September 2008
| Volume 66 | Number 1
The Positive Classroom
Marge Scherer
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Steven Wolk
Many of our greatest joys in life are related to our learning, but, unfortunately, most of that learning takes place outside of school. Educators can put more joy into the experience of going to school and get more joy out of working inside school by focusing on several essentials. Help students find pleasure in learning by giving them the freedom to explore what they love. Give students some choice in how they will go about their learning and how they will demonstrate their knowledge. Allow students to create original work, and show off that work. Give students and teachers time to tinker. Make school spaces inviting. Get students—and teachers—outside. Read good books. Offer more classes in gym and in the arts. Use more authentic assessments and student self-assessments. Get teachers, students, and administrators together from time to time to have some fun.
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Rick Smith and Mary Lambert
For long-term learning and positive connections to take place in the classroom, we need to assume that our students want to learn both content and appropriate behavior in school. Teachers must explicitly teach behavior, pausing in their lessons to address misbehavior in the classroom. Five strategies can help: using volume, tone, and posture to communicate in a firm but nonthreatening way; implementing the Two-by-Ten Strategy (use two minutes each day for ten days in a row to get to know a troublesome student); breaking things into steps; using behavior rubrics; and using visuals.
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JoBeth Allen
Families often support schools by contributing to fundraising efforts and offering volunteer help. But what kinds of family involvement contribute most to student learning? The author describes strategies that teachers have used to build meaningful, reciprocal partnerships with ethnically diverse families. These strategies support student learning by building respectful relationships, engaging families in supporting learning at home, and addressing cultural differences.
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Paula Denton
Teacher language is one of the most powerful tools a teacher wields; it can shape how students think, how they perceive themselves, and ultimately how they learn. The Responsive Classroom approach, which research shows is associated with students having better social skills and more positive feelings about school, offers concrete strategies to help teachers' classroom language support student learning. Denton, who coaches teachers in Responsive Classroom strategies, discusses five key principles of positive teacher language: (1) be direct; (2) convey faith in students' abilities and intentions; (3) focus on actions; (4) be brief; and (5) know when to be silent. She offers classroom examples of using each strategy successfully.
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Robert Blair
The Aulas en Paz (Classrooms at Peace) program in Bogotá, Colombia, teaches conflict resolution skills to elementary school students to help them learn to interact constructively, democratically, and peacefully with one another. Four lessons learned from this experience can apply to schools everywhere. Schools should teach conflict resolution skills to their youngest students, create opportunities for aggressive students to mimic the behavior of prosocial students, give students ownership of the classroom rules, and enable students to practice these skills during simulated disputes.
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Russell Skiba and Jeffrey Sprague
Research shows that exclusionary discipline policies, such as suspension and expulsion, do not reduce disruption, improve school climate, or increase student achievement. Further, suspension and expulsion are inconsistently and unfairly applied, with racial minorities punished more severely for less serious and more subjective infractions. This article describes School-wide Positive Behavior Support, a comprehensive, proactive approach that creates a safe school climate while reducing student suspensions and expulsions. The authors cite research showing that this approach, used by more than 6,000 schools, can reduce problem behaviors, improve school safety, and improve academic achievement.
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Stephen Wessler
If schools want to curtail degrading speech, they need to start with students. The Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence works with schools to empower students to speak out when they hear hateful speech and support classmates who are hurt by such speech. Wessler describes some of the programs the center has implemented in schools and tells stories of how students have learned about harassment, challenged stereotyping, and responded to racist incidents in their communities. He encourages teachers to model for students how they can stop such speech before it escalates into harsher words or violence and implores them to talk openly with students about their concerns.
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Mara Sapon-Shevin
The author asserts that we need to go beyond the narrow definition of inclusion as the instruction of students with special needs or disabilities in the regular classroom. A broader definition of inclusion looks at the myriad ways that students differ from one another: race, class, gender, ethnicity, family background, sexual orientation, language, abilities, size, religion, and so on. Rather than ignoring or denying differences, inclusion allows teachers to name the diversity, value it, and design and implement productive, sensitive responses. The result is a classroom environment in which students can develop comfort with diversity, skill in confronting hard topics honestly, understanding of their interconnectedness, and the courage to change the world.
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Elizabeth Bondy and Dorene D. Ross
Developing an engaged and respectful classroom atmosphere is a thorn in the side of many educators in high-poverty schools. Studies have shown that the "warm demander" teaching approach, which the authors elucidate here, is an effective teaching style, especially in high-poverty classrooms. Warm demanders first establish a caring relationship that convinces students the teacher believes in them and has their best interests at heart. The authors discuss strategies for building relationships with students. On the basis of this relationship, warm demanders relentlessly insist that all students perform required academic work and treat the teacher and their peers with respect. Bondy and Ross detail how to be a successful "demander," including providing a variety of supports for different kinds of learners until all students "get it," being highly consistent with behavioral expectations and consequences, reaching out for students' help in understanding recurring behavior problems, and using clear communication and a matter-of-fact tone.
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Linda Christensen
Educators have the power to determine whether students feel included or excluded in schools. The author asserts that students whose home languages differ from "standard English"—including those who speak Black English or Ebonics—often face inequities because of linguistic prejudice. By bringing students' languages from their homes into the classroom, we can validate their culture and history as topics of study. The author describes a curriculum on language and power that she has developed and used to make students aware of the way schools perpetuate the myths of inferiority of some languages. This curriculum has helped students feel more empowered and included in school.
