Source #1: “Making Classrooms “Safe” for Adolescent Learning” by Glenda Ward Beamon
This source was a great find for my project. It talks about exactly what I am looking for. It first talks about how a classroom needs to be both “physically safe” and “psychologically safe for learning”. After explaining why this is important, the author continues to suggest what makes a positive classroom positive. It states that, in order to allow adolescents to develop socially and emotionally, the classroom needs to be characterized by the following: “relationship-builiding, positive interaction, and trust”. Not only does the source explain that these characteristics are what makes a positive classroom positive, but it also provides ways in which to accomplish this psychologically safe environment. It states, “The current ideas for fostering social and emotional support for adolescent learning can be grouped into several broad areas, including: personalize learning opportunities, build relationships, promote inner management, create emotional security, and teach well.” It continues to explain strategies on how to accomplish these things:
“Instilling positive feelings in students will not result from pep talks or positive self-image assemblies, but from planned educational experiences. Provide students with genuine evidence of personal academic success (competence). Show them that they are members of a community (belonging). Reinforce feelings that they have made a significant contribution (usefulness). Help students feel empowered (potency). Encourage/teach tolerance, empathy, civility, and moral development. Listen to others’ perspectives, present your views with clarity, support ideas with reasoning. Talk through conflict, reflect on learning process.”
Additionally, it also provides activities that can be used to make the class more psychologically safe. For example, the text suggests “perspective-taking, debate, role playing, decision-making, discussion, and civic projects” and allowing the students to “craft a class constitution,” through which the students would create the rules for the classroom and monitor positivity, “allow 20-minute seminars” for students to vent their feelings about issues in or outside of school, and for students to fill out a “teacher evaluation form” through which the student can evaluate how safe the teacher has been able to make them feel and leave suggestions.
Overall I found this sources very useful. Not only does it talk specifically about what my project is about (both the physical and PSYCHOLOGICAL/ EMOTIONAL safety of a classroom environment), but it also offers what characteristics make a classroom safe and positive, and suggests certain activities to use to try and achieve this type of environment. I found Beamon’s activities to be ones that I could use in a future classroom. I agree that students, in order to feel safe, need to feel like they belong and need to be able to trust those in the classroom around them. Also, allowing students to debate their ideas and opinions in a positive and appropriate way allows them to disagree and argue in a way that is not emotionally disturbing. For example, if a student is asked to present something they wrote about a particular topic and a student disagrees, the text provides that the student should listen to the writer’s perspective, present his own views with clarity, and provide support. In this way, while the student is portraying his own opinions, he is not simply tearing the student’s writing a part or insulting the student. He is simply portraying an opposing argument with evidence in an appropriate manner.
I will most definitely be using this source for my project.
Source #2: “Positive Classroom Environments = Positive Academic Results” by LaTerra Wilson-Fleming and Dylina Wilson-Younger, Ph. D. (Alcorn State University)
This source was also very interesting and useful for my I-search paper topic. First it talked about positive classroom environments and why they are important to creating positive academic results. For example, the text states, “A positive classroom environment is essential in keeping behavior problems to a minimum. It also provides the students with an opportunity to think and behave in a positive manner. Positive classroom environments help to enhance, promote, and encourage students’ learning in all academic settings”. The text then continues to provide a definition of a classroom environment as such: “classroom environment can be defined in terms of the students’ and teachers’ shared perceptions in that environment”. I found this to be an interesting way to define this term. It can only be defined by the way it is perceived by all the members in the classroom. Thus, everyone’s perception is important when determining what constitutes as “positive”.
After providing this definition, the text then continues on to say, “there are a number of ways in which teachers can create positive classroom environments. Some suggestions for creating a positive classroom environment includes: starting the year with high expectations, encouraging student involvement, making the classroom visually appealing, getting parents involved, and using effective praise and effective feedback.” What I like about this text is that it doesn’t just simply create a list of suggestions and then leave it to the reader to figure out how to do these things. Instead, what it does is go through each suggestion and explain why and how it could help.
