How to Create an Irresistible Classroom

Hey, Teachers!

How do you make your classroom IRRESISTIBLE?  You want your classroom to be a place where students are thriving, where anyone visiting can clearly see engagement, enthusiasm, positivity, growth, and your top priority: learning.

How do you define learning?

Learning in this regard involves both the teacher and students.

Learning can be what you absorb from your students that fuels and informs your direction, intent, and accomplishments with them.

And learning is obviously what your students demonstrate in demeanor, connectivity, productivity, and in assessment data and proficiency marks.

Too often, our classroom spaces become predictable, both for us and our students, and by the time they reach senior year, they've "figured out" the K-12 system, how to jump through hoops, and how to "play the game" to get to the finish line, graduation.

That's not really what we want "school" to be. And it's far too common because of what the system largely promotes in pedagogy, instructional design, policymaking, supervision, testing, and expectations.

So, how do we create a classroom that thinks outside of the box? One that students don't want to miss? One that parents support? And administrators want to showcase?  

Following are four "TEACHER MINDSET MUST-HAVES" for becoming more positively influential as an educator. An irresistible classroom begins with your teacher self-image and self-efficacy. And this is true whether you have support on the job or lack support in numerous areas (funding, morale, time, encouragement).

💫Teacher self-image is how you think of yourself as an educator. Your students pick up on this. They can tell if you want to be there. They usually know when you're having a bad day. And they absolutely know if they feel loved or dismissed in your teaching spaces. Teacher self-image involves your personal and professional definitions of teaching and all associated roles and responsibilities.

💫Teacher self-efficacy involves motivational theories of learning. In short, self-efficacy is how confident you are, and how able you feel to complete a task, or learn new procedural knowledge and information, both individually and collectively. Your self-efficacy includes your teacher beliefs and values about teaching, your students, your organization, and your job.

Be intentional and purposeful about creating an irresistible classroom ✨

1. Identify your top beliefs and values as language your students can internalize. This begins when you walk into the classroom or hop onto the online portal to get class ready at the start of the school year. The type of visuals, language, colors, knickknacks, materials, fonts, graphics, and they way you organize your physical space or written communication space all play into how students feel stepping into your classroom.

Additionally, know who YOU are as an educator. What are your core beliefs and values? How will you help your students to magnify these in their own worlds? And with their own words?

Examples:

👉🏼Calling your students scholars, change agents, or another friendly label can encourage and promote higher self-efficacy in class because you're driving that self-efficacy within yourself. You believe in your students and you want them to believe in themselves.

👉🏼Developing ways for students to earn rewards and acknowledgements for excellence in all areas affecting learning (social-emotional, academic, personal, individual, collective) can underscore your goals in supporting kids.

👉🏼Showcasing examples of leadership by exemplifying strong leadership as the teacher (kindness, accommodations, flexibility, investment in human capital), and encouraging students to be leaders can illuminate strengths that drive positive outcomes.

👉🏼Making learning fun (how you communicate expectations, rules, guidelines, consequences, and during instruction) can spark interest and desire to practice skill development; looking at every overarching unit and lesson plan through a creative lens can augment positive learning outcomes.

2. Create a learning environment that is both emotionally safe and academically accessible. This seems like a no-brainer, but it's not. Teachers may feel too depleted or disinterested to really tune into what students need, to observe differences between class climate year to year, or to remain intuitive about individual student hardships. Teachers can easily become desensitized, detached, and dismissive.

And students are likely to share thoughts, challenges, and opinions, and contribute in class if they feel safe.

Our lesson planning must be differentiated enough so that all students can access the materials. Bans and other destructive policymaking that curtail instructional liberties remain challenges in this effort. But the core of our lesson planning, regardless of the content, should be inclusive and caring in approach.

3. Approach teaching and learning with the mindset that all of your students are flowers who are beautiful, strong, and able, but who can also be fragile. Students will remember how they felt in your class, whether it's PreK or dual credit chemistry. They will know if you care. They can read between the lines and will take your words at face value. 

As teachers, we have a choice to be positively or negatively influential.

This includes to what degree we engage in personal bias, presumptions, favoritism, marginalization, discrimination, negligence, rigidity, and exclusion. Classrooms that thrive are none of these things because the teachers in them emphasize what's possible, even within the confines of state/district mandates or lack of funding and adequate resources. 

Our students can sense our apathy too.

When we recognize the opportunity we have with each student, this affects how we address students individually and how we think and feel about the instructional tasks at hand. Our students will remember harsh things we said or did, including sarcasms. They will also remember how we truly gave them every opportunity to succeed, not in principle, but in action. We don't begin a school year aiming to be teacher of the year or the one teacher who made the difference in a student's life, but we just might be that person, and we may never know the impact we had.

4. Infuse enthusiasm, discovery, opportunities for creative and critical thinking, and excitement in lesson planning, activities, centers, share time, labs, and academic projects. You don't have to follow the masses with archaic instructional models by relying upon a "traditional instruction" mindset even if you're in a "20th century factory learning" school structure ranging from operating on a bell schedule to the type of assignments and assessments expected. 

You are and always will be steward of the learning experience. 

Avoid dull projects, mundane discussions, and having a robotic presence in class. Again, this might seem obvious, but teachers who thrive with students don't allow themselves to get bitter, critical, defensive, beaten down, or bored. 

Where can you do something a little different? 

How can your lessons ignite student passion and productivity for learning?

What kind of noise in your classroom do you want to hear?

And what silent behaviors reflect your students' thirst for more knowledge?

An irresistible classroom is an achievement. We don't begin our careers with all the "know-how" on keeping students motivated and engaged. We learn this over time, and often, through trial and error.

The key to being the class students want to be in starts within each of us. 🌱

We have to want to be in that class.

And above all else, an irresistible learning environment contains one underlying ingredient, the most powerful of all: love.