Today, I'm going to write on the topic of classroom management. Today's topic centers on creating fluid, rather than fragmented, learning spaces. If you have classroom management techniques to share, please email me!
Success as an educator comes in the form of the three Rs – Relationship, Relationship, and Relationship. When a teacher truly builds a relationship with her students, she begins to manage her classroom as a series of individual personalities to be reckoned with rather than a set of factors to be controlled. There are, however, strategies that accompany fundamental principles of learning that encourage the development of sound classroom management practices.
Authors Fred Kofman and Peter Senge identify fragmentation in the learning environment as a current practice that is a "frozen pattern of thought to be dissolved." They offer that our enchantment with fragmentation starts in early childhood. Since our first school days, we learn to break the world apart and disconnect ourselves from it. We memorize isolated facts, read static accounts of history, study abstract theories, and acquire ideas unrelated to our life experience and personal aspirations.
Students who struggle in school are more negatively impacted by fragmented learning systems than many of their peers. Often, at-risk students have a high degree of fragmentation in their home and social lives. There has been little consistency of thought in their parenting and in their relationship building. They are often seen as aimless drifters who graft themselves to the fad of the moment, the group with the most radical viewpoints, or to the predictable effects that chemicals will have upon their bodies. For these students, school does not provide the critical "grounding" that is necessary for learning. Often, these students see school as a series of unrelated smoke and mirrors acts. From the primary grades forward, they do not see the "whole" of the educational environment and subsequently do not have a personal buy-in to the eventual attainment of a high school diploma. As they progress through the grades, they become tired of jumping through the hoops of learning and they simply stop doing so.
Providing fluidity for students in an otherwise fragmented academic world is a key factor in managing behavior within a classroom. In a fluid classroom, learners have access to all of the tools needed for learning. Each learner has some small space to call his own. Learners are taught interdependence and caring for one another. The furniture is fluid, too, moving at will and adapting to the needs of the students. The teacher is fluid, being seemingly everywhere at once, able to move freely from student to student and rarely needing to turn his back on anyone. There is a structured balance between chaos and rigidity and an emphasis on blending self-expression and group goals. Students, teachers, and visitors are made to feel as though they are an essential living part of a work in progress.
Having been trained as a special education teacher and as a behaviorist, I didn’t always believe in fluidity. In fact, at times I still struggle, sometimes suppressing and sometimes expressing a desire to put the students’ desks in rows and to harangue them to remove their personal effects from the classroom. When I do decide on rows, it is because I feel us moving more towards chaos. When I sense a paralysis of learning because our environment has become too traditional, we move again into groups. As with any environment, there are students that keep their books and notebooks in neat rows in their lockers and students who slam their locker doors quickly in hope that nothing falls out. Within the classroom, there are students who are annoyed when the bookshelf becomes cluttered and others who don’t even know that there IS a bookshelf behind the clutter. The baskets beneath the desks in my classroom range from spartan space savers to hosts of an array of student projects that quite possibly date back to a child’s kindergarten year.
Fluidity is governed by intuition. It is flavored by language. I have tried to phase out the words "my classroom" from my vocabulary and to replace it with "our classroom". When I return the students to rows, it is because we need the structure and the grounding that sitting in rows provides. When I speak to educators who share my students, I try to say "our students". Being proprietary not only segregates students in the minds of others, it also further fragments those students as learners.
Fluidity is also rooted in a firm belief of unconditional respect. Only when we respect others for who they are can we hope to make them better than where they are. Kofman and Senge affirm that learning organizations must be grounded in three foundations (1) a culture based on transcendent human values of love, wonder, humility, and compassion; and (2) a set of practices for generative conversation and coordinated action; and (3) a capacity to see and work with the flow of life as a system. It is little coincidence, they maintain, that virtually all spiritual disciplines, regardless of culture or religious setting, are practiced in communities. Kofman and Senge are right when they assert that "only with the support, insight, and fellowship of a community can we face the dangers of learning meaningful things." Parker Palmer has long held that we must possess the courage to teach – so, too, we must provide our learners with a safe environment in which to evidence their courage to learn.
