Classroom Community

Elements of Community Running head: ELEMENTS OF COMMUNITY

The Elements of Community and Long Term Learning

Matthew Kissel

University of California Santa Barbara

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Table of Contents Abstract ..................................................................................................................................................... 2 Framing the Inquiry .................................................................................................................................. 3 Chapter 1 Artifact Analysis..................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 2 Artifact Analysis..................................................................................................................... 32 Chapter 3 Artifact Analysis..................................................................................................................... 59 Concluding Thoughts.............................................................................................................................. 86 References ............................................................................................................................................... 87 Appendix................................................................................................................................................. 88

Abstract The community of the classroom (the list of rituals, routines, attitudes or other elements of the classroom that the population of the classroom agrees is important) has an effect on a student’s ability to learn (evaluated in this work by their long term retention of information) and on a student’s experience of school. In order to help students learn well and as a moral imperative because school attendance is compulsory teachers need to understand how classroom communities are created, what influence (if any) a teacher has on the community, and what kinds of communities there are and how they affect learning. Types of communities and methods of establishing them are discovered and analyzed using classroom observations and surveys from teachers and students. When comparing what classroom communities teachers saw as important with what communities students remembered having in their classroom I found that in these instances there was not a strong connection. For my own practice I will consider the possibility that my ability to create the classroom community I want is limited.

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The Elements of Community and Long Term Learning

Framing the Inquiry Introduction While pursuing observations at various school sites in which I was placed I became interested in seeing ways classroom communities formed and what resulted from the varying styles of communities that came about. Throughout the process of observing classes, gathering artifacts, analyzing and discussing my findings with peers, and reading literature on the subject I refined my notion of what a community is, what the teacher’s role in developing the classroom community can be and what effects different communities can have on the learning process. I will begin explaining my inquiry process by providing a summary of the main stages of my inquiry process (the three rounds of artifact analysis and the review of the literature) highlighting my changing views about classrooms. I will then go into details about how and why I developed my concept of community and what exactly I mean when I use that word. Summary of the Process The inquiry process for this work had four main stages that correspond to the three rounds of artifact analysis and the review of the literature. The following paragraphs will summarize what happened at each stage and show areas where my thinking changed. In addition to the generic name for each stage (e.g. Artifact Analysis Round 1) I will give them a title that describes what the stage was like for my inquiry more explicitly. Each stage will also note how the focus of my inquiry changed through the process of artifact collection and analysis. The first chapter especially will tell a story of how I got from looking at behavior management to looking at classroom community.

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The Exploratory Stage: Artifact Analysis Round 1 This was a point at which my overall goals for my inquiry were not clear. I was at this point free to look around at whatever interested me as if I were perusing an eclectic art gallery. While looking over notes I had been taking from observations I noticed that I seemed to focus less on the lessons themselves and more on the interactions in the classroom. A good reason for this was that my greatest concern at this point was in managing student behavior. I was unsure of how I would be able to convince students to follow classroom procedure and respect my authority which my thinking at the time suggested was a good goal for a teacher to have. What specifically drew my attention was the forms of communication between teacher and student, some of which were overt and some of which were subtle. Observations became a game where I would observe an event in the classroom and try to note what was being communicated. I would observe some sort of interaction in class that grabbed my attention and then try to find out what influenced that interaction. Admittedly this method is not very precise and in further stages of the inquiry I used another method of generating artifacts. This led me to conclude that the ways teachers communicate with students can be very subtle and often times things that could go unnoticed in the classroom may have a significant influence on the events that do get noticed. My artifacts were various pictures that documented classroom procedures, decorations, and instructions as well as observation notes accompanying them. The process generally involved taking notes on a specific event and looking to different things in the classroom that could have influenced it. This process left a lot to be desired and through peer discussion I found that knowing something has an influence on something else is not very useful information. Knowing how much influence something has or in what way it influences other things is useful but was very hard to establish. For my next stage of inquiry I would have to develop a better method than looking at events and influences.

