1. Meeting students’ needs

To create a positive learning environment; teachers must strive to meet the students’ needs. This may seem hard to achieve with large class rosters, state-mandated curricula, family-related problems, and other factors.

Yet, it’s necessary to navigate those obstacles so that we can understand and address the specific needs of our students. We don’t have to ignore them, thinking that we already know a lot about our students or because we barely have time to teach the curriculum.

The more we explore their basic needs the more we know about each student and determine what makes him/her motivated and engaged in learning.

To help you meet students’ affective/motivational needs here are some tips:

# Create a supportive learning environment

Learning can feel scary when making mistakes or admitting not knowing or understanding something in class. Therefore, one of the basic needs of students is to feel emotionally safe enough to take risks for learning. This is so important because meaningful learning requires risk-taking.

So, as teachers, we must create an emotionally safe environment where our students are encouraged to make mistakes and learn. We can’t learn unless we make mistakes and our failure is the starting point of success. This is what we need to instil in our students.

We also need to admit that we teachers don’t know it all, though most students think we should. We are learning on the go from our experience, from mistakes, from others including students. By doing so, you’re helping your students recognize the real meaning of learning and motivating them to gain desired knowledge

Besides, not all your students feel confident in their abilities. So even though a task may be interesting and relevant they won’t engage in it if they feel they will fail.

So, we need to think about helping our students develop a sense of confidence so that they get motivated to initiate, make mistakes, and learn. That support is decisive mainly in contexts where grading students is emphasized.

So, to help your students feel more confident provide extra assistance whenever it’s needed. This means devoting some time outside of regular class hours to go over the materials with your students. You can also personalize assignments and/allow them to redo them to achieve mastery.

In addition, check and monitor your students’ learning on an ongoing basis and reach out to them even if they haven’t asked for help. Many students are afraid or feel embarrassed to seek their teacher’s help.

Your feedback can also boost students’ confidence in doing well. So, be sure to provide positive feedback that will make a difference to their learning.

# Connect with your students

For a learning environment to be positive, students need to feel valued, connected, respected, and supported by their teachers and peers.  That sense of belonging is one of the main predictors of their learning motivation and achievement.

Therefore, no matter what their social class is, living conditions, or learning issues they have, students must not be socially isolated from their peers and feel alienation from school life.

So, we as caring professionals should not focus just on the academic or instructional practices but also how we should connect more with our students to make them feel more supported, motivated, and concerned with their learning.

But, teachers’ caring needs to be visible to all students daily.

There are different caring strategies you can integrate into your teaching routines. Here are some examples:

• greeting students friendly at the door;
• calling students by their first names;
• having a brief one-on-one conversation about a student’s life;
• sending or handing encouragement notes to students;
• listening actively to students’ concerns (personal and academic issues) during class meetings and seeking regularly their feedback;
• being intentional about learning more about what students love outside of the school by inviting them to share those things;
• creating better learning experiences for students by tapping into their passions. This is by encouraging them to do the things they love like creating videos, blogging, using Google apps in learning;
• supporting peer-teaching where students don’t learn from the teacher but also from each other;
• Using nontraditional learning activities like role-playing, field trips, school-sponsored extracurricular activities help personal bonding.

 

Also, to foster students’ sense of belonging connection needs to be maintained among students and their peers. So, it’s important to integrate team-building activities where they collaborate, get peer support and develop prosocial skills of sharing and teamwork that transform classrooms into communities.

#Make your teaching more interesting and relevant to students

Students need to enjoy learning and also perceive it as purposeful and rewarding. Though we’re not supposed to turn every task into fun, we need at least to bring something that captures their interest and makes them involved.

When the task triggers their curiosity to find the unknown, it’s unfamiliar, thought-provoking, competitive, or relates to their own lives, students get actively involved in it.

In fact, there are various ways you can bring interest into your classes while targeting the same teaching goals.

The most important ones are being flexible and varying tasks to accommodate learning differences, providing students plenty of choices to make, and opportunities to interact and demonstrate their skill and understanding (But, all these depend on how well you know about your students).