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Elise Trumbull and Carrie Rothstein-Fisch
U.S. classrooms are increasingly places where different cultures meet. Cultural differences often bring with them different notions of how students learn best; how they should behave; what kinds of interventions can help them meet the school's expectations; and what roles teacher, student, and parent should play. Trumbull and Rothstein-Fisch describe how teachers can capitalize on students' cultural strengths to enhance learning. For example, Latino cultures tend to value collective responsibility and group interdependence, as opposed to U.S. mainstream culture, which emphasizes individual responsibility and independence. Through the Bridging Cultures project, the authors observed teachers of predominately Latino students who offered opportunities for collaboration and group responsibility, thereby strengthening overall classroom harmony and productivity.
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Sue Zapf
Adolescent students who face serious life issues—from homelessness to depression—often need teachers to reach them at an emotional level and provide a nurturing community before they can engage in true academic learning. The author describes how she and her coteachers forge an inviting environment in Compass, an alternative program for 8th and 9th graders who were slipping away academically in mainstream schools. Drawing on strategies developed by Purkey and Novak in Inviting School Success, Zapf provides consistent routines, projects an interested and accepting manner to students, and models how to safely share ideas and feelings about classroom situations. The Compass program also uses a grading system through which students must continue improving work until it merits a C or better.
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Jean Johnson
Five Public Agenda surveys—A Mission of the Heart (2008); Lessons Learned (2008); Reality Check 2006; Rolling Up Their Sleeves (2003); and Stand by Me (2003)—provide snapshots of how instructional leadership is working in schools. Most principals see instructional leadership as a key mission. "Transformer" principals are able to focus squarely on instructional leadership in their work, whereas "coper" principals often have a hard time fitting instructional leadership into a busy day. A majority of principals expressed satisfaction with teacher quality in their schools, although principals in mainly minority schools didn't voice the same level of satisfaction. According to Public Agenda's research, the most serious hurdle facing instructional leadership is whether communities and districts are willing to reorganize schools so principals have time for this work.
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Jeannine Herron
In an effort to insert phonics back into early grade classrooms, publishers have created curriculums that teach phonics in a tedious, unproductive way. Herron asserts that the key problem in the current phonics approach is that it teaches the code backwards: Students progress from print to sound instead of from sound to print. Phonemes, she notes, are articulated sounds. It is the motor system of speech, not the visual system, that sequences and remembers phonemes. Reading instruction should start with students constructing words (encoding) rather than trying to recognize letters and words from visual appearance (decoding). Herron explains why encoding instruction (which activates left-hemisphere processing) is a better place to begin than decoding (which activates right-hemisphere processing). Besides urging more encoding, she details how other common practices in phonics instruction must change for such instruction to help struggling readers break through rather than furthering their frustration.
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W. James Popham
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Joanne Rooney
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Douglas B. Reeves
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Deborah Perkins-Gough
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Judy Seltz
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Andrea H. Antepenko
Integrating music into instruction, first-year teacher Andrea Antepenko writes, helps her create a classroom in which a diverse group of 5th graders each experience relevant, meaningful learning, while also mastering required content. Antepenko plays music throughout the learning day, choosing as her soundtrack tunes that correspond to the period in history her class is studying. She uses music to inspire students as they begin writing assignments; to reinforce content in social studies, math, and other areas; and to create a mutually respectful but stimulating classroom atmosphere. She gives an extended example of how a particularly moving song about black soldiers during the Civil War ("We Look Like Men of War") deepened her students' understanding of black soldiers' experiences in this war and enlarged their ability to empathize with others.
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Stephen Myers
To take the risks that are essential to authentic learning, students must feel safe in the classroom. Myers describes how he creates a safe classroom by building trusting relationships among students in structured, intentional conversations. In these conversations, students determine the conditions that will enable them to get what they want out of the class, commit to creating these conditions, maintain relationships throughout the year, and deal with breakdowns in their agreements. Myers's experience has shown that these conversations can create healthy classroom communities.
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Lori Korinek
A 30 percent reduction in discipline referrals over two years at a problem-plagued urban elementary school is a sign something is working. A school in Newport News, Virginia, achieved this kind of dramatic change through implementing the School-wide Positive Behavior Support (SPBS) approach to discipline, according to Korinek, a researcher with the Training and Technical Assistance Center at the College of William and Mary. Korinek helped advise school leaders in implementing SPBS and also researched how the process unfolded. She describes how the school formed a core team of administrators, teachers, and specialists to lead the new discipline approach; pored over data on student misbehavior; and identified specific student behaviors that they wanted to encourage in different areas of the school. Starting in fall of 2006, teachers explicitly taught students these behavioral expectations and reinforced them throughout the year by creatively reteaching behaviors and providing visual cues. Although this approach improved the classroom environment, data on student behavior revealed that the lunch period was still a problem area. The team analyzed this problem and created a plan for improving student behavior based on teaching specific behaviors, setting up transitioning routines, and training cafeteria workers to monitor each table's behavior daily and reward positive conduct.
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Carol Gerber Allred
This article outlines seven strategies that compose the Positive Classroom program, which has been in existence for 26 years and has been implemented in more than 13,000 schools. Teachers can build positive classrooms by (1) making learning relevant, (2) creating a classroom code of conduct, (3) teaching positive actions, (4) instilling intrinsic motivation, (5) reinforcing positive behaviors, (6) engaging positive role models, and (7) always being positive. The U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse has recognized Positive Action as the only character education program to achieve positive effects on both academics and behaviour.
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Susan Klonsky
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Naomi Thiers
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