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During the inquiry process it took me time to find out that the topic I wanted to examine was classroom community. While it was clear to me from the beginning, based on my personal interests, that my interest for this work would not focus on basic pedagogical matters like assessments or instruction methods I did not have a word for the type of thing I wanted to find while observing classrooms. I knew that my attention often drifted toward the interactions that happened in the classroom and how teachers would facilitate these interactions mostly through communication with students (communications being things like writing directions on the board, giving instructions, or even the teacher’s tone of voice when talking). I considered using the term behavior management to be sufficient for my inquiry. In my mind it worked as terms that described the different ways teachers changed the way students acted. This concern could have simply been a result of my anxiety over being new to teaching a class of over thirty students. I often wondered “How am I going to get them to listen to me?!” At the time I considered getting students to be obedient to be a very important part of a teacher’s job. Because of that I started collecting artifacts thinking my focus was going to be on behavior management. Because behavior management was my initial focus for my inquiry I thought I would focus on learning things like “Say ‘You need to sit down’ instead of ‘I want you to sit down’ to make an instruction seem more authoritative.” I quickly realized that many teachers all had their own method of behavior management and some things that worked for one did not work for others and some things that did not work for some worked for others. Everyone has their own theory of behavior management and they can all prove to you why theirs works and others’ theories do not. If I was going to find something of substance to make my inquiry about I was going to have to dig deeper than just behavior management. I asked myself what behavior management was trying to do in the first place and my answer was that it was a way of modifying the classroom culture, which I defined as the nature of the interactions between the students and between the students and the teacher beyond the teacher’s direct

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means of communication of expectations to students. While this would include written instructions on the board it would also include more subtle things like how the classroom is decorated and established classroom routines (these things are what I mean by “beyond the teacher’s direct means of communication”). It is the larger picture that encompasses within it the routines or norms developed through behavior management. This bigger picture concept can get lost when teachers focus solely on routines and norms because it makes it seem like interactions of the different people in the classroom revolve completely around what the teacher makes the students do. The intention of this stage of the inquiry was to analyze the influences on classroom culture to give a more complete view as to what affects it and how teachers can engineer it (from a bigger perspective than behavior management) to something they prefer. Discussion Between the Chapters: Getting to Classroom Community As noted earlier, my initial interest while making observations was to observe how teachers facilitated interaction with students. While many would consider the topic I was interested in at this point to be behavior management I was not ready to commit to that being the focus of my inquiry. Behavior management seemed like the tip of a larger, much more important iceberg. I tried to look to the infrastructure beneath management. My classroom culture concept was very broad. Behavior management, student social roles (class clown, taskmaster, teacher’s pet) and classroom layout are all features of classroom culture because they involve how the members of the classroom interact. The pyramid shape of the iceberg I mentioned earlier helps illustrate what I was thinking. There were two problems with using classroom culture. One was that the term ended up being too broad to use for my inquiry. The more I tried to define classroom culture the bigger the word

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became. I used a visual representation of the concept in order to show what kinds of things were incorporated into classroom culture and came up with the following: Figure 1: Concepts Incorporated in Classroom Culture

Classroom Culture Classroom Culture Behavior management

Classroom layout

Student social roles

Decorations Classroom layout Decorations According to Figure 1 my concept of classroom culture involved the method the teacher used to manage student behavior, the social roles the students had with each other and the layout of the classroom including the decorations. In order to analyze classroom culture I would have to take into account all of these things that are represented as fitting inside of classroom culture in the image. While the boundary of this representation of classroom culture is clear at this point, new terms started getting added to culture and the bubble kept growing. It seemed to have no limits and therefore not help clarify any of my ideas. While discussing with peers what classroom culture was I kept adding new terms to clarify it and its boundaries kept getting bigger and bigger until its shape could no longer be determined because it was impossible to get a clear outside view. It was like trying to tell someone the shape of the universe. Whatever term I used for my inquiry was going to have to be something that could take clear shape. It would have to have some sort of boundary.

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The second problem with classroom culture is that the term is misleading. What most people seem to think of when they hear the word culture is the specific variant of ethnic culture. Even without bringing ethnicity into the conversation, culture seems to suggest some aspect of students that exists outside of the classroom that they bring with them when they go to school. While studies of ethnicity or home life and education are interesting and worthwhile I wanted to keep the focus of my inquiry fixed squarely inside the classroom. Since my interest was to understand an event that occurred in a classroom I wanted to start with the preceding events in the classroom. Such things have their place, but it is an entirely different method of inquiry than the one I am interested in which is more direct. In the same way when someone asks how they got hit on the head by a rock their interest is in knowing who threw it and not getting a lesson on the law of universal gravitation if I want to make sense of classroom observations I am going to start with what exists in the classroom itself and not follow the actors in the event home develop a psychological profile of them. It was after considering all these shortcomings of terms I was using as a guide for my inquiry that I decided to use classroom community. The word is smaller than culture and keeps the focus within the classroom. When people describe the interactions between a local people they often times refer to them as a community. After glancing through different dictionary definitions of culture I found that the word value, or a word similar to it, came up most often. Because in my experience a value can best be described as something someone cares about enough that it influences his actions I could get at the kinds of things I was interested in by looking at the values that a group of people in a classroom share. How Communities are Created: Artifact Analysis Round 2 For this stage I was able to incorporate my initial interest in behavior management techniques into my newfound curiosity with classroom communities. All of my artifacts at this point were observation notes I had made of classrooms. What I did was observe a classroom setting where I noted

