may now return to your online course activities.