Your Classroom

Creating an Environment for Diversity
The physical, mental and social environment in your classroom are also major considerations when building a welcoming place for your students and families. To create an inclusive and successful classroom community, teachers must consider diversity and meet each individual student’s needs. (Pérez, 2009)

The Importance of CLassroom Environment

Creating a classroom environment that promotes learning and community provides students with the atmosphere and tools they need to be successful in the classroom. In addition to creating a general classroom environment, it is important to create an environment specific to promoting literacy development.

When creating a literate environment, teachers must consider the physical and social components that contribute to developing students’ literacy skills. Classroom configurations to differentiate instruction and routines to support organization and management are also important components of a literate environment. All four of these components must integrate curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Learning experiences must be connected and meaningful in order for students to make sense of the content and engage in classroom activities. Developing curriculum, instruction, and assessments that flow together naturally is an extremely important part of creating an environment that promotes literacy development.

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The Social Environment

There are four main components that must be present in the social environment in order to promote literacy development for all students.

 

  1. The environment must be low-risk. Failure is inevitable in the learning process, which can paralyze students and cause them to not make any further progress. However, when students feel safe taking risks and failing, failures are a positive motivator that drives them to keep working toward success.
  2. The social environment must include student choice. Autonomy is important for students in all content areas, but it is especially important in literacy. Students must have the opportunity to explore texts that they find personally interesting if they are going to improve their literacy skills and become life-long readers.
  3. The environment must motivate students. When students are motivated in the classroom, they will engage with the content and take responsibility for their own learning, which results in higher achievement and higher student satisfaction.
  4. The social environment must provide scaffolding for students. Teachers must support students by giving each student the tools that he or she needs to understand the content and reach new levels of achievement.

The Physical Environment

According to McMahon, Wernsman and Rose (2009), research posits that positive school environments lead to positive outcomes among students across grade levels. For elementary students, much of that environment is the classroom, as they spend the majority of their time in one space throughout the day. The physical space you create in your classroom has an impact on the culture and learning of your class and must be thought out and applied with reverence to your students. “For students to learn to their full potential, scientific evidence suggests that the classroom environment must…contain cues signaling that all students are valued learners.” (Cheryan et al., 2014)

Ramirez (2014) states “…modifying the classroom design can be a simple solution with powerful results for students who have difficulty remaining on-task and whose anxiety prevents them from fully engaging in school.” From furniture configurations to text displays to aesthetic decor, all must be taken into consideration when designing optimal learning spaces for all students.

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Consistency in the Environment

In order for a classroom to run smoothly, it is important to establish classroom routines that help students know what is expected of them and what they can expect during the day. Classroom routines can be especially beneficial for ELL students. Classroom routines establish patterns that ELL students can follow over and over rather than trying to learn a new set of procedures each time they complete a task.

When creating an environment that promotes literacy development, it is important to create specific routines related to effective organization and management reading and writing instruction. These routines can be developed in the same way that general classroom routines can be developed, but they must have specific connections to reading and writing instruction. Routines must address time management, transitions, whole class discussions, and peer feedback.

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