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some behavior management technique the teacher seemed to use and what interactions it created. I then asked the teachers about the technique to understand what their goal was in using it, though I relied mostly on my own observation of events because my status as an outsider gave me a more objective look at the interactions in the classroom. At this stage of the inquiry I defined community as a unified body of students and a teacher with overlapping values. In my mind at the time behavior management was a technique that teachers used to establish overlapping values. Teachers would convince students to care about the things the teacher cared about using persuasion or punishment and reward. A technique could be a way of incorporating initial student values into the classroom or getting students to adopt values the teacher brings into the classroom. For the analysis part of this stage I analyzed the techniques teachers used to establish common values in the classroom and classified them based on whether the majority of the values the technique establishes come from the students or the teacher. A teacher making students take their homework back and pass it forward again because they did not pass it forward fast enough the first time is an example of establishing a value that comes from the teacher. Students now share the value of passing their homework forward quickly (something the teacher initially wanted on his own) because it is a means to avoiding punishment. In order to clearly describe my analysis I place each community on a continuum somewhere between the students and the teacher and located the classroom community on a point that I call the Zone of Shared Values. If the behavior management technique emphasized teachers adopting initial student values (the shared values exist because the teacher has chosen to care about things the students came to his class caring about) then the Zone falls closer to the student on the continuum. If the technique emphasizes students adopting initial teacher values (the shared values exist because the teacher has, by using persuasion, punishmen or reward, convinced the students to care about the things he came to his class caring about) the Zone falls closer to the teacher.

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After classifying each technique I was left to wonder why any of it mattered. Does the community have any effect on the learning process? At this stage I was analyzing community due to a moral imperative I had (which will be explained after the summary) but was now interested in seeing what kinds of communities there could be in classrooms and what relationship they had to learning. At this point I had to come up with a means of determining what learning meant to me. For the purpose of this inquiry learning means retaining content information taught in class after it is over. Breaking Down Community: Review of the Literature In pursuing literature related to communities in classroom I was trying to get tools I could use to classify different kinds of communities. While my second chapter was about getting to a community I wanted my third chapter to be about what kinds of communities there are. I came across research that broke communities down into 5 components and tested each one with a 5-point Likert scale (Royai. 2002). I chose to modify the survey for my purposes and use it to analyze those five components in middle school classrooms. The literature also showed me other rationales for studying community including research that suggested a link between emotion and learning (Maren 1999) and suggested that community in schools is an inherent good (Sergovianni xiii. 1994). It provided me with a means of testing my definition of community against the definition of others. I concluded that my definition either included the one thing common to other definitions (the concept of shared values or something synonymous with that) or it got the heart of community better than other definitions. Comparing Communities Using Six Components: Chapter 3 Artifact Analysis For my next stage I wanted to analyze different communities and needed a method of breaking each one down to compare them. From my review of the literature I concluded that each community can be broken down into the same components. Communities can be compared and contrasted based on which components one may emphasize more than others. I borrowed five components from the

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literature and added my own as a sixth (Royai. 2002). Then I created my own Likert survey that students could describe the type of community that they experienced in a previous class they took. The surveys would show what components were emphasized in the classroom community the student had experienced. The different classrooms that were described by the student surveys could then be compared using these components. In addition to comparing different classroom communities the survey can also be modified and used to compare the teacher’s concept of what they want their classroom communities to be with the community that students say they experienced in the classroom. This stage showed me that in these instances the kinds of communities teachers think are important are not the kinds of communities they get based on aggregated student surveys about the community. I had expected there to be a strong connection between the communities that the teachers wanted to establish and the communities the students experienced. The implications of this seemed to be that these teachers are not in control of the community as much as I had thought and therefore techniques that focus on establishing community closer to students’ values would be more effective since the teacher cannot effectively change those values very well anyway. Despite the appearance of a lack of control over the community in the classroom these teachers had, by my standards of learning, provided students with a successful learning experience because students said they remembered a lot from the classes they surveyed. Why Community? Many students in public school feel a strong sense of belonging. I was one of them and so were my childhood friends. Since leaving school I have become acquainted with several students who do not feel that way. While working in a youth group that hosted students from elementary school to middle school in afterschool and weekend programs I spoke with students who felt like they did not belong at school. In our conversations the students seemed intelligent enough that academic success was possible for them. They were often capable of learning things I tried to teach them. These

