Student Social Development and the Importance of Creating a Classroom Community

October 1st, 2008 By: Diane Trim in Articles, Teachers' Corner

I’ve been writing a lot about creating a classroom community and a classroom environment. In my interviews, I’ve learned from experiential learning expert Jen Stanchfield, author of Tips & Tools: The Art of Experiential Group Facilitation, that the time you spend fostering a classroom community actually makes the rest of the learning go faster.

In another interview, Brian Mendler, President of the Teacher Learning Center and author of Tips 4 Teachers, said much the same thing. He said that the ten minutes of class time that a teacher takes every day to connect with the students in a personal manner are ten minutes that she won’t have to spend disciplining students.

Today I ran across an interesting angle on interpersonal connections. In the book Thinking Inside the Block Schedule by Pam Robbins, et. al., the authors cite an article from Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec:

Major studies in corporations show that the number one reason why people lose their jobs is not that “they don’t know and can’t do,” but that they have interpersonal problems in the workplace.

The quote above shows that these interpersonal connections aren’t just important to an efficient and smooth-running classroom management program, but they’re important to success on the job, too. They’re not a school skill, they’re a life skill.

At the end of a teacher training day, a facilitator asked the group I was in to fill out an exit slip. Half of the exit slip was “three things I learned today.” The other half was “three things I learned today that weren’t part of the objectives.”

That’s powerful to me. What do we teach without meaning to teach it? Do we teach trust and cooperation in our class? Do we teach that students aren’t products, but they’re people, each one different, unique, and talented?

When I read the quote about interpersonal communications being a job skill, I was struck by the importance of classroom communities. The climate we set in the classroom might reach

Reference:
Robbins, P., Gregory G., & Herndon, L. (2000). Thinking Inside the Block Schedule. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, p. 74.

Tags: classroom community