Leading Your Classroom Community on Love

Here’s the truth about me:  I run a classroom on love.

Here’s another truth about me:  I am a terrible teacher.

No really, I am.  If you were to walk into my classroom at any given moment, I cannot promise that you won’t see students up walking around, talking to their neighbors, making jokes, laughing, and sometimes yelling (hey, passion is loud).  The floor is probably messy, there are papers hanging out of desks, books are scattered all over the carpet, and there are half-finished posters hanging on the wall.  If you were to pass by us in the hallways, you may see students smiling at each other, laughing, and, I promise, we are not standing in a straight line facing in one direction.  There are probably shirts untucked, belts missing, and a couple of my students may be wearing a jacket with a logo on it.

It drives people crazy.  I know it does.

What Other People Think about a Classroom Community of Love

I see the looks of disapproval in the hallway and the stress on their faces when they walk into my room.  I see that uncomfortable look on their faces and for a second, my stomach drops.  I get nervous that I am not doing something correctly.  I quickly think about the student who’s crawling across the floor looking for the pencil and I snap at them to get to their seat immediately.

“We have to look presentable when others walk in.”

It’s what I immediately think.  I apologize to whoever walks in and tell them they walked in during a transition and that it doesn’t always look this crazy, but deep down, I know the truth.

My students know the truth too.  The visitors probably know the truth too and I am naively assuming they think I “have it all together.”

I don’t have it all together.  But my students and I, we’ve got it all, together.

That’s cheesy.  I realize that.   But I wholeheartedly mean that.

What My Students Think about a Classroom Community of Love

I came back to school on a Friday after being out for a conference.  In my mailbox, there was a stack of letters from my students that they had written for me for Teacher Appreciation week.  They said things like:

“I like my teacher because she’s fun.”

“My favorite thing about my teacher is she is always herself.”

“My teacher’s superpower would be creativity.”

“My favorite thing about my teacher is she always makes boring stuff to halfway decent stuff.”

“She gives you chances.”

‘My favorite thing about my teacher is that she’s funny.”

“My teacher’s superpower would be nerd power.”

“My favorite thing about my teacher is she lets us get on the Chromebook almost every day.”

“One thing I want my teacher to know is that I love her.”

I know some of you reading this are thinking:  What is wrong with her? They never do any work.  They spend all day having fun, playing on the computer, and folding paper planes.

Actually, no. Not really.  We do work.  We do a lot of work.  We do a lot of hard work.  But my students don’t think of that when they’re asked to reflect on their relationship with their teacher.  They don’t think of their relationship with me tied to work or learning.  Why is that?  Is it that they haven’t learned anything all year?  Is it because they aren’t working daily on improving who they are as readers, writers, mathematicians, and critical thinkers?

No… it’s because while they’re working on all of those “school” things, they are also working on becoming better friends, sons, daughters, brothers, and sisters.  They are working on becoming kind, compassionate, creative, strong-willed, independent, self-reliant, and loving human beings.

They won’t remember that six-page reading assignment aligned to the Common Core standards that took them an hour to do in 10, 20, or 30 years.  But when they look back on their time with me, they will remember…

• times during recess that they busted out laughing with their friends;
• the puzzles and projects they worked on together;
• the jokes that their teacher made to lighten the mood and wake them up in the morning; and
• the fact that their teacher loved them.

Proof that I am, in fact, a mess.

What I Think about a Classroom Community of Love

I’m going off on a tangent here, so let me get back to my point.  My point is that I am a terrible teacher.   Let be super clear with you here:  I am a terrible teacher in the sense that I can’t always get my students to stand in a straight line and I haven’t figured out the best way to remind them to put their names on their papers.  I don’t always remember where I laid down the papers I was about to hand out five seconds ago.  I trip over my words, I make mistakes when teaching math, I sometimes let my students work on busy work while I sit at my desk for a few minutes and take a breather.

However, those moments are rare because I hate pushing students to be compliant for the sake of being compliant.  So, to outsiders, it might look like my class is out of control and all over the place.  In fact, in talking to a parent the other day, my principal referred to my classroom management style as laissez-faire and I took it as a compliment (and I think that’s the way he meant it) until I looked up the actual definition.

LAISSEZ FAIRE:  a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering

In truth, if my classroom was run in a true laissez-faire manner, it would look the scene from Lord of the Flies where there is a pig’s head on a stake and blood all over the place.  The real truth is that my classroom environment is not the result of accidental neglect, but rather months and months of intentionality.

The Intention Behind a Classroom Community of Love

You see, every year, while I’m building classroom routines and expectations, signing classroom constitutions, and trying to review with my students how to subtract with regrouping, I’m also working on several little things that I didn’t even realize were a part of my classroom management plan until, well, this week, when I felt like someone brought them into question.  These things, I’ve realized recently, are what keep my classroom functioning through the chaos.  Even though we have a classroom set of rules designed by students that focus on responsibility, respect, and safety, I have two additional unspoken rules for myself that guide me through the year.

