I believe classroom community is one of the most important parts of any classroom! Do you agree? Part of building that classroom community with strong relationships is having high expectations. I learned this the hard way my 1st year teaching. I focused so much on curriculum and getting my students to like me. Yes, there is a lot of research behind the importance of students liking their teachers, BUT the mistake I made was that I was worried that if I had to high of expectations, my students wouldn’t like me. Oh was I wrong! Over the past 8 years, I have found that my students STILL like me, and may even like me more now that I hold them to high expectations! Setting up high expectations for your students is one of my favorite topics to talk about and share with other teachers what has worked in my upper elementary classroom.
Check out my 5 biggest tips for creating and maintaining a classroom community with high expectations:
- Create Expectations WITH Your Students Starting on Day 1: A mistake I made early on was that I would create classroom expectations before school started, post them on the wall in my classroom and read them to my students on the first day of school. I then expected them to just follow these expectations. Yeah, you have probably guessed it, but that did not work out as well as I thought it would. Some students did follow them, but many of my students looked at them once and then never looked at them again. About 5 years ago, I decided to change this and make creating expectations part of the first day. I started creating social contracts WITH my students that gave them a voice and say for our classroom expectations. I asked them what they felt was important for our class to be expected to do and what should be part of our class culture. Want to hear more on creating social contracts? Click here to check out this awesome video by Edutopia, “Social Contracts Foster Community in the Classroom”.
- Post Your Classroom Expectations With the Help of Your Students: I know this sounds simple, but I cannot tell you how often I have walked into another classroom and I do not see their classroom expectations posted anywhere. Not only is it important for our students to see these expectations every day, but it is important that anyone who walks in the room can see their classroom expectations (especially helpful for substitute teachers). For many years, I chose where these expectations were posted, but I found that by involving my students in deciding where to post them in our room, helped my students see and reference our expectations more.
- Practice Your Classroom Expectations Throughout the Whole Year: It is so important that we are making sure our students understand each expectation and know what it looks like. One of my favorite ways to do this at the beginning of the school year is by role playing. My students love to when I let them create skits for our expectations during the first week of school. Their favorite skits were always when we did a skit on what it looked like and what it did not look like to follow that expectation. Often, that is all I would do though. A couple years back, I started creating scenarios to go along with our expectations and used them throughout the whole year. Sometimes these scenarios would be a scenario that happened in our class (make sure you don’t use a students name to avoid embarrassing students) and other times it would be a scenario that I could see happening in our class. I would often share the scenario with my class in our morning meeting and ask them how we can use one of our classroom expectations in that scenario. Sometimes, I would even let them act out the scenario. The key here is doing this throughout the whole school year. This helps your classroom expectations become part of your classroom culture.
- Have Accountability for Your Classroom Expectations: One of the main reasons that I post classroom expectations in my classroom is because my students and I reference it every single day. I remind students of expectations they still need to work on and point out expectations that are being followed well. This is a great way to hold your students accountable. A couple years back, I took this accountability a step further and had students start holding one another accountable. We had a lot of class discussions and I did a lot of modeling on what this looked like, but what I found was that I was having to hold students accountable a lot less because they were holding each other accountable. One of my favorite ways to help students hold each other accountable is by creating a class gesture for our expectations. I have my students help create this gesture. For example, one year my students wanted the gesture to be creating a little check mark with their finger as a reminder to a classmate to check themself with our classroom expectations. This is talked about in the video that I shared earlier as well.
- Create a Classroom Community that is Goal Oriented to Help Keep Expectations All Year: We all know that there are those times of the year that our students have a harder time following expectations (right before a break, after a break, when you have had lots of days of indoor recess in a row, etc.). I started having my students during these times create expectations goals. At the beginning of the week (or sometimes every day), my students created a goal that goes along with one of our expectations. They create this goal based on an expectation that is more difficult for them to follow. Then, they share their goal with their classmates (morning meeting, turn and talk, etc). About mid-week, we check in on these goals and students share something they have done to help them towards their goal. Then, we check in again at the end of the week. If a student has reached their goal, they choose a new one the next week. If they have not, they continue working on that goal. I love doing these check-ins during morning meeting or right at the end of the school day.
BONUS IDEA- TOP 3: Top 3 is one of my favorite ways to reinforce expectations and shout-out students who are following expectations. At the end of every day, after students pack up, we come together as a class (about 5-10 minutes) to share the top 3 students who have followed one of our expectations that day. I, the teacher, choose the 1st student for Top 3. I share the name and a specific way I saw a student in our class follow one of our class expectations that day (I often choose a student that may not be picked or needs extra encouragement). Then, I let two other students share someone they saw follow an expectation and specifically how the expectation was followed. This is such a great way to build a classroom community of following high expectations and help students recognize one another too!
Is there a tip here that you want to try with your students this school year? I would love to hear which tip you think will help you the most this year! Please share with me a tip you plan to try in the comments below and feel free to ask any questions you may have too.
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