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students failed many classes and those who were in high school were in danger of dropping out. When I asked them what they did not like about school they did not complain about the work or subject matter, they complained about the teachers, the administration or the other students. These complaints were not focused on aspects of the curriculum or content being taught, they were about the environment of the school. A school’s environment is composed of many things. There is the neighborhood in which the school is built, the makeup of students, the attitude of the administration, the climate of the region the school is in and even elements of popular culture that students enjoy. Most of these things are not within the control or reasonable influence of a teacher. One part of the school environment that is, however, is the community of that teacher’s classroom. In my own practice my classroom is going to be the one aspect of the school environment that I have the most direct influence over, meaning I have the greatest power to affect my classroom. It seems necessary for a teacher to create a classroom community that makes students feel like they are empowering themselves for their future so that they do not end up like the students I worked with who felt like they did not belong in school. From this mindset I looked at the setting and dynamics of different classrooms to see this different kinds of communities established in classrooms and methods teachers used to influence those communities.

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Chapter 1 Artifact Analysis While observing classes I naturally tend to focus on the teacher’s method of behavior management (techniques teachers use to get students to exhibit the behavior they want them to). At the time I thought of behavior management is the putting of teaching. When people think of golf they think of guys with thick clubs hitting golf balls very far away, they do not know that putting is actually eighty percent of the game and therefore a more accurate picture of what golf is. Likewise, when we think of teaching we think of a person lecturing in front of a class (search for “teacher” on Google Images and most of the pictures will show something like this) while for many teachers behavior management is most of what they do. I did not, however, just go around taking photographs of posters of classroom rules or record teachers getting students quiet to start the class. As I observed class sessions I noticed how student behavior was not simply students reacting in response to the teacher. Students had their own views about what the class ought to be like that affected their behavior. Also, things in the classroom besides the teacher stimulated student behavior such as interaction with other students. Behavior management is part of a larger picture. What we often use that term to describe has to do with intentional, direct manipulation by the teacher of the classroom culture. The term classroom culture for the purpose of this inquiry means the interactions between all persons in the classroom. It is influenced by interactions, student-to-student, student-to-teacher and teacher to student as well as the classroom setting (decorations, desk placement, outfits people wear, etc.). I thought that I would satisfy my desire to learn about behavior management and my desire for a big picture approach to student behavior by focusing on classroom culture because I saw behavior management as an attempt by the teacher to influence the classroom culture. In order to really understand behavior management techniques and be able to adapt them to individual classrooms and assess their effects it helps to be aware of the classroom culture that one is trying to manipulate. If a

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teacher tries a method of behavior management without being aware of the classroom culture it is impossible for her to know what the real effects of her strategy are. A teacher might be at a school where the student assumptions about class conduct are to walk into the classroom and wait for the teacher to tell them what to do, she assumes, however, that her seating chart and strict demeanor (her main strategies) are successful in bringing about desired student behavior. She is then confused six months later when she discusses behavior management strategy with a teacher whose students wait for his input when they get to class, yet he has a friendly demeanor and lets students chose where they want to sit. If she only used her strict demeanor because she thought she had to then this would allow her to re-evaluate whether she wanted to continue using it or if she would like to adopt a different way of interacting with students. In order to have a fuller picture of the variables influencing my interactions with my students I need to be able to tell when student behavior is a result of my management or some component of the classroom culture. Not all student behavior is dictated by direct communication from the teacher, some teachers use indirect means as part of their behavior management technique. For my practice I would like to be able to indirectly influence the classroom culture through things like classroom decorations or my tone of voice when speaking with students. In thinking about how I would do that for my class I have decided that it would require me to be able to see what elements of the classroom culture influence students so I can find out how to influence it properly to get the desired effect from student behaviors. Because the classroom culture involves student interactions with each other I would also have to be able to interpret observed student interactions. Throughout this process I looked for artifacts that showed me examples of these ways teachers would influence the classroom culture and examples of student interactions. I have classified my artifacts into two categories: the first is direct attempts at communicating desired norms, rules or procedures to students (seating charts, posters with rules on them, recordings of