For example, the text says, “It is essential for teachers to start the school year with high expectations in order to guarantee a positive classroom environment. The implementation of positive expectations should occur on the first day of school By doing this, the students will gain sense of ownership and responsibility for their actions. This implementation will encourage them to behave and act appropriately with an academically structured setting. Teachers should adhere to these expectations throughout the school year. Teachers must also strictly adhere to the structured guidelines set forth at the onset of the school year. Failure to do so will undermine the process and students will revert to previous undesirable behaviors.” The text continues on to explain this suggestion more in depth and then moves on the others that were listed. This can be an important piece to my research for my project and also gives me a good idea as to WHY these suggestions can work and why they will make positive environments.
I agree that teachers should always start with having high expectations of their students. While I think that these expectations should not be overbearing and strenuous for the student, I do believe that teachers should never have low expectations for their students. High expectations instills a sense of responsibility and maturity in a student which can lead to a hard-working environment where students can work together efficiently and appropriately.
Overall, this source is very useful for my project.
Source #3: “Keep It Simple, Make It Real: Character Development In Grades 6-12” by Jan Olsson
I actually found this source through the Rhode Island College school librarian we met with during our time in the digital classroom in Adams Library. She offered me this book that had great information about my topic on classroom environments.
First, the text talked about how the school and teachers as a whole can implement a behavior plan to help create a better working environment. There first chapter is broken down into sections through which the book talks about “the key to successful implementation” which is motivation. It even includes percentages.
As it states, “The research conducted by Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports strongly recommends that there must be an 80% buy-in required by staff before moving forward with the implementation of a behavior plan for students. Simply put, for any plan to be successfully implemented, the inner circle of staff supporters must grow to a sufficient size that a large number of teachers become willingly engaged in the execution of the plan. Conversely, the reminder of non supporters must be reduced to a small enough size so that, despite their best efforts to do so, they are unable to sabotage the implementation of the plan.”
The text continues to talk about just what kind of support is needed to start this. While at first I wasn’t sure if this was something that was important to my topic, I continued to read and found what direction the book was headed. The next part of the book is dedicated to “Creating the Assessment Tool” through which teachers can assess behavior. It then goes on about how to record this information and when to collect data. They even provide the reader with a visual graph through which the data can be collected. While this is at great use for an entire school to use, I also feel like a teacher can use these tools and this information in his or her own classroom. A teacher could use these tools to decide what kind of behavior and environment they want to have and then they can use it to monitor their students progress so that the teacher can be aware of when it is safe for students to start sharing their writing. This is just my opinion.
Chapter 2 of the book was the most helpful towards my topic. It was entitled “Safe and Inviting Physical Environment: Physical Environments That Change Behavior”. It first talks about how the environment affects student’s behavior and, in response, their achievement. It states, “A student’s learning environment can be defined by the qualities of three factors: cognititve, emotional, and physical. The majority of the current educational research focuses on the cognitive fact and how creative curriculum interventions can impact student achievement. The emotional environment, which is formed by the teacher-student relationship, focuses on empowerment and its impact on student motivation, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and the resulting achievement. The physical environment includes all the human and nonhuman elements that make up the physical world where learning takes place [the classroom]…The focus here looks at the physical environment and its impact on the development of good character, in particular, student behavior and achievement”.
My project is about creating emotionally AND physically safe environments, and this book goes deep into the detail of both. In my proposal, I talked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in regards to my project. This author does the same thing, which I found very useful in backing up my own statements. It specifically talks about how the student needs to feel physically and psychologically safe in their learning environment in order to produce achievement in learning. It provides diagrams that I could use in my data, and then it continues into a section entitled “Aspects of the Physical Environment that Impact Achievement and Character Development”. In this section it goes into detail about what physical characteristics of a classroom make it positive (the lighting, the temperature control, air quality, etc.) It was very interesting to see just how many things affected the performance of students. I never really thought about the physical component before, and, if I did, I thought of wall encouragements and decorations (which the text also talks about later) more so than the actual climate of the room, but, as I think about it, I agree with the text. I always felt most relaxed in a room with a comfortable climate. Anytime I was cold or the lights were too bright or too dim I couldn’t concentrate as easily on my work because I was distracted by uncomfortable physical elements. I will have to remember this as a future teacher.