Love them first and always.

and

Make things fun.

Love Them First and Always

My first unspoken rule is to love them first and always.  On the first day of school, as my students are leaving the classroom, I tell them, individually: “I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow!”  Most of them are taken aback at first because they’ve never heard a teacher say I love you to their face.  And, truth be told, it feels a little forced on that first day for me too.  But it sets the tone.  It tells them that I love them, unconditionally, JUST BECAUSE they are in my class.  I love them, even though I don’t really know them, and that they don’t have to earn my love, they already have it.

Then, I say it every day after that and I show them that I love them through my actions by caring about their problems, working with them to find solutions, treating them with respect, and listening to them.  It sounds woo-woo, but it works.  When students realize that you love them, even when they act unpleasant, even when they forget their homework, even when they make a mistake, a strange and wonderful thing happens:  they develop a love for you too.

A lot of teachers will say that their classroom runs on respect, but I caution you to consider that respect will only get you so far.  You may respect your boss, but you’re not going over a bridge with them.  People will literally do anything for someone they love.  (Disclaimer:  I AM NOT ASKING MY STUDENTS GO OVER A BRIDGE WITH ME.) Those tough kids, they need your love most of all, and once they understand that you’re not going to take it away because you’re not “feeling it” today, they will work for you.  I promise.  I’ve seen it over and over and over again.

Make Things Fun

My second unspoken rule is to make things fun.  I literally cannot stand even the most mundane tasks (must be the Aries in me), but it is so much harder watching someone else do mundane tasks just for the sake of doing them.  Every day, I try to add a little something-something to the classroom to make it more fun.

Sometimes, it’s playing a game as part of a lesson or working with partners or sitting wherever they want for a half hour.  Sometimes, it’s cracking a joke in the middle of class or busting out a dance break.  Sometimes, it’s a fully-designed flipped lesson on the Chromebooks, which they love and takes most of the work off of me.  Whatever it is, I try to make sure that there is something joyful in every day so that they can remember that fun thing they did today with Mrs. Woods, even if it has nothing to do with the actual work they did.

I am a terrible teacher, in that my room is always a little messy and I may not return graded papers in a timely manner.  But, I am also a good teacher.  I love my students and we have fun together, all while working and learning and growing and being better versions of ourselves.  My classroom isn’t run in a laissez-faire manner, it’s run on LOVE and JOY and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reader, as you’re reflecting on your own classroom management style and your interactions with your students, I challenge you to think about unspoken rules that you have in your classroom.  Are there underlying themes that help your classroom run?  What would they be?  Please share them in the comments below – I look forward to reading all about them!

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Why You Should Read For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood and How It Will Make You A Better Teacher

I just finished reading For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too by Christopher Emdin.  And… wow.  While I have about 12 blog post ideas just from reading it, I knew that I wanted to start by doing a recap of the book itself.  Mostly because the information inside of it is too good not to share and because I. Couldn’t. Put. It. Down. You know it’s good when you can’t stop reading or thinking about it. 

Before you get too far into this, I must warn you that this post is severely long.  I tried cutting it down, but I didn’t want to leave out any important information!  Okay, anyway, with that being said…

Let’s start with how I came across the book. My district (Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky) hosted a Deeper Learning Symposium at the beginning of June. Christopher Emdin, author of For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too, was the keynote speaker on the last day of the symposium.  He was phenomenal to watch in person and his insights and perspectives about our students in urban settings blew me away. As a white, female teacher, the differences between some of my students and myself are too large to go unnoticed and yet, they’re usually not acknowledged. At one point in his keynote, I remember feeling very uncomfortable, like I was a fraud. But I knew that the growing happens in the discomfort, so like any good lifelong learner, I ordered his book from Amazon and set out on one of the best reading adventures I’ve ever been on.

When I say that it is chocked full of good information, I’m not lying to you.  It is a terrible study habit to highlight most of the words in a book, but I couldn’t stop because almost every line was one that I wanted to remember!  As a middle class white teacher in an urban area with many students who don’t look like me, I wanted to take in as much as I could so that I could be the best teacher I can for my students.  I almost don’t know where to begin this post.

Emdin’s basic premise is that of Reality Pedagogy.  Reality pedagogy is teaching and learning that meets each student on, what Emdin calls, his or her own cultural and emotional turf.  That means that you take the time to recognize each of your students’ realities and use that to inspire your teaching.  At first glance, reality pedagogy is very similar to the popular phrase “culturally responsive teaching.”  And, in many ways, it is.  There are pieces of culturally responsive teaching that overlap with reality pedagogy, such as learning within the context of one’s life and student centered instruction.

But let’s be clear here, reality pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching is NOT as simple as pulling a book with a character who looks like the student.  This is often more offensive to a student’s reality than avoiding it altogether.  Reality pedagogy goes much deeper and is much more effective.  According to Emdin, reality pedagogy is not about seeing students equal to their cultural identity, but instead individuals who are influenced by their cultural identity.  That means, for teachers, while we determine what needs to be taught (the content), our students help determine how that information is taught.  We are no longer planning lessons around the content to be taught, but rather around our students who need to learn the content.