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techniques teachers use to quiet their class), the second is indirect attempts at those things (classroom decorations, teacher tone of voice, student relationships). Within these categories the artifacts can be labeled either a student contribution or a teacher contribution. A student contribution would be an artifact representing classroom culture that is generated by a student or group of students, a teacher contribution is generated by the teacher. The teacher generated artifact will represent an interaction between the teacher and a student or group of students. Obviously all of the artifacts in the first category will be labeled teacher contributions. I attempted to divide the second category into intentional and unintentional artifacts but, while obvious examples could in theory be found, in many cases there is too much ambiguity to tell if something is intentional or not. Description of Artifacts by Category The following are artifacts that relate directly to classroom control or setting classroom norms. By this I mean they are direct attempts at communicating desired norms, rules or procedures to students. While not a perfect method a good guideline to go with is that these artifacts relate to management techniques that students are aware are management techniques without someone explaining it to them. I will give each artifact a short name to more easily refer to them. The first is a photo of written instructions and questions on a whiteboard from an epistemology class that I took because it was an example of direct instruction from a teacher. I called it “Knowers.” The second is a copy of the syllabus from a life science class that I chose because it contained an interesting admission from the teacher (he admitted to students that he will lose their work) and because it got a student who had recently been in trouble with the teacher involved in the class routine. I called it “Syllabus.” Third is a photo of “The Wheel of Death” from a U. S. History class chosen because the teacher was struggling with dealing with the feature of her classroom’s culture that tardiness was not a big deal. I called it “Wheel.” The fourth is a photo of different slides that appear in a computer program that tends to pacify rowdy English learners in a Read 180 class “Poster.”

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The next list is of artifacts that indirectly contribute to establishing classroom norms and managing behavior. Something about them led me to believe they affected the environment of the classroom, which in turn had some effect on student behavior, or were placed there to do so by the teacher. This category would include things like encouraging posters (but none with rules or procedures on them), seating arrangements or the way the teacher greets students as they enter the classroom. There are two artifacts in this category: a photo of original abstract paintings made by the teacher that were hung in the back of the room, I call it “Paintings” and a copy of “A Skeptical Manifesto” from the website of Skeptic Magazine that I call Manifesto. Both of these artifacts were acquired in or due to observations of the epistemology class Knowers is from. Part 1: Direct Attempts Figure 2 Knowers: A photo of directions on the white board

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The class from which I took Knowers involved a lot of group discussion without coercion. Students were not cold called to give answers but instead were simply asked to raise their hand if they had anything to say. Teachers often consider this a bad method of getting student participation. “What if no one raises their hands?” they might say. I have spoken with several teachers who have created a system of calling on students randomly in order to get everyone to participate because they believe if they wait for students to volunteer ideas they will only get a handful of participants or get none. In their experience even questions that involve lower-level thinking like “What does the second paragraph on the page say?” can bring zero volunteers if students do not feel like participating. It is counterintuitive then that the kinds of questions written on the board that Knowers displays are very open-ended and involve higher level thinking. These are questions that many adults would have trouble answering. The question “Is there a difference between believing something and knowing something?” could produce hours of hot debate in a graduate school class and the question “What is truth?” has, to my knowledge, never been satisfactorily answered by anyone ever. Is this class just some sort of exception to the rule? How does the teacher get away with asking for volunteers? One would expect from a class like this to see the, now all too familiar when taking teaching classes, scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where the teacher is attempting to get student participation while explaining the Laffer curve and is failing completely. Yet while observing the class I noticed that there was no lack of student participation. It is possible this class is simply a fluke. The teacher may have somehow acquired the students’ sympathy or perhaps only students who want to participate choose this class. One other possibility is that the higher level questions in the class have captured the students’ interest and encouraged them to raise their hands and share answers. I had believed through intuition that students shy away from openended questions because they seem so complex. Maybe the opposite is true. Students shy away from simple questions because they are boring and are stimulated by open ended, complex questions because

