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A few tips for new teachers who want to foster strong relationships with students and between students.

David Grossman / Alamy Stock Photo

New teachers intuitively understand the need to create a welcoming community in their classrooms. A warm and responsive classroom culture is essential because, like all of us, students need to feel safe and valued in order to thrive. As the professor of education Linda Darling-Hammond has said, "When that sense of belonging is there, children throw themselves into the learning environment."

One path to creating this kind of classroom culture is to focus on setting expectations and routines that are designed to foster relationships and a sense of safety and belonging.

Since students thrive on consistency, one secret is for teachers to align these routines with our personality and values so that we abide by them with ease throughout the school year. If you believe in the importance of greeting students at the door, commit to making that part of your daily routine. If you practice mindfulness outside of school, you might want to begin your classes with a 30-second meditation. If your school has the supplies and you're an organized person, keep your classroom stocked with things students need but often forget-extra handouts, sharpened pencils, Post-it notes, highlighters, tissues. The classroom norms and procedures that really work are those we seamlessly implement because they're an extension of who we are.

Here are a few other strategies that can be easily adapted to your teaching style to create a classroom community built upon the fundamental pillars of relationships and belonging.

Put Students at the Center

What is your motto for life?

What is your favorite quotation?

What is your six-word memoir?

What is one item currently on your wish list?

What is one thing people should know about you?

Learn about your students with a reflective activity to display in your classroom-preferably with a photo of each student. Ask questions such as:

Students' thoughtful consideration of these questions helps them understand themselves more fully, and sharing these details with peers and their teacher helps them feel known.

Hang students' responses with their photos around the perimeter of your room (clothespins on a clothesline will suffice). This colorful display will draw students to their classmates' photos and ideas throughout the year, giving students the opportunity to share with their peers and learn about each other. The photos remind us of who matters most in the classroom-the students.

Do a 'Do Now'

Begin class with a three- to five-minute low-risk, content-related activity that all students can complete independently from start to finish-this helps students settle in and engage in purposeful work. One idea for this kind of "do now" activity is a preview of the day's lesson that asks students to make a prediction in response to a picture, cartoon, or idea. If you're doing a history lesson, you could share a relevant political cartoon. If you're focusing on a particular theme in a novel, you could ask students to respond to a quotation that illustrates that theme.

The do now can also be a review of the prior day's lesson, or reinforce a skill, by presenting students with a question, riddle, puzzle, or problem.

To ensure completion, the do now should yield a final product-that could be a pencil-and-paper task or a document in your learning management system. The do now provides a predictable routine that is inclusive and builds confidence because all students are guaranteed a successful outcome. It builds equity as it provides an entry point into the content for all students, which communicates that they belong in the classroom community.

One-on-One Time

Strong relationships with individual students strengthen the fabric of a classroom culture by giving students a chance to be heard. There's no substitute or shortcut for knowing our students because these personal relationships enable us to help them find meaningful connections to the work we're doing in class.

Short, focused conferences are a real option in a classroom where students are engaged in work that matters to them. Strong relationships free up the teacher to spend time with individual students because the rest of the class is motivated and focused on their work.

Tell me what topic you chose for your project, why you chose it, and one question you want to ask me about it.

Tell me one thing you're feeling excited about or one thing you're worrying about.

Each of our conferences will last approximately two minutes.

Conferences operate most efficiently when students know exactly what the goals of the conference are. I usually offer one academic goal and one personal goal, and advise students of our time constraints. I display all of this on the board for easy reference. For example:

Even with the strongest classroom community, issues will arise throughout the year. Students' personal lives will distract them from their work, they will become disenchanted with their grades-and sometimes with you-and they will likely be unkind to one another. Although these moments can be depleting, as teachers it is our responsibility to be steadfast in our mission and unfailing in our commitment to our students' success. A strong classroom culture not only supports student achievement but also brings joy to teaching and learning.

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How New Teachers Can Create a Welcoming Classroom

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A few tips for new teachers who want to foster strong relationships with students and between students. David Grossman / Alamy Stock Photo New teachers intuitively understand the need to create a welcoming community in their classrooms. A warm and responsive classroom culture is essential because, like all of us, students need to feel safe and valued in order to thrive.

