Troublemakers Blog Post: Values in the Classroom

Most students know what to do to be considered ‘good’ in a class. Based on your hopes for your classroom decor, rules, procedures, and instructional practices, what do you think students will assume you thought was ‘good’? Do you want to continue to communicate those values? Why or why not? What else would you communicate?

I think that based on the way I imagine my classroom looking and sounding, it is my hope that my students will consider being vocal about their own thoughts to be 'good' in my class. Given that I will be a history teacher, I would like to run a class largely based on discussion and collaboration rather than the lecturing that usually occurs, and I hope that this will encourage students to be themselves and to be vocal by being given daily opportunities to speak their mind about the content we are learning. I absolutely would like to continue communicating this value, because I think that students who are able to speak their mind would be much more comfortable in my class than in one in which they have difficulty being heard, and therefore making the class much more productive and thought provoking overall. I think that a potential problem with this could be that one or several voices may drown out ones that are much more quiet, so I will have to put some infrastructure in place to remedy this.

I think that another value that I would like to communicate would be that the opinions of my students mattered. To me, this value seems harder to convey, especially given that I plan to teach in a high school class. I think that the best way to get this across would be to have some sort of system of negotiated curriculum in place, giving students choice about how we learn in my class. Additionally, I could simply take time to ask for input from my students about anything that arises, for instance asking for feedback from the students on the structure of an upcoming quiz and modifying it accordingly.  

I believe that encouraging these two values would transcend beyond the content we are learning, teaching them to speak up and to have an opinion about what's going on around them, two skills that are equally if not more important than the content itself.