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they are interesting. I remember teachers asking open ended questions in school but do not remember how successful they were at getting students to participate in answering them out loud in front of the class. My only memories are from a family of engineers who refused to participate in discussions around complex questions and preferred questions with simple, obvious answers to which everyone, given a certain proficiency level, will come up with the same answer. Perhaps this data set is skewed and not representative of most students in school, still though I would like to know how to stimulate the engineers in classrooms too. Knowers is interesting to me because it represents a paradigm shift in my personal thoughts on students’ willingness to answer complex questions, an optimistic example of the nature of student curiosity in school (as in students actually are curious about class material) and a challenge to the general belief that student participation must be coerced through cold calling. This artifact shows that it is possible to have a class with successful student participation that relies on the natural curiosity found within students. Syllabus My next direct norm-setting artifact is the syllabus for a life science class. Two things about this syllabus made me want to get a copy of it. One has to do with something I observed occur in the class when the teacher was reading the syllabus with the students on the first day, the second has to do with the content of the syllabus. They lead me to wonder how upfront a teacher should be about his own shortcomings with his students (when does it garner trust and sympathy and when is it demoralizing?) and what sorts of things can change a student’s attitude about class.

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Figure 3 Syllabus: A teacher’s openness about his own shortcomings.

In the syllabus the teacher admitted to the class that he tends to lose work. There is a section in the syllabus that says “DO NOT THROW ANYTHING AWAY UNTIL I SAY!” The statement is followed by a short paragraph that explains it which includes the following sentences: “Everyone makes mistakes…including me. If a grade is entered incorrectly you can show me the evidence.” There are parts of the syllabus students and their parents are required to initial to show that they have read it so this document is written for the students and their parents. The rationale the teacher gave for the sentence in all caps was that he loses student work every year and students will want to hang on to their work to prove that they did it when he does. His exact statement was “I will lose your work.” This is an amazing confession for a teacher to give to his students. While it is nice to see a teacher admit he may lose work (I had teachers growing up who would lose work, refuse to admit it and give students lower grades because of it) it seems like it opens up students asserting that he lost their work that they just did not do using his confession as evidence against him. His warning to them to keep all their work may come off as an attempt to make his students do his job for him by keeping track of their work instead of encouraging them to take responsibility for their own grades and encourage teamwork

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where they take into consideration each others shortcomings as he seems to intend it to do. I should note that I am not accusing the teacher of doing this, simply noting a possible interpretation that students and their parents may have after reading his syllabus. The teacher has been doing this in his syllabus for years so either he refuses to learn from his mistakes and he is demoralizing students and angering parents or the syllabus has a different effect. Because the former interpretation seems excessively uncharitable I decided to assume the latter and got a copy of the syllabus to see how he phrases his request for students to keep their work to get them to do it and to maintain his image as a responsible adult to the students and their parents. Perhaps it is telling that the syllabus is not as confident as his statement to the class while reading the syllabus that he will lose their work. The document simply admits the possibility that he will lose work. His statement made a greater concession: “I WILL lose your work.” Is this statement an exaggeration he made in the heat of public speaking? Is it in response to students who did not take his request seriously last year? Is it simply that he wants his students to hear this but not their parents who might file complaints? There may be a certain dynamic between teacher and student that allows them to be more forthcoming than the dynamic between teacher and parent. When he prepared the documents to be read by parents this teacher may have taken that into consideration. The teacher acknowledges that everyone makes mistakes. His request that students keep their work to make up for his own shortcomings comes with a universal admonishment of every human being’s fallibility. In adding that statement to his request he is taking the focus off of himself and putting culpability for lost work on a quality all people have including the students. This We’re-NotSo-Different approach to confession may get students on board with his decision to make them put in the effort to keep their work for him and not write him off as lazy or incompetent. Students benefit from keeping their work as well in this class. The teacher provides students with two rationales that focus on the benefits to students. One involves a natural benefit. Students who