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Exploring Diverse Forms of Storytelling With Mentor Texts

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Writing can be more engaging for students when they have the opportunity to consider different approaches to help them get started.

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These brain breaks are designed to serve different purposes, and selecting the right one at the right time can yield positive results.

The science behind brain breaks is clear. We know that incorporating brain breaks into academic routines yields benefits for students of all ages. CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, includes brain breaks in their three signature practices. Throughout my career, I have used brain breaks with great success with my second- and third-grade students as well as with college students and adults in professional development workshops.

As I reflect deeply about the brain breaks I use, I categorize them based on the result I hope to achieve with them. Brain breaks can energize students or help them to relax. They can also spark creativity and connection.

4 Targeted Brain Breaks

1. Energizing brain breaks. I use these when I sense that we need to increase energy in the classroom and spark joy. They include activity videos such as those you can find on UJU's YouTube channel, which was created by a group of teachers. They are fun and require movement. For younger elementary students, movement videos tied to questions and games such as Would You Rather? or Which One? are especially powerful. Videos are also available in Spanish.

For older students and adults, I love to set up a Rock, Paper, Scissors tournament. I have done this with great success with up to several hundred adults. Participants find a partner to play Rock, Paper, Scissors with and then trail the winner, cheering for them until it's down to just two people in the room. This game is almost universally known and is a crowd pleaser. At professional development sessions, having a small prize for the winner is also fun.

Another brain break I like for all ages is one I call Walk the Room. In this break, I play upbeat music and ask students or adults to walk the room racetrack style while chatting with a friend or contemplating by themselves. I define the path for participants and tell them they can talk about whatever they want, or they can just walk quietly.

This type of brain break is useful after morning meetings in classrooms where we typically have been sitting for a while, after lunch when sluggishness can set in, or when we've been working on an academic task for 30 minutes or longer and just need to increase energy and clear space in our brains for what's next.

2. Creative brain breaks. I use these when we have been working hard on a concept and need some time, space, and sensory input to make something on our own. My favorite examples of this type of brain break are creating with small cans of Play-Doh for five minutes, building something with Legos for five minutes, and building structures with small wooden blocks similar to those used to play Jenga.

Students and adults have a choice in what they are making and how it comes together. This small bit of agency can go a long way toward regulation and resetting brains for the rest of the class or day. I also love having students work on a 24-piece puzzle. The task of having to think and work toward an end product activates neurons in the brain. A puzzle can fire up a growth mindset and provide a challenge.

3. Soothing brain breaks. There are times when more mindful, slower-paced brain breaks work best. I offer choices with calm activities when students arrive in the morning, after an energetic or fast-paced activity, and quite simply when we need to calm ourselves to be successful in our next activity.

Examples include journaling, mindful coloring, yoga activities available on YouTube, box breathing, and working on dot-to-dot puzzles with hundreds of numbers. Each requires focus and is relatively quiet. I love to play lo-fi beats music in the background while we work on these things, which adds to a calm ambience in the classroom and helps students regulate while they can see how much time they have. Three to five minutes works very well. The Pomodoro Music Timer YouTube channel has lots of videos you can use for this purpose.

4. Connection brain breaks. A connected and safe classroom community supports academic and social success. Throughout the year, we can build connections through rituals and activities where we share ourselves with others. This can include articulating our hopes and dreams, fears, goals, and what's important to us. We can share our customs, traditions, and family practices.

Brain breaks that focus on these goals can provide that time. A very popular brain break is to ask a quick opinion question, such as "What's better, tacos or pizza, and why?" Would You Rather? and Four Corners are always great options.

I love to do a quick-chat brain break in my classroom. We do this each day after lunch to move and foster connection. I put up a slide with a quick question, and students find a partner to chat with for one minute. When I ring the chime, they find a new partner and do the same. We do this for five rounds. It gets us moving, talking, and connecting and takes just five minutes. It's a perfect transition between activities. You can see one of my slides below. I put a picture of my dog Bella in it for fun.

Brain breaks are a necessary and enjoyable element of any learning environment. They work best when we plan them to meet our learners' needs at different times of day and in different situations. When we are flexible and attuned to our students, we can take advantage of the best type of brain break for the moment.

