I . Establishing A Respectful Tone
This is one aspect of community building that I do well. The students are hyper aware of the things that I say to them and the way that I address them. Usually, I have a pretty sarcastic sense of humor with adults. I make sure to turn this off when I am with my students. That is one thing that they do not understand and could easily mistake for me being rude to them. I try to model please and thank you a ton like the author of the article does. It may even be rubbing off on the students. I I . Establishing A Bond With And Among Your Students The bond in some of my classes is strong, but in others it is very weak. In my crew class, I have a good bond with the students and the students seem to be getting along well. I even see some hanging out outside of class. We do tons of team building and cooperation activities in this class and I always join in with the students. It's great to get up and moving with them and to show them my fun side at times. Most of my sixth grade classes seem to be getting along pretty well, too. We took the whole first week to play get to know you games and start building community. I also try to get them talking and working with others as much as I can in my language arts classes. At the same time, I have one 7th grade class that seems to be getting worse when it comes to community building. I did all the same things with them at the beginning of the year and did many of the same protocols that my sixth graders did. Yet, they constantly insult each other and put each other down. I am struggling to figure out how to help them get along better and stop being so mean. III. Creating A Community That Values All Students I think a have done a lot of deconstructing my own personal biases throughout this MAE program. Beth's class last fall was almost entirely about that and I fell pretty good about recognizing my own biases. I try to readjust my thoughts and not say things that could bring people down. I have been trying to address all insensitive comments that I hear in my classes, but in that 7th grade class it is really difficult. There are just so many mean things being said that I can't keep up with the students. I have tried to make the whole class aware of this by generalizing and addressing the entire class, too. This usually turns into more disrespectful comments somehow. It works for the sixth graders though! I V . Helping Students Resolve Conflicts I have used restorative conversations to resolve conflicts between students and they usually seem to help students apologize to each other and move on. For example, I had a sub the other day so I could go to a professional development event and an incident occurred between two students. One said something really insensitive when a student mentioned his deceased father. That student responded by breaking some personal property that belonged to the other student. We talked it out and the students were able to recognize that they both did something wrong in this situation. They apologized and things seemed less tense between them afterwards. I would never have heard the whole story if I had not handled this situation like I did. I would have only heard the sub's point of view which made things seem much worse than it actually was. I think it's important to give students the space to solve their own problems and facilitate if necessary to repair harm.
1 Comment
Rhea Gillespie
10/6/2018 11:05:30 am
Something went wrong and Weebly deleted half of what I wrote. I'm just going to move on though because I have too much to do to deal with this right now.
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