Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate - By Pei Yi Liu

Establishing a Positive Classroom Climate

By Pei Yi Liu

In this assignment, I am going to share and reflect on the decorations that I displayed in my real classroom that helped in creating a safe, caring and positive relationship with students.

The subject I teach is English and the grade level of my students are grade 2 and grade 4. Most of the students are from China and Taiwan. For them, English is a second language; as a result, it is important for me to create an environment that is filled with a lot of multicultural posters or books. In addition, I have two different levels of grades in my classroom, I need to be concerned how to unite the classroom space to meet both standards. In order to satisfy both grade level students, I’ve considered two perspectives – the arrangement of furniture, and classroom setup effectiveness - on how I set up my classroom in creating a safe, caring, and positive relationship with students.

The first perspective is about the arrangement of furniture in the classroom. The furniture includes students’ desks, students’ chairs, bookshelves, teacher’s table, walls, cabinets, windows, doors, the bulletin board and the whiteboard. To create a learning environment where students feel cared for and respected, teachers have to keep these concerns in mind: brightness of light, anti-collision supplies on desk or chairs, height of desk, chairs and whiteboard, students’ movement routes, position of bookshelves, cabinets and teacher’s table, and an activity area.

The poor brightness of light and inappropriate height of desks and chairs affect not only on teachers’ and students’ eye sight but also both of their standing or seating posture. Without a comfortable sitting position, students can’t engage in a meaningful learning environment.

Adjustable Desk And Chair

One concern for students’ is in elementary school, they are easily active and hyperactive. The anti-collision supplies on desks and chairs provide a harmless and safe environment that prevents students from being hurt. In this environment, students feel safe and supported not only physically but also emotionally.  

The anti-collision supply prevent students be hurt by the edge of the desks or chairs

            A good well-designed classroom setup should think highly of students’ movement routes and activity areas in order to provide an opportunity among students to interact and communicate. On account of my classroom being a square shape, I put all the cabinets, bookshelves and teacher’s tables by the corners of the classroom to make my classroom have more space and look bigger. Students can do activities or move around the classroom safely. In addition, I can observe or monitor students thoroughly.

 My Classroom

Except for those things, the route that students enter the classroom to their desks also plays an important role in creating a caring and safe climate. An effective and organized moving route not only saves teachers’ time for instruction, but also helps students understand the learning objectives or goals each day. Students’ bag shelves by the door aims to support, especially the lower graders to concentrate and pay attention to the teachers in the classroom more, since they are easily interrupted by the stuffs they have next to them. This helps students understand each day’s learning goals, I set up a daily needed supplies reminder board by the students’ bag shelf for them to take out needed materials to their desks. What’s more is the bag hangs besides the desk might trip someone who are careless and cause accidents to happen. Thus, it is important for me to reduce this possibility in the classroom.  It's the teachers' duty.

Students' Bag Shelf

To me, collecting students’ assignments is a big task every day due to most of my lower graders forget to do it all the time. In order to facilitate me to know and organize the missing homework, I collect an assignment section with a hanging storage bag. When students finish taking out the materials they need, they walk to the assignment section to drop their paper work in the bag in light of their seat numbers. In this way, teacher can easy to examine and check who missing homework is.      

Assignment Section

In terms of classroom setup, what is a thoughtful classroom setup and structure? Definitely, it needs to meet students’ needs and to provide a social and emotionally safe classroom. It is important for students to learn from differences and explore themselves with a personal or social identity. With supporting collaboration, fostering dialogue and shared inquiry learning circumstances, students have opportunities to talk, accept and know from varied experience. The arrangement of seating plays a significant role to support students exploring with different cultures. I design a T shape format seating plan for three to four students to sit together, which is convenient for them to develop inter-group awareness and understanding while they discuss. In this way, they can respect or accept multiple perspectives from different cultures or different languages that helps connect to the world.

The concept of people being gender-neutral in China is almost unheard of. Just recently, Taiwan became the first Asian country to legally recognize same sex marriage. Asia is not as progressive as the west. China has some deeply held cultural beliefs in the value of boys, while girls have none. This is because women, once married, are expected to take care of their in-laws, while their own parents have to take care of themselves. In a way, having a boy is a guaranteed pension, while having a girl means having a painful and humiliating old age. So, people who know they are going to have a girl get an abortion, and this has led to a huge gap between genders in China's current population. It's getting better now that China has stopped the 1 child policy, but because of these huge cultural differences the idea of someone being non gendered is impossible in modern Chinese society. If anything, there would be pressure for parents to raise their girls as boys, which happens in poor rural families. If I had a student who identified as something other than their physical gender, it would be extremely difficult to prevent bullying. Nevertheless I would try my best to create a safe environment for them, and we would put extra emphasis on accepting and respecting everyone, despite their differences. I would have to create an entire unit about acceptance and do it first before everything else.          