Also, students won’t spend their time and effort learning something unless they see its value or relevance.  So, it’s not enough to explain to our students how relevant the material is, but we need to make its learning more important for them. How?

Find ways to connect the curriculum with the world outside of the classroom. Learning is often more relevant when one can see how knowledge or skill is related to the “real world.” To do so:

• find examples of how people use this topic in the real world;
• involve students in project-based learning; educational field trips that help them explore, solve a real-world topic/issue.
• encourage them to bring examples from the real world that relate to what they are learning in class;
• include hands-on learning activities to create artifacts and conduct experiments;
• use authentic materials such as newspaper articles, magazines, guest speakers, or videos.

 

However, to make your lessons relevant and interesting to your students remember that your humour and personality too, add meaning and vivacity to your lessons. So, the kind of experience you create and the energy you spread can make your students happy and expectant.

2. Using classroom management plan

To create and maintain a positive classroom it’s necessary to manage the behaviour of students. This can be a source of frustration, even stress for teachers.

Therefore, it’s necessary to develop and use a classroom management plan with your students. This plan is a comprehensive set of goals, procedures, and strategies designed to promote appropriate student behaviour and support student learning.

Your classroom management plan needs to include these 2 essential elements:

# Proactive classroom management strategies

We all know that students can easily get distracted and disturbances can occur at any stage of the learning process. So, instead of focusing on how to react to stop those misbehaviours and the kind of consequences to use in case they persist, we should plan to prevent or minimize them.

Those proactive classroom management strategies will help you create a positive learning environment and focus more on teaching and improving students’ learning.

You can learn more about these strategies in this post: Proactive Classroom Management Strategies

# Intervension strategies

This is how you will respond to inappropriate behaviour when your proactive classroom management strategies have not worked well enough. Your classroom management plan should include all the possible responses to inappropriate behaviours (ranging from mild to most severe).

For instance, indicating visually (facial expression) to the students that you have seen the behaviour can stop the behaviour without making the rest of the class aware. Other cases will require more action than that.

It’s true that we all want to teach without disruptions or disturbances. But, we shouldn’t drain our energy reacting to every student misbehaving and ensuring the negative consequences.

So, instead of getting angry and start arguing with disturbing students, we need to create a dialogic culture to discipline where we communicate with them the source of the problem, teach them how to fix it, and improve their behaviours in class.

We should teach our students to be responsible for their behaviours and self-discipline. Research has shown that a self-discipline approach to classroom management has led to significant reductions in a number of discipline problems.

But, how to help students develop self-discipline?

Students need to learn how to self-regulate. This personal reflective experience can help them to realize the limits of unacceptable beliefs and behaviours that have brought them suffering and problems of coping. The more students reflect and self-control the more they get intentional about their actions.

This means you work with your student first to evaluate the misconduct. So, instead of asking about the reasons for misbehaving, you ask: “What are you doing?” “What’s going on?” to make the student aware of the purpose of his behaviour.

Then, encourage him/her to judge his behaviour asking: Is your behaviour in keeping with class rules?” “What’s the rule?”

You should then (working with the student) devise an applicable plan for the student to correct his behaviours. Ask the student to formulate an alternative way of behaving the next time he or she is confronted with a similar situation.

You can suggest alternative behaviours. Monitor student plan and provide feedback to ensure commitment and success.

Don’t accept excuses. If the student refuses to write a plan or continues to misbehave the planned consequences; already negotiated; will be used (these also depend on the kind of support both administrators and parents provide to maintain discipline).

Still, be patient, and allow some time for students to be responsible.

You can also use classroom meetings to discuss classroom problems with your students. That gives students more ownership over their learning and opportunities to be open up and real with you.

This is how you can create a positive learning environment for your students.

If we are to be successful in creating a positive learning environment, we must strive to meet students’ affective/motivational and manage their behaviours well.

These indeed require time, patience and effort from us, but creating that environment is a priority to get our students meaningfully engaged in the learning process. We CAN make it!