kdew88
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Provide rich teaching for students ...
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Week 5 of 5
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My Commitment Journal
 kdew88
May 12, 2021, 1:24 PM
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The Engagement Mindset One major impact of poverty on the academic mindsets of students is stress. Children of poverty are exposed to more stressors that are more intense and last longer with much fewer coping skills. Decreasing stress can have a powerful impact on all student’s learning. There are three levels of stress responses that people typically experience during stressful situations. Positive stress responses are associated with a brief increase in heart rate and stress hormones. This type of stress response can be healthy and used to help motivate as they are short term and typically due to short term situations. Tolerable stress responses are serious, but temporary stress responses that can be buffered and alleviated through strong supportive relationships. This is why building strong relationships with our students is so vital to their learning and understanding. Finally toxic stress responses are prolonged stress responses in the absence of protective relationships. Students who experience toxic stress are in a constant state of fight or flight, and can have detrimental impacts on a child’s learning. I employ strategies such as physical activity, breathing exercises, and Mindfulness Based Stress Responses to help my students learn more coping strategies and handle the negative impacts of stress in a more appropriate way. If a child is displaying signs of stress or anxiety, I like to tell them to “take a lap” around the hallway to clear their head. Physical activity can be a particularly effective strategy to alleviate the stress responses in our students. I have had particular success with this with students who have ADHD or other learning difficulties. I like to use breathing exercises during assessments, because I explain to the students it will physiologically trick your brain to calm down. I teach them how to breathe in through their mouth using their diaphragms rather than through their noses to help alleviate stress responses. I explain to the students that often when we are stressed, we literally cannot get enough blood to the part of our brain that allows us to think clearly so we have to use strategies and coping skills to de-escalate this response. This helps separate the stress a child may experience outside of school and allows for less instructional time to be lost due to stress responses. If we do not address the stress and distress levels in our students, educators will be negatively impacted in multiple areas of their lives. By arming students with effective coping skills, they can combat stress before it has a negative impact on their education. |
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kdew88
May 12, 2021, 12:59 PM
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Rich Classroom Climate Mindset I define the difference between my classroom culture and climate by how my students express they feel about walking into my classroom. There are many dynamics that can impact my classroom climate from one class to the next such as the personalities in the classroom, the interactions of the students with their peers and myself, and the reactions and actions I have when handling the different behaviors and opinions in my classroom. One way I make my students feel safe in my classroom especially in terms of regulating behavior is through the use of a social contract. On the first day of class, I ask students to add to a graffiti board things they believe would make a perfect classroom. I have three categories, what the teacher does or says, what the students do or say, and what the classroom looks like, that the students can respond to to help guide their thinking. I create a word collage of all of the students’ statements on the graffiti board and display it for the students to see. After displaying this collage, I break students into jigsaw groups of four and assign each group a question. The four questions that will be answered by the students are: How do you want to be treated by me, the teacher; How do you want to be treated by each other; How do you think I, the teacher, want to be treated; and How do we treat each other when there is conflict? After about five to ten minutes, I have students move to their new groups where each member worked one of the four questions. The students collaborate and create a list together of their responses to the four questions. At this point, I write their responses on the board and consolidate their responses once again. These become our classroom norms and rules. I transfer this information to a large poster board and have the entire class sign the contract. This way all of the expectations and rules have been discussed and decided upon by every child in the class. This allows students to take ownership and have more buy-in over the rules rather than me establishing a set of rules without consulting the students at all. Through this procedure, I am able to create norms that make every student feel safe emotionally and physically in my classroom. They are more likely to follow these rules, because they are the ones who established them with very little input from me. We often have the discussion of their age and maturity levels and learning to establish boundaries that address their concerns without infringing on other students’ learning environment. Students also feel more respected by me, when I am willing to discuss and adapt my expectations to meet their needs. While I know teachers are always adapting in the classroom, sometimes taking deliberate steps that allow students to see that is what the teacher is doing can create a mutual respect between students and the teacher. |