The book then talks about why and how physical environment should be and can be controlled. It continues into how a physical environment can improve achievement and how it can affect the way that teachers teach (which is an aspect I also never really thought of before) and how the way it affects the teaching, in turn, affects the students. It continues into the kinds of impact that may occur (achievement, engagement, affect, attendance, and well-being) and provides a diagram to organize all of it which I found to be something that I should also hold on to for the future. Most importantly, it is then broken down into sections entitled, “Aspects of the Physical Environment Affecting Health”, “Aspects of the Physical Environment Affecting Safety”, “Aspects of the Physical Environment Affecting Physiological Needs”, and “Aspects of the Physical Environment Affecting Morale” which all provide information about how and why the environment, once again, affects the students in both positive and negative ways. The book provides rubrics to follow to make sure that your classroom is safe and allows the teacher to evaluate themselves (once again something every teacher should have in their classrooms).
There are many other uses of this book that I found to be one of the most important in my research, but I have already written too much about it as it is. Regardless, this was probably the best source I found (but what else should one expect when receiving help from the awesome expertise of a RIC librarian).
Source #4: “Positive Classroom Motivational Environments: Convergence between Mastery Goal Structure and Classroom Social Climate” by Helen Patrick, Avi Kaplan, and Allison M. Ryan (Journal of Educational Psychology)
This source was a little different from the others (in a good way). It had an entire section about “Classroom Climate RESEARCH” which provides information about classroom environments that have been collected through instruments including “Learning Environment Inventory, Classroom Environment Scales, My Class Inventories, Classroom Life Instruments, Individualized Classroom Environment Questionnaires, Consructivist Learning Environment Surveys, Inventory of Classroom Environments, Questionnaires on Teacher Interaction, and ‘What is Happing In This Class?’” The “big guys” here to remember are B. J. Fraser who conducts many of these researches and two of the authors of this source (Patrick and Ryan) who are well known for the study of classroom environments.
These tools were used by these researchers to measure 4 things: 1.) “to describe naturalistic classrooms quantitatively at various grade levels or in different subjects”, 2.) “to compare students’ perceptions of their current and ideal classrooms”, 3.) “to compare classrooms that differ in some way to evaluate effectiveness of different types of interventions and to compare perceived classroom climate by gender and across nations”, and 4.) “to investigate associations between classroom dimensions and students’ outcomes, including motivation, engagement, and achievement.” I really found this explanation to be important in deciding whether or not this research was going to be useful. Though some research seems to be helpful to a specific topic one is working on, it must first be decided whether or not the research is measuring what one’s topic is specifically about. In this case I believe it is.
I think the legitimacy of this information is what will be useful in my project. While I do have other sources that talk about the topic, this source provides me with the clinical research that accompanies its arguments about positive classroom environments (which is always something that should be part of one’s research).
The source found that what was most important to the classroom environment were these three things: teacher support, mutual respect, and student interaction. It found that these dimensions were “associated similarly with student motivation, engagement, and achievement”.
They then conducted experiments in classrooms to try and prove that integrating the text’s idea of a “goal theory” with “classroom climates areas of research has the potential to lead to new developments in understanding the nature of mastery-focused classrooms and the specific types of teacher practices perceived by student as emphasizing a mastery focus” (positive learning environment aimed at extracting the best work). They conducted 3 experiments and found out that their prediction was right. “Mastry goal structure construct could provide a good, parsimonious, and efficient alternative to administering numerous measures of classroom social climate in order to assess the multidimensional nature of the classroom.”
Overall, this source is useful to my project due to its research provided by experts.
