Professional Practice Standard 5: Learning Environment
The purpose of Virginia’s Learning Environment Standard is to foster respect of and for students, as well as a mutual sense of responsibility for maintaining a safe, respectful, and productive atmosphere. When fully realized, the goal of a proper learning environment is that teachers are able to successfully implement and document effective, evidence-based behavior management and classroom organization techniques. The objective of this standard implicitly holds teachers accountable for demonstrating such practices that lead to consistent student progress.
An effective classroom learning environment can be created by implementing the following methods:
Maximize Instructional Time:
When instructional time is maximized and disruptions minimized, students are on task and learning for the greatest amount of time possible. To create such a situation, teachers must be proactive by creating a positively-focused, specific behavior management plan. Consistent enforcement of a behavior management plan creates procedures and routines for students to follow so that no time is lost to clumsy transitions, downtime, or general confusion over directions. Additionally, the plan simultaneously functions to minimize distractions by setting up, from the start, rules and expectations for students to follow, as well as positive and negative consequences directly linked with these rules and expectations.
Respect for Diversity:
Here, teachers view students as individual people rather than as a collective group that must assimilate into uniformity. Respect for diversity hits on the principles of equitable education: the idea that all students deserve access to education that equally addresses their unique needs, rather than addressing all students equally, which may not meet their different needs. In this way, students can contribute and connect diverse experiences to learning and thereby provide new perspectives that will benefit all students. For this last idea, in particular, I heavily emphasize annotation when reading anything in my class so that students can connect their unique experiences to the text and then have the opportunity to share those with peers.
Here is a list of poems that students use for a poetry project in 9th grade, which represent authors from varying time periods, races, genders, religions, and backgrounds. In addition, here is a survey I ask students to fill out on the first day of school so that I can learn more about them as people.
Different-Sized Groups:
Different groupings include: working individually, in pairs, in small groups, and as a whole class group. The reasoning behind this specific mixture of instructional groupings is that it allows students to build different types of skills, and differentiates by and honors students’ learning profiles, all the while moving the entire class towards a common goal. Varying student groupings guarantees learning simultaneously on micro and macro levels. Beyond student outcomes, these different groupings allow the teacher to view students under different circumstances so that s/he can conduct ongoing and varied assessments of each student’s progress.
Please click here for a 9th grade Pre-AP English lesson plan I designed that utilizes independent, pair, small group, and whole group instruction. The lesson plan focuses on defining ‘a text’ and then formulating this definition into one body paragraph of an expository essay.
Thesis:
Please click here to access my paper on this professional practice standard as part of my thesis for my MAT degree from Hollins University.