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kdew88
May 11, 2021, 6:28 PM
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Implementing the Positivity Mindset There are many times that I feel helpless when trying to positively impact my students of poverty’s learning. It is frustrating as an educator to see a child that is burdened with so much that it distracts them from being able to learn while in the classroom. I often feel conflicted because I understand why school is not the student’s top priority yet know that school is their way out of poverty. The stress that comes along with being a child of poverty can have a physiological impact on one’s brain chemistry making it next to impossible to concentrate and pay attention in class. It is important that educators begin to understand the physiological response one experiences under a fixed state of stress. When we can begin to foster more positivity within the classroom, we can increase hope which can improve our brain’s ability to adapt and learn even in stressful circumstances. One way I try to increase positivity within my classroom is through the decorations I place around the room. I place motivational quotes and sayings throughout my room for students to read while in my classroom. The front of my door says, “Today is a good day to have a good day!” The board that has our agenda and assignments on it has the phrase “You are capable of amazing things!” I also have an area called the fridge, where students can place things they are proud of or grades they are proud of on the wall like one would the fridge at their house. I let the fridge build all year long so students become excited to add to it. Everyday before my students leave the class, I tell them to have a good day, be safe, and make good choices. Finally, I have a mantra I share before every summative assessment that I tell the students, Good luck, I know you all can do well and you are all capable of doing well. I use these things to help increase the hope and confidence of my students. No matter what kind of day they are having, when they come into my classroom, it's filled with bright colors and motivational sayings throughout the room, and it is rare a child enters without a smile on their face. These things are great motivators to increase the positivity in my classroom, but my favorite tool is my take what you need, give what you can board. I created a bulletin board that says the previous phrase. At the beginning of the year, I fill this bulletin board with sticky notes that have all kinds of phrases for all types of situations. I have students who come in daily and pick a note off the board. I leave a stack of sticky notes beside the board, and also allow students to write their own to share with the class. I love students coming up with their own positive phrases or drawings to put on the board for each other. It helps create a community and facilitates the positivity I am trying to promote in my classroom. |
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kdew88
May 11, 2021, 5:34 PM
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Achievement Mindset As an educator, I work hard not to accept that a student is just “not good” at the subject I am teaching. I am always looking for ways to improve my skills and reflect on how I can better assist my students. I teach economics and many students come into my course immediately thinking they are not good at economics. I hear things about not being good at math or history at the beginning of the course. One way that I combat that, is by dismissing it. When a child tells me he or she is not good at history, I tell them great because this isn’t history. When a child expresses difficulty with math, I respond explaining my own difficulties with math and I am still able to teach economics. By doing this, students realize not to assume anything about economics and that I will not accept excuses like this as a reason to not complete work. This is especially true for students who are in poverty. Oftentimes, these students have developed a fixed mindset because they have been allowed to resort to this state. I like to continuously use the word yet each time I hear negative statements such as I can’t do this...yet. Its amazing what power such a small word can have on anybody’s mindset and beliefs regarding their own abilities. Because I use the word yet, I allow students to have multiple attempts with work in my class. One particularly difficult concept is usually supply, demand, and equilibrium, and I explain the process to the students. We are going to keep trying until we get it. Some days I spend an entire class period making students go back and fix the work they turn in until it we are both satisfied with the grade. It always amazes me how even students who are usually disengaged become so determined to be right. A lot of times, I explain the reason we practice the skill over and over is the same reason someone starts doing pushups from their knees and progresses to their toes. The more we practice the skill the easier it becomes and the more permanent it becomes in our minds. As educators we must foster the skills that create a growth mindset for our students. We need to focus on the effort to motivate our students to work harder and learn from mistakes and difficulties they experience as this is a true lifelong skill. This will help our students to achieve and raise their own expectations of their abilities and create lifelong learners in the process. |
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