Creating the Environment for Progress - Part 2

This blog is Part 2 of 4.

You can access the other parts here:

Establishing Norms

We move now to think about the norms of your classroom.

Norms are unwritten rules of behaviour.

They are rules rarely articulated but widely understood.

For example, it is a norm in the supermarket, in the UK, to queue up at the checkout and wait your turn, just as it is a norm to eat with a knife and fork at the dinner table.

These unwritten rules underpin how we behave in social situations.

So, what are the norms in your classroom?

Or, to put it another way, what do you want the norms in your classroom to be?

These questions are important.

If you spend time considering the norms you want to establish, you can direct your energies towards successfully cultivating them.

If you do not do this thinking in advance, you will find the process of creating an excellent environment for progress more difficult.

Let us look at an example to illustrate the point.

Prior to starting our training, we decide that one of the norms we want to establish in our classroom is that people should listen actively to one another.

This means that they will show each other they are listening through their body language, that they will pay attention, make eye contact and ask relevant questions.

With this norm in mind, we can start to do things while we are teaching that will help to establish it.

We might communicate a set of rules to our learners, model active listening for them, praise good examples of the norm being followed, and pick up on behaviour that confounds our expectations.

All of which helps to establish the norm.

And the process is much quicker than if we don’t know what norms we want or why we want them.

Most highly effective teachers have a clear understanding of what norms they expect learners to adhere to in their classrooms.

They then communicate this to their learners and work hard to ensure their expectations become a reality.

This, in turn, helps them to secure excellent outcomes because their classroom comes to function in a way that they have predetermined will be beneficial to all.

Here are five steps you can work through to identify and then establish the norms you want.

Step 1: Overview

First, sit down and think about the general norms of behaviour you want to see in your classroom.

These are the unwritten rules you want learners to follow all or most of the time.

They might include things like treating others respectfully, applying effort in every activity, and not giving up when faced with challenges.

Step 2: Specifics

Next, think about the specific norms you would like to see.

By specific we mean specific to certain situations.

So, for example, how do you want learners to come into the lesson? How do you want them to start the lesson? What do you want them to do when taking part in certain activity types like speaking and listening?

Here we are thinking about how your general norms will play out in specific settings.

Step 3: Communication

Reflect on how you will communicate your norms to your learners.

This is particularly important at the start of your time working with a class.

They will not be familiar with the norms you want and will only come to know these if you convey them.

You might choose to go down a more formal route involving written rules, or you might go for a less formal option focussing on modelling and verbal explanation.

The second part of this step happens in the lesson, when you put into practice the communication strategies you have decided on in advance.

Step 4: Praise

An excellent tool through which to establish and maintain the norms you want is praise.

Praising the behaviour of learners who follow your norms sets up a positive role model other learners can copy.

It draws attention to the behaviour you want and reinforces this by conditioning learners to associate good things (praise) with the carrying out of the desired norms.

Step Five: Sanctions

The flipside of praise.

If learners break the norms you are seeking to establish, sanctions need to be applied.

Otherwise, a sense can develop that there is no consequence to behaving in a way counter to that which you desire.

Sanctions include the withholding of praise, admonishment of behaviour and non-verbal gestures like frowns and head shaking.

They can escalate to things like detentions if the situation warrants it.

Always start low. This gives you somewhere to go.

You may be surprised how much effective behaviour management can be done simply through looks and non-verbal cues.

Those are often sanction enough.

Concluding this section, we can say that creating the environment for progress rests in part on the establishment of norms, at your behest, that allow progress not only to take place, but to be maximised.

To do this effectively you should consider what norms you want to see in your lessons and then communicate this information to your learners.

Finally, you should consistently use praise and sanctions (favouring the former over the latter) to ensure your norms are maintained throughout the course of your teaching.

The Values of Your Classroom

Values are the beliefs that underpin our actions.

They are the things we think are important.

Most norms are informed by the values we hold.

For example, the norm of greeting people when we first see them stems, in part, from the fact that we value politeness, friendship and respect.

As with the norms of your classroom, the values are set by you.

If you do not set them, or if you do so in a perfunctory way, you are less likely to be successful than if you sit down and define what it is you want to underpin the lessons you teach, and the learning your learners do.

To some extent, the values of your classroom will depend on the age-group and/or subject you teach.

This reflects the fact that certain things are privileged in certain subjects and in relation to certain stages of children’s and young people’s development.

The first step towards defining your values is to think about why you chose to train as a teacher in the first place and what you want from the profession.

Many people join because they see the job as inherently rewarding, with this reward coming from the simple fact that your working life involves helping and supporting others.

Once you start down this road of reflection you will quickly come to the central values animating the choices you have made.

These can then form the basis of the values you want to see echoed in your classroom.

The next step is to add to these any values you think it important learners learn and gain experience of.

Here we are thinking about our wider role as teachers.

That is, to socialise children and young people into good ways of acting and thinking.

This reflects the moral dimension of learning that forms part of the hidden curriculum (that which is taught but which is not prescribed by the formal curriculum).

Finally, we need to think about the values that, when enacted, will help us to create an environment in which learning is central and in which, therefore, progress is maximised.

It may be the case that the three sets of values you define overlap.

You will probably be able to shrink them down to a core set which, taken together, reflect your own beliefs about teaching, the things it is important for learners to learn as they grow older, and the things that contribute to good learning and good outcomes.

Having been through this process, you will have a selection of values you can use to inform every decision you make as a professional.

This is particularly useful when you have a tricky decision in which the path forward is not clear.

You can identify a path by looking at your choices through the lens of your values.

This will help you make a judgement that fits with your core beliefs.

Another benefit of defining your values is that you then have something to which you can refer in times of trouble.

If a lesson goes wrong, if you feel weighed down by your work, if you just can’t quite seem to achieve a target …

In all these cases, by going back to the values you earlier defined you will be able to reset yourself, remind yourself why you are doing the training and, through this process, help yourself to be successful.

Having a clear set of values in place makes dealing with difficulties a simpler task.

And that means it is easier to create and maintain an environment that facilitates progress.