Suggestions for Building Community

By: Alfie Kohn

“Make the classroom a community where students feel valued and respected, where care and trust have taken the place of restrictions and threats …”

“Children need classroom community – created by themselves and guided by an adult.”

Relationship with the adults

• Children are more likely to be respectful when important adults in their lives respect them.
• They are more likely to care about others if they know they are cared about
• If their emotional needs are met, they have the luxury of being able to meet other people’s needs – rather than spending their lives preoccupied with themselves.

Connection between students

• Community rests on the knowledge of, and connections among, the individuals who are part of it
• Help students imagine how things appear from another person’s point of view through “perspective taking”
• Exercises designed to promote an understanding of how other people think and feel

Class wide and school wide activities

• While teacher student and student to student relationships are important it is important to have whole class collaboration as well
• Class murals, collages, quilts, songs, or community service projects are good suggestions
• Class meetings discussing broad questions
• What makes school awful sometimes
• Try to remember an experience during a previous year when you hated school, what was going on when you were felling that way?
• What can we do to make this year go better than last year?
• School wide events include: advisory groups of multi-age kids, morning meetings in smaller communities, cross-age interactions

Using academic instruction

• Class meetings can be about how to approach unit organization
• Integrate life lessons with class lessons
• Academics can be pursued cooperatively and thus connections form through students working in groups
• Elements of curriculum can be selected with an eye to supporting social and moral growth indirectly (works of literature)

“If we are committed to moving beyond discipline, we need an engaging curriculum and a caring community … But we need something else as well, the chance for students to make meaningful decisions about their schooling.”

10 Tips for Classroom Management

1. It’s hard to work to solve a problem with a student unless the two of you already have a relationship.

2. If a caring relationship with each student is a prerequisite for solving problems or resolving conflicts effectively, it in no the only one. Also required is a certain set of skills.

3. The adult’s role in dealing with an unpleasant situation begins with the need to diagnose what has happened and why.

4. It is even more difficult to consider causes and contexts when that process raises questions about our own practices. We must be willing to look beyond the concrete situation in front of us.

5. When problems happen it is just as critical that we maximize student involvement in deciding how to resolve the conflict.

6. The questions we ask must be open ended, with students encouraged to explore possibilities, reflect on their own motives, disagree, and, in general, construct an authentic solution.

7. We don’t need to ignore what the student has done. Instead, she can be assisted in thinking about ways to make restitution or reparations.

8. It is often useful to arrange to check back later to see how a plan worked, whether the problem got solved, whether additional or entirely new strategies may now be needed.

9. Problem solving requires flexibility.

10. Everything should be done to minimize the punitive impact.