When teaching doesn’t connect to students, it is perceived as not belonging to them.

Within his book, Emdin goes through many strategies that we can apply to our teaching in urban areas that would be more effective.  I will go into all of these deeper in later blog posts (after I do MUCH more research and implementation!) but I want to give you an outline of some of the strategies that he proposes.  Let me know if you’ve used any of these strategies in your own teaching.

Pentacostal Pedagogy – Preachers in southern Black churches are probably the best teachers around because they know how to engage an entire room full of people simultaneously.  Some of the best teachers around don’t have educational degrees, but they know how to create magic.  Watch Emdin talk about how teachers can create that magic in his TED Talk:

Cogenerative Dialogues – Invite students to be part of a “special task force” or cogen whose main job is to identify problems in the classroom and co-create solutions.  In the book, Emdin talks about how one of his cogen groups identified his yelling as a problem in the classroom.  He took it rough (as we all would) but they worked together to come up with a solution which involved a nonverbal cue from his cogen group.  Cogens should be created using a cross section of the classroom population:  a highly performing student, a low performing student, a highly engaged student, and a disengaged student.  While you’re not specifically looking for cultural differences, you’ll find these probably play a part.

Co-teaching – The next step of the cogen mentioned above is inviting students to teach a class.  Emdin states that “they [students] love the teaching and learning process when they are a part of it.”  By having students teach the content and experiencing what it’s like to engage in the lesson planning and delivery process, they gain a better understanding of the teaching process as a whole.  It is important for you to encourage the students to plan for the best way they believe to teach the content to their urban youth community, not the way that they would expect the teacher to plan the lesson.  The goal is to learn from the students and how they interact with each other.

Create a Cosmopolitan Classroom –  The cosmopolitan classroom is one where the students are emotionally connected and invested.  The class turns into a family and each person fills a specific, special role to keep the family functioning.  Class jobs go a long way in the cosmopolitan classroom.  Cosmopolitan classrooms create their own social norms and language that is respected by each member of the group.  These might include a catch phrase such as “I will not lose” or a co-created handshake.

Teach Within the Context of Your Students – Emdin makes an interesting observation in his book by acknowledging that his students are often more tied to neighborhood networks than they are tied to ancestral origins.  So, in order to teach within each of your students’ personal contexts, you need to get out and be a part of them.  Emdin spent his evenings on the basketball courts with his students and his weekends at cookouts and church events with their families.  He observed how they interacted with each other and how they learned from each other and he brought that back into his classroom.  

Create Friendly Competition – A large part of urban youth culture is the battle.  It’s not about violence, but about being mentally, physically, and spiritually ready to be challenged.  Just as rappers prepare for a rap battle, students can prepare for classroom battles where their knowledge of content is put to the test.  The beauty of the battle is that even students who struggle with content and may perform poorly on standard academic tests have the opportunity to shine in a different environment.

Keep it “Clean” – To be blunt:  fashion, art, and aesthetics matter.  Emdin says, “engaging with an audience who values aesthetics requires attention to one’s attire.”  Urban youth display their personalities through their dress and they should be allowed to express their style without being punished for it.  A good guideline to follow is if what a student wears or chooses to do impacts teaching, learning, or his/her intelligence, then it should be addressed. Otherwise, self-expression should be welcomed.

Teach Students to Code Switch – This chapter could turn into 2-3 blog posts all on its own, but the basic premise is that students should be taught how to engage in different environments.  How one speaks on the basketball court is likely not the same way they will speak in traditional classroom settings and is far removed from Ivy League college lingo.  While it’s important to meet students where they are and let them be themselves within our classrooms, they also need to know how to navigate the world outside of our classrooms.  Code switching is how students (and people of other cultures in general) do that.

Let Them Be Where They Are (on Social Media) – Social media can be scary for educators, especially when it comes to letting students use it within the educational context of the classroom.  The important thing to remember is that they already do use it to collect artifacts of their realities.  Why shouldn’t we use that to our advantage? Just remember that it is your responsibility to teach them how to use it productively.

I could spend all day talking about this book and still not feel satisfied.  I hope, if nothing else, this post has given you something to think about in regards to your own teaching in an urban classroom or ways that you can push yourself to be more culturally competent.  I’ll leave you with one last quote from the book.  It’s probably my favorite, as I highlighted, circled it, underlined it, and placed a star next to it.  Emdin says, 

You cannot teach someone you do not believe in.

Even if you’re struggling with the cultural piece — as all of us middle class, white teachers have — remember that, above all, your students need you to believe in their ability to do it.  For their sake and for yours.

Also, side note, I created a LOT of #booksnaps while reading this book.  I’ll put them all here in case you’re interested.  Another fun way to use social media for teaching!