From the Director of Strategic Initiatives

Confident Classrooms: How Setting Limits, Being Considerate and Staying In Charge Helps Everyone

This week I bought a new Christmas tree. While the tree itself has nothing to do with my job, it has a lot to do with the season of schooling we are coming into. The DIY gingerbread houses are out in the supermarkets, the Junior School has a Christmas tree in the foyer and Mr Webb is rehearsing for Carols on the Lawn. All these things signal to students that the end of the year is coming, and with it comes a changing of gears and often changes in behaviour. They see Christmas as a signpost saying it is winding up for the year, and if we are going to see uncharacteristic behaviour, it is often in the last few weeks before the Summer break. I also need to point out clearly and explicitly that classrooms are not doing low-end Christmas activities at the moment and we are still 100% invested in strong teaching and learning.

With this in mind, I want to write about Confident Classrooms. These are classrooms where teachers and students have deep respect for one another, with each keenly aware of their role in the culture and learning of the class. Some of the traits seen in Confident Classrooms are:

Teachers are both sensitive and in charge.
Students know their teacher cares about them. They feel secure, known and welcome.
Teachers listen to students and work with them, but students will not always get what they want.
Students are clear of what is expected of them. These expectations are known, realistic and fair.
Teachers and students know their role in the class and in learning.
Students are given autonomy and freedom, with age-appropriate boundaries and support.
Teachers curate spaces and learning that are engaging, exciting and challenging.
Routines, expectations and consequences are fair and predictable.
Teachers, students and families work together. Each of these groups knows their role and supports others to do their role also.
Students are set up for success.
There is a culture of learning and improvement that everyone plays a role in.
Students can trust they can ask for help, admit mistakes, say they don’t understand and be confident they will be helped.
There are high expectations that are clear, and people are supported to meet them.
Teachers are friendly, interested and warm but they are not friends with their students.

Depending on when and where you went to school, you may have been part of the generations where unquestioning obedience was demanded and any variance was met with a strong, or even disproportional response. Teachers controlled their kingdoms through tyranny and a metaphorical iron fist. While I am a millennial, I still remember one of my junior school years with a particular teacher. Chalk dusters were thrown and metre rulers snapped down on desks to gain the silence of the room. This classroom was characterised by power and authority. The teacher was to be feared rather than trusted and public shaming of students was a motivational tool. The tone of that class was not set up for learning because students were living in fear of doing anything wrong. Dropping your pencil could incur wrath disproportional to the action. This was not a Confident Classroom it was a place you served your sentence and waited for the year to be over.

I am sure we all agree that these days should stay behind us, but we also need to be sure that we are not going too far in the opposite direction and over-compensating. The opposite of my Junior school class is a place where the teacher has surrendered to the students and they are skittish about exercising any authority at all. They are afraid they cannot be sensitive and in-charge, which is bad news for everyone.

In classrooms where the teacher is insecure as the leader of the class, students are handed over to the peer culture and implicitly told ‘You run the show. You tell me what to do so you don’t make it hard for me.’ Students call the shots on participation, expectations and consequences. Often this does not happen overnight but through a gradual retraction by the teacher. Students become the leaders who are there to be served by, not taught by the teacher. You see this when students demand time to play games on laptops, or are allowed to hand in sloppy work or damage class property. We see it too with arguing and going back and forth in unhelpful or excessive ways.

Often the teacher knows they are losing control and the students see this too, which leads to two main cultural problems: confusion and frustration. Students are confused as to what to do or what their role is. They are not cognisant enough, nor emotionally aware enough to steer the culture maturely, and nor should they be. Teachers are frustrated and confused because they see this is not how classrooms should be, but don’t know how to bring it back to a point of equilibrium. The teacher’s lack of confidence to deal with challenges healthily throws the whole culture of the class into a tailspin. Teaching and learning stalls and it becomes a survival effort.

So how does one develop a Confident Classroom?

Classrooms are like any other community. They have a diverse range of needs and interests, and members have obligations and responsibilities to one another. Teachers and students have different roles and work together for the common good through contribution and participation. Students need to know they have a role in the tidiness, organisation and culture of the class and that their behaviours are not neutral; the way they speak, act and participate will shape the feeling of the group one way or another. Likewise, the way the teacher leads the class will shape culture too.

In Confident Classrooms teachers are both sensitive and in charge. They are neither the dictator nor the door mat. They set out expectations and stick to them, even when it is unpopular. They are willing to withstand disappointment and push-back in order to deserve praise and gratitude later. An example is learning times-tables. How many of us learned multiplication tables through rote, repetitive methods, returning over and over until they clicked? Learning multiplication tables was unlikely to be the highlight of anyone’s year at school, but as adults we see the value in learning these as they are linked to so much other learning and life. To help students push through with learning they would rather not do is a key function of a teacher. They should make it as engaging and creative as possible, and encourage the students, and even acknowledge the grind, but in the end it is the teacher’s responsibility to curate learning that sticks for students.

As we move towards the end of the year I am sure that our teachers will be confident in the classrooms and set a culture that students want to be a part of. In the meantime we will keep learning multiplication tables, even amongst the Christmas trees.

Christopher Sanders

Director of Strategic Initiatives