Lizzy Dutton, Trellis Scholar:

I didn’t start off always with an idea of what the classroom community would explicitly look like, but more get to know my students as people and figure out the things that worked with them as a group of students.

Jessica Chan, Trellis Scholar:

So I developed distinct classroom, community and culture starting from the first week. So for me, community is really important in getting students to connect with each other and connecting with me. So my first week of school is all community building and no content. During that first week, I also set up norms with students so that they know their expectations, they know how they should act in a classroom. Then also I give out an “All About Me” to learn more about themselves. Then I have a birthday calendar.

Every unit, I do group changes so that they meet new people. With these group changes, there’s new get-to-know-me questions and new icebreakers so that they could get more comfortable working with each other because I do have group projects in the class. Then lastly, I emphasized that making mistakes is totally okay, especially in a science classroom, health, or biology. I want them to feel comfortable enough to ask questions, and I accept half-baked thoughts. They don’t have to have a full, complete response, but to share what they’re thinking is good enough for me and the class.

Neal Donahoe, Trellis Mentor:

So when coaching my mentee to try to develop a distinct classroom culture and community, some of the things we focused on were how we set norms early in the year and how we make those visible, and to get students to buy into those by letting them create the norms, let them create the posters that we’ll have up so that way from day one, it’s set by them. On top of that, try to really encourage my mentees to do the extras: to go to a kid’s game every few weeks, to see them outside of class, to stay in that lunch, to play cards with kids and give them a safe place, and to participate in our advisory class, where it wasn’t a math curriculum but gave them a chance to know the students in a different way.

Precious Listana, Trellis Scholar:

I developed a distinct classroom, community and culture by having check-ins with my students at every start of the class. Those check-ins would generally be about their interests, whether what they did for the weekend, their favorite movies they’re watching, favorite snacks, and really things centered around them. While teaching computer science, I also made the projects based on allowing them to have their own individuality and creativity. So building websites that showcase their interests and their hobbies and allowing them to also present that so their other classmates and friends can also hear that. So it’s a mix of the check-ins that we would do and infusing the curriculum to allow them to showcase their selves in the concept that we were learning.

Josh Deis, Trellis Mentor:

I was able to work with my mentee in a way to develop a community within her classroom that wasn’t just about answer-making, but also about sense-making in mathematics. She worked with her students with my suggestion that a lot of their work in math is to justify their thinking and to make sense of things, and not just answer-getting. So we created a distinct classroom community and culture that was focused on those things rather than just getting answers, because we like to say that right answers are important. They’re just not sufficient.