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keep tests and quizzes have the ability to practice their metacognitive skills and figure out what they need to study more. After the confession part of the paragraph in the syllabus the teacher writes “Furthermore, if you did poorly on an exam, keep it and learn from your mistakes!!!!!!” In other words, keeping assignments has the natural benefit of improving your test scores by helping you study. The other benefit mentioned is artificial. The teacher writes “I like to award extra credit for keeping assignments.” In listing these benefits to the students the teacher is providing additional reasons a student ought to keep their work besides his potential for losing it. Therefore he has other reasons to fall back on if his own shortcoming is an unconvincing rationale to the students. The syllabus also interested me because of the change in behavior I saw from one student in the class, who I call Cheryl, when the teacher started reading it to them. She had come into class late and had a negative interaction with the teacher to the point where he told her to stay after class to talk to him. From then on she had done two things that were geared specifically to disrupt class. One was making a loud noise while the teacher was talking and the other was refusing to share piece of paper with a student next to her. While it is possible that there were separate causes for her behavior the most parsimonious explanation is that she was upset at the teacher and intentionally trying to be disruptive. Her change in behavior started when the teacher was going over the syllabus. On the page where he admitted his penchant for losing assignments (but before he read the text) he asked the students what the most important thing on the page was. While most students had simply been shouting out at that point Cheryl raised her hand. She said that she thought the most important thing was the Final Exam, probably because on the tests and assignments layout it was worth the most points. The answer the teacher had in mind was the statement about not throwing work away. Still, the fact that Cheryl raised her hand and attempted to answer the question (her voice did not sound ironic or sarcastic when she answered, it sounded sincere) seemed either like a peace offering or simply that she had forgotten that she was supposed to resist the teacher’s attempt to have a functioning class. This

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behavior was only noticeable after the syllabus was shown. It seems unlikely that something as mundane as a syllabus can have an effect on student behavior but I wanted to get a copy of it anyway. Figure 4 Wheel: Creative discipline involving a random punishment in a public forum

Another artifact that had a direct relationship to norm setting or classroom culture building is Wheel. This is a circular piece of cardboard divided into sections like a pie chart. Each section has a cartoon illustrating some sort of disciplinary action. The varieties are: bring food for everyone, wear a dress and do a fashion show, push-ups, write standards, detention, sit quietly in the corner the entire period, detention and teacher’s choice. There is a spinner attached to it that students who are in trouble can use to randomly determine their punishment. The idea of alternative punishments when detention and suspension are ineffective interests me. Many students practically live in detention and do not seem to mind while suspension seems completely ineffective. For instance if the student hates being at school I cannot imagine why he would regard not being allowed to go punishment. Wheel uses public shaming as a disciplinary tool. Students spin the wheel in front of the entire class and must accept the punishment the spinner lands on. Besides ethical concerns about

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intentionally embarrassing students in front of their peers and having a disciplinary method that is fun enough to create an incentive for the teacher to use it, I was skeptical about the effectiveness of Wheel. Will there be students who enjoy the attention who will intentionally break the rules so they have a chance to spin for the fun of it? I can imagine myself in high school enjoying performing the fashion show or doing push-ups to impress the girls in class. I asked the teacher about it and she said that the main reason she adopted Wheel was because detention was ineffective at discouraging tardiness. Perhaps she had other discipline methods for more severe rule infractions. About one month later I observed a class session where the teacher used the wheel to discipline a student who ridiculed another one. The student got “teacher’s choice” and she made him write standards. While one student in class tried to draw attention to the event most students simply ignored it, continuing to do their group work. The student who had to write standards was considerably annoyed. He had a stunned look on his face that he had to spin a wheel for punishment. Perhaps it seemed very arbitrary to him. Is Wheel an example of clever alternative discipline or proof that diverging from detention is a bad idea? I only observed one instance of it being put into practice and it did not seem to antagonize the student more than publicly shame him. Perhaps that one instance was poorly executed or had positive (from the teacher’s perspective) effects on the student I did not notice. Still, I am interested in things teachers do to make their class unique so I decided to take a photo of Wheel for reference.

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Figure 5 Poster: Directions from a computer program for English language learners.

The final direct artifact is Poster which was taken from a Read 180 class. What I was really interested in was the computer program students were using. The computer program showed students slides with letters on them and pictures of things that use the sound of that letter. It reminded me of visuals seen on children’s television shows like Sesame Street or The Electric Company. They wear earphones and hear the words said out loud. The poster is a picture of the slides the computer programs show the students, I thought it would show up better than photographing the computer screen and I did not want to buy the software. There was one student I was watching (who I called Vance) in class who had very disruptive behavior. He would pick on other students, shout things at the teacher and refuse to do his work. The routine of a Read 180 class is for students to switch between three stations. One involves writing, one reading and one the computer. Vance’s behavior issues ended when he got to the computer. He kept his headphones on and watched the screen, clicking when prompted to. Why did a computer program that appeared oriented to children hold his attention so well? The possible answers I can think of are

