During my practicum experience, I saw how important it was that I establish an inclusive classroom community where all students feel respected and safe. I was able to create a trusting and friendly relationship with each of my students and always ensured I checked in with each of them frequently throughout the day. I was always available to help them during classroom time and often spent time conferencing with individual students about their work. I ensured to treat all students with respect and model how this might look so that the students in turn treated each other with kindness and compassion.
There were some instances of students not feeling like they fit in in the classroom community. I saw how my School Advisor made these students become more integrated in the classroom community and in turn I saw how much happier they became and this also reflected in increased classroom performance and effort. I was amazed how getting one student more involved in classroom activities and interacting more with peers in turn caused this student to be much more motivated in seeing improvements in their writing.
In hopes of creating a comfortable classroom community, I gave the students many opportunities to voice their opinions and made sure to listen and respect what they had to say. I provided many opportunities for students to interact with their peers through classroom discussion with their peers. Sometimes I would have them talk to their neighbours and at other times we would do an activity called “murmel murmel.” In this activity the students would stand up and walk around the classroom while saying “murmel murmel” repeatedly. I would then say “groups of (number)” and the students would then have to quickly get into groups with that number of people and I would give them a question to discuss. We would then continue the activity with different discussion questions and different group sizes. With each of the groupings, I would encourage students to work with different students who had not been in their group the first time. I found that this not only allowed the students to be engaged and share their ideas with their peers, giving them confidence and mutual feelings of respect, but also getting them moving during a lesson helped them to pay more attention and prevented them from getting restless after sitting for too long.
I also provided students many opportunities for them to do group activities. Such activities included math games using manipulatives, reading, and station activities. One of the activities that I thought was particularly successful in getting students to work together cooperatively was a lesson on social studies where we studied continuity and change. As a class we first looked at pictures of Vancouver in the past and the present and students discussed what they noticed had changed and what had stayed the same. I then gave the students a bundle of photographs of Granville Street and had them work together in groups of four to place these photographs in what they thought was the correct chronological order, using clues from what items were presented in the pictures. If they finished early, I also had them discuss with their groups why they think the pictures went in this order and what changes they noticed over time.
At the beginning of many writing lessons, I would read a few students’ work who I thought did a great job at descriptive writing and had some great ideas in hopes of motivating students and allowing them to give their peers positive feedback. The positive validation from their peers proved to motivate the students in writing and had them working hard to write long, descriptive narratives that they hoped to be shared with the class. I made sure to feature different students’ work each week so that all of the students could feel this positive inclusion in the classroom.