Students Group Seat – T Shape

Except for group seating, I design a playing room section for students too, to show the perspective on working or playing with diversity. Students can share their feelings, build their relationships and solve their conflicts via playing games with others. It establishes their community building skills that is based on real life.

The Playroom Room and Rules

The classroom is like a small community to students; they not only build their awareness, respect and responsibility to the real world, but also learn how to work together, communicate and collaborate. To respect, care and trust each member in the classroom, without a doubt classroom rules and group rules are a priority. All of the students need to collaborate to set up the rules, as well as make agreements with each other. These rules assist them to building a harmonious and peaceful environment, both physically and mentally.

Classroom Rules + 6 Expectations

Group Rules Set By Students Themselves

Students are building their problem solving skills and critical thinking skills to communicate and interact with others in order to build a social and emotionally safe learning environment. In order to have good communication with others, the listening and talking skills are an important key to show your respect and engagement with someone. I put a talking and listening rule chart on the whiteboard to remind students to follow it when they talk to someone. 

Talking Tips Chart

Listening Rules Chart

Volume Traffic Light

The student jobs develop students’ ownership and life skills as well as conflict training. I created varied classroom jobs for students; each student is in charge of one duty in the classroom. The intention is to build students’ responsibility and self-awareness.

Student classroom jobs

However, it isn’t guaranteed that the classroom will be perfect all the time; sometimes students have their conflicts and emotional issues. To help students to understand and respect others, I designed a cool down zone and a behavior reflection chart that intends to help students to reflect on their problems. Through the behavior reflection chart, students can do a self-reflection on understanding what caused them have this behavior, how to solve this problem, and how to avoid this problem again. It shows the respect for cultural difference and equity and fairness to the others.

Cool Down Zone

Behavior Reflection Chart

To English as a second language students, support, clear goal setting, and a meaningful classroom brings a thoughtful, welcoming and safe learning environment. The learning wall design includes multicultural images, classroom English, word walls, learning objectives board, classroom procedures chart and posters which are related to learning materials, they all aid students to develop their learning processes and understanding. In addition, it shows the diversity of society that the world has.

Teaching Tools	Learning Objectives	Classroom Procedure
Classroom / Daily English	Word Wall

I done a lot to create a caring environment for all students. In order to facilitate their learning of other cultures, I have set aside books from many places and many cultures.  My students are all ESL students, so I need to work hard to create a warm, welcoming, and safe learning environment that is inclusive for all.

Reading Corner

Reading Strategy/ Skill Poster

Reading Appreciation

The best way to identify, value, honor, appreciate and reflect on a diverse cultures for students is to display students’ work in the classroom. In this way, students understand and learn from different viewpoints of different things, as well as reflect on themselves by exposing or observing the others’ work. 

Students’ Work Display

In addition to these things, I designed comprehension traffic lights and “What I become today” person characteristic charts for students to do self-awareness checks and reflections on them every day before they leave the classroom. In this way, teachers can know students more, and students can identify and know themselves better. What’s more is this helps teachers to build a closer relationship with students to build a positive learning classroom climate.

Comprehension Traffic Light

What I become Today

In sum, the key to success with students’ learning processes doesn't rely on curriculum design; instead, establishing a positive relationship and a safe and caring learning environment can translate to greater successes. Although my classroom looks like a safe, welcoming and comfortable one, I still have a lot of things I need to learn and reflect on. For example, decorating the poster about anti-bullying or integrating the projects with cross grade or cross class, connecting courses with community or society would also be good.

These are the things that I need to put more effort into in the future. The professional development course provided by online websites or school or government can be good resources for me to reflect on my teaching experience. I can recognize what skills, strategies or technology I need to improve or build upon. In addition, discussion and sharing with teachers, or posting on networks such as Facebook,  Twitter or in my case wechat can help me to learn more points of view from different people’s opinions. I hope during the next school year, I can make my classroom better.