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that he is a kinesthetic learner who is only interested in learning when he is interacting with it, the computer program is very simple and allows him to zone out so that his mind is not active enough to find ways to be disruptive or he really enjoys using computers so his behavior in the other stations is designed to show how the computer program is the only thing he wants to do. I observed Vance while at the reading station and though his behavior was disruptive he was smiling and asking questions about the reading. These are signs that he is enjoying himself so I doubt he is maneuvering toward more computer use, nor does he seem very interested in zoning out. I took Poster because I wanted to see if there was something about the visuals that could have changed Vance’s behavior. The conclusion I drew, however, from watching the visuals and observing his behavior in another station was that it was the fact that the computer involved all learning modalities and constantly kept him busy. Part 2: Indirect Attempts All of the previous artifacts involved some sort of direct attempt to set classroom norms or maintain control. Generally they involve giving direct instructions, keeping students occupied or disciplining them. While there will probably be situations in every classroom where the direct approach is necessary I wondered what sort of indirect methods there were that teachers could use. In what ways can they put students in the frame of mind they want them in? How do they guide students to complying with rules without threats? I took the following artifacts because I either observed an effect they had on students or believe they were an attempt by the teacher (either conscious or unconscious) to indirectly affect the class environment.

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Figure 6 Paintings: Abstract paintings created by the teacher that are hung up in the classroom.

As I mentioned when describing Knowers in this class the teacher was able to make students feel very comfortable sharing deep thoughts. I decided to examine the classroom decorations and thought it was interesting that the teacher displays original artwork. Could it be that she is simply vein and wants to show her talents off to her students? A more favorable interpretation is that it somehow aids the students’ learning. It could be something she communicates to the students in sharing her work or it could be something about the paintings themselves. I asked the teacher why she put the art up and she simply said she liked it in the class. Of course, she may be elusive about why she put it up, it is possible that a student would overhear her give her reasons for displaying her art and then the effect will not work on him anymore, or she could be unaware of the effect it has on her class. Perhaps sharing her artistic talents with her students contributes to an environment where students are open to the level of sharing necessary for her teaching methods. She shares something of hers with her students to get them to share about themselves. Students learn to trust the teacher, who has opened up to them with her art, so they feel comfortable enough to think and share in the class. The possible rationale for the paintings that has to do with the content is the effect of their color.

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According to an article in The Seattle Times “Blue streetlights believed to prevent suicides street crime” Japanese subways have found that adding blue lights to their subway system decreases crime and suicide. Companies throughout Japan are changing to blue lights and finding they result in less crime. The effect has also been observed with Glasgow streetlights. Does the blue in the paintings have a calming effect on students so they feel more comfortable? Manifesto The following is an excerpt from The Skeptical Manifesto which quotes from Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer. Figure 7 Manifesto: An excerpt from A Skeptical Manifesto explaining skepticism.

A Skeptical Manifesto ON THE OPENING PAGE of the splendid little book, To Know a Fly, biologist Vincent Dethier makes this humorous observation of how children grow up to become scientists: Although small children have taboos against stepping on ants because such actions are said to bring on rain, there has never seemed to be a taboo against pulling off the legs or wings of flies. Most children eventually outgrow this behavior. Those who do not either come to a bad end or become biologists (1962, p. 2).

The same could be said of skepticism. In their early years children are knowledge junkies, questioning everything in their view, though exhibiting little skepticism. Most never learn to distinguish between inquisitiveness and credulity. Those who do either come to a bad end or become professional skeptics. The final artifact I collected did not come from inside any classroom. It is a resource that is relevant to a topic that got brought up in class discussion. In class students had already done a quickwrite about knowledge vs. belief (shown in Knowers) and then shared their ideas with the class. Unlike other instances I observed in other classes where students share in partners and groups before

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anything is brought up with the class (in order to make them more comfortable sharing their ideas with a large group) students were sharing immediately after they came up with their ideas. One girl toward the front of the class, I call her Sophie, took the position that there is a difference between belief and knowledge. An example she gave was “I don’t believe my best friend is not a psychopath, but I don’t know she’s not.” When she gave her viewpoint she identified herself as a skeptic. This led to an example of students interacting with each other, a component of classroom culture that I noted earlier. Another student, Kyle, raised his hand, waited to be called on and then addressed Sophie directly, not the teacher like all the other students were doing. He said, “Do you really believe that?” The way he stressed the word “really” indicated that he was annoyed at her statement. Something she said upset him so that he looked directly at her and did not converse through the teacher the way the other students did. Also, his hand went up for the first time that class period immediately after Sophie made her statement. One girl labeled herself as a skeptic. I was unable to figure