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4 Brain Breaks for Different Classroom Needs

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These brain breaks are designed to serve different purposes, and selecting the right one at the right time can yield positive results.

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7 Digital Tools That Help Bring History to Life

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Challenging games, fun projects, and a healthy dose of AI tools round out our top picks for breathing new life into history lessons.

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Articulating what good teamwork looks like takes planning, reflection, and respect for student choice.

Sjoerd van Leeuwen / The iSpot

One of my all-time favorite reflective protocols is the Start-Stop-Continue exercise. It encourages learners to consider the impact of whatever is being learned by asking them about its perceived impact. A teacher or facilitator completes a lesson or an instruction sequence and then pauses, asking their audience to consider what they're going to start doing, stop doing, or continue doing based on a learning experience.

One example of how this structure was impactful for my growth occurred after I participated in a series of professional learning communities (PLCs) focused on collaborative learning. I was teaching middle school, and while collaborative learning can and should be done at any grade level, it's especially important in middle school, because tween learners need support as they encounter more complex emotions and social situations for the first time.

Based on what I learned from the PLC and the impact those strategies had in my classroom, I committed to start, stop, and continue certain things in regard to collaboration, each of which had profound impacts on how I viewed work time within a project-based learning (PBL) context.

START: Differentiate between group work and team work

Calling project work time "group work" is a bit of a misnomer. I once heard a colleague of mine, who also happened to be an experienced little league coach, explain the importance of this distinction in a very clever way: "There is a reason why we call them baseball teams rather than baseball groups." His point was that groups are not invested in the long-term success of their partners, while teammates recognize that individual efforts contribute to the success of all and are therefore more invested.

1. It provides students access to different perspectives and solutions that may exist outside their project team.

2. It allows teachers to leverage protocols that might call for pairs, trios, or larger groupings than the project teams may provide.

3. It gives students a break from the people they're collaborating with the most. This is sometimes critical to the continued harmony in a classroom, especially at the middle school level where relationships and hormones seem to change with the tides.

The reason this differentiation is key is that it reminds teachers to provide temporary grouping structures throughout the course of an assigned project that are different from the team that is producing the final product. There are many benefits to this, but here are three that I've observed:

STOP: Assuming That collaboration is built by experience alone

Having students work in groups is not the same as teaching them to collaborate. It's akin to teaching someone to swim by throwing them in a lake and shouting at them from a distance until they figure it out; it's skill development born out of desperation, and there are definitely less stressful ways to learn.

I believe that providing specific, teacher-facilitated opportunities to discreetly develop collaboration skills should be a part of any project where teamwork is required, especially early on. You want students to have a chance to follow Tuckman's stages of group development before grades add extra stress to the experience. Provide them time for storming and norming before deadlines, and you'll be setting them up for a better chance at success.

This can be done with short group challenges accompanied by a quality assessment tool, such as a rubric that clearly articulates what good teamwork looks like. Books like the summer camp classic Silver Bullets or the evidence-based rubrics on the PBLWorks website are resources worth checking out. Building your students' collaboration muscles takes planning, but it doesn't need to add full days to your PBL projects. Look for places to include 15-to-20-minute experiences at the beginning of your day for greatest impact.

CONTINUE: Include student voice in groupings

Whether or not to allow your students to pick their own groups for collaborative learning is a common question. While student choice can promote positive class culture and engagement, students don't always make grouping decisions based on who will be their most effective learning partner. Despite this, I did and still do advocate for occasionally allowing students to have some say in their groups, but this doesn't mean completely unstructured, or on scaffolded control.

Group and team formation should be a shared endeavor. Sometimes you're the one who makes the decision, and sometimes you allow a degree of student choice-but most often in a shared process.

An example of this would be allowing students their choice of roles, then a teacher uses that choice to form groups based on those roles. Another example might be allowing them to submit the name of a partner whom they want to work with and then forming the final group by putting two pairs together. They might also choose the type of final product they would like to create and then form groups based on that choice.

