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Essential Skills for Classroom Management

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Essential Skills for Classroom Management

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Create psychologically safe environments.

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Essential Skills for Croom management micro_skills_

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Determining Readiness

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Determining Readiness

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Create psychologically safe environments.

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Create psychologically safe environments.

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It is a departmental priority that all students have access to learning alongside their similar aged peers allowing them to the opportunity to feel success in their academic and schooling life. According to Cornelius-White (2007), “the power of positive teacher-student relationships is critical for learning to occur. This relationship involves showing students that the teacher cares for their learning as students, can see their perspective, and communicate it back to them so they have valuable feedback to self-assess, feel safe, and learn to understand other and the content with the same interest and concern” (p.123, as found in Sharrat and Fullan, 2012).

Knowing students means more than merely acquiring social or administrative information—students' names and ages, something about their friendship circles, a bit about their family backgrounds, a few statistics from their academic record. To maximize learning, we need to dig deeper than this superficial acquaintance (Powell and Kusuma-Powell, 2011).
Developing an in-depth understanding of each learner enables teachers to:

1.  Create a psychologically safe environment for every learner.
2.  Determine each students' readiness for learning.
3.  Identify multiple access points to the curriculum to increase engagement and success.

1. Creating a psychologically safe environment:

Maslow proposed in his hierarchy of human needs, basic wants must be met before students can turn their attention to learning (1999). After securing food, water, shelter, and safety from harm, people seek as their next most important needs affection, belonging, and esteem. In the process of coming to know students, a caring and interested teacher can develop rapport and trust not just between teacher and student but among students. This trust and acceptance creates a psychologically safe atmosphere in the classroom, which provides the security students need to experience the intellectual discomfort of new ideas and adjust their pre-existing mental models to accommodate new, deep learning. A sense of belonging and being valued maximizes the chances that students will take such risks. At Dakabin State High School, we employ the use of Reboot Strategies, as well at the Essential Skills for Classroom Management (ESCMs).

2. Determining Readiness:

As teachers, we make decisions and judgments daily about the readiness level of our students.  If teachers are to meet the learning needs of a global classroom, they will need to personalize learning, to think of readiness in both group and individual terms.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, "enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with a person's capacity to act" (p. 50).

We would suggest that this is the exact location of personalized learning—on the frontier between boredom and anxiety, which, most likely, is not the same for all students in a class. If readiness levels in a class differ, so must the levels of challenge provided (Jensen, 1998; Sousa, 2001; Tomlinson, 2003; Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Wolfe, 2001).

Sometimes, learning readiness is thought of as dependent on the knowledge, understanding, and skills that an individual brings to a new learning situation. However, educators also need to appreciate that readiness is influenced by an individual's prior learning success or failure, self-esteem, sense of efficacy, cultural norms, social status within the class or group, life experience, dispositions and attitudes, and habits of mind. When we know our students deeply, we are able to consider all these factors and determine individual readiness with greater accuracy—and then pitch instruction more precisely to a student's optimal zone for learning.

Because readiness is affected by so many factors, it is not a static condition. Ultimately, student knowledge will let teachers influence readiness, foster and anticipate it, and truly ready students for learning.

3. Identifying Multiple Access Points to the Curriculum:

Access points are the connections that make the content and concepts relevant to learners, whether through similar experience, or an interest, or tapping into their way of thinking. As teachers get to know each of their students better, effective access points become more apparent. Access points are often areas of student strength.

Gathering Data About Your Learner
As teachers, it is natural for us to be concerned about the students in our classes who are struggling. As a result, we tend to focus on student deficits (what a student is not yet able to do) as opposed to student strengths. By 'Knowing Your Learner', you are able to shift this focus and unmask success. Below are a series of questions that teachers might want to ask themselves as you begin to know your learner. The questions are categorised under the five dimensions of learner identity.

Biological traits

In what ways might the student's gender be influencing learning in the classroom?

Is there anything in the student's medical records that indicates a condition that might impact classroom learning?

Does the student have a learning disability?

Has the student been identified as highly capable?

Cultural and societal influences

What is the student's dominant culture (or cultures), and how might it (they) be influencing learning?

How do you think the student perceives the role of the student?

If you were to ask the student what the word "learning" means, how do you anticipate they would respond?

What might be some ways that you could support the student in coming to better understand the culture of the school?

If the student's first language is not English, how might this linguistic diversity enhance achievement in the classroom?

Emotional and social influences

What are the socioeconomic circumstances of the student's family circumstances? What is the family's primary language?

What is the student's prior school history?

Does the student prefer to work alone or in groups?

When have you seen the student take on leadership responsibilities?

How would you describe the student's interpersonal skills?

When is the student most self-directed?

Learner preferences

What are the student's strengths as a learner?

Under what conditions have you seen the student doing his or her best work?

What are you noticing about the environmental influences on this student's learning?

What activities does the student engage in after school or during breaks?

What have you noticed about the student's preferred learning styles or intelligence preferences?

In what ways does this student most prefer to demonstrate learning?

Academic performance

What have you learned from your analysis of this student's work, and how will this influence the design of future instruction?

For more information please visit the link below:

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How to Teach Now: Five Keys to Personalized Learning in the Global Classroom

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In this book, William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell provide a practical map to navigate some of today′s most complicated instructional challenges: How do you help all students succeed when every clas