These choices I made about what to start-stop-continue doing in regard to group and team work became much more than just kids working in groups, but an opportunity to increase a key college- and career-readiness skill that would benefit them for the rest of their lives.

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An Effective Strategy for Successful Group Work

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Effective group work strategies can improve learning experiences when teachers balance their guidance with student choice.

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Incorporating digital collaboration into PD gives teachers a model to replicate when setting up tech activities for students.

Goodboy Picture Company / iStock

Promoting student collaboration in the classroom can increase engagement and students' use of higher-level thinking skills. But it's important that teachers help students develop the tools needed to collaborate effectively, and that includes learning how to leverage digital tools for collaboration.

Many teachers find it challenging to do so, though, whether because of a lack of experience using technology for collaborative purposes, or due to an uncertainty about when to use these practices in the classroom.

One way to address this challenge is to model digital collaboration in professional development (PD) sessions. By demonstrating how teachers can integrate digital collaboration into their learning environment, we can help colleagues feel more prepared.

When I plan PD sessions for teachers, I use the principles of adult learning theory as a guide. These principles help me design learning experiences that are effective for my adult learners, and they also provide me with opportunities to integrate digital collaboration-for example, when teachers share prior knowledge or experiences or new learning, or they work to solve scenario-based problems.

Sharing prior knowledge and experiences

Teachers bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to PD sessions. Our job as facilitators is to acknowledge and build on that experience.

I led a PD for teachers about how to use Google Forms for assessment. At the start of the session, I asked teachers to reflect on the current practices they use to assess student learning. I organized teachers into groups of four to five, and I gave each group one slide to share in a Google Slide deck.

They discussed their current practices and added them to their assigned slide. After a few minutes, I asked each group to take a minute to look at each other's ideas. They were able to see their work as a whole group, and as a facilitator, I was able to connect their current practices to the new learning that followed.

Sharing new learning

Teachers appreciate having opportunities to make choices about how and what they learn. Those of us who design PD should provide opportunities for choice in every session. Simultaneously, we need to work in ways for teachers to share their learning with each other.

When I led a PD on blended learning for a group of teachers, I knew that they were coming in with a variety of experience levels. I designed an activity in which I gave them three different articles from which to choose, depending on their current knowledge. The articles ranged from a very basic introduction to blended learning to a more advanced exploration of teaching strategies.

When participants finished reading their chosen article, they then shared what they had learned on a collaborative Google Jamboard or another digital whiteboard. In this way, they were each able to choose the best path for their learning needs, and they were still able to share and discuss new learning with each other, building upon one another's ideas with the help of technology.

Solving scenario-based problems

Adult learners are motivated by the opportunity to solve problems. Facilitators can therefore engage teachers by designing activities in which they are challenged to solve problems related to their professional lives.

For example, I facilitated a PD for teachers about how to increase active learning for students. After we explored some strategies and ideas together, I asked teachers to apply their new learning. I placed them into teams based on their grade level and content area, and I gave each team a classroom scenario. They worked together to identify ways that the lesson could incorporate more active learning. Each team was given a Google Doc template where they could organize their ideas, explanations, and thinking. Since each team member had access to the Google Doc, they were all able to edit and type in it together.

Each team added the link to their Google Doc on a Padlet board that the whole group could see. Teachers benefited, not just from hearing the thinking of their team members, but also from being able to access the work and ideas of all the other teams.

Other Ways to Incorporate Tech Into PD

After you complete a collaborative activity, you can also ask teachers to think about and discuss how they could use a similar activity with their students. It's important to use digital tools that teachers are also allowed to use with learners, to make it as easy as possible for teachers to use the activities in their own classrooms. Be ready to offer suggestions or ideas for teachers who might struggle to see how the activities could translate to their content or grade level.

You can also provide how-to resources for the digital tools you use, such as links to videos or step-by-step directions. Offer to follow up with individual teachers who might need support learning how to use the tools.

Integrating digital collaboration into the classroom can be challenging. By providing teachers with opportunities for digital collaboration in PD, we can help them gain the confidence to implement these strategies in their classrooms, which will lead to enhanced learning opportunities and collaboration for students.

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Incorporating digital collaboration into PD gives teachers a model to replicate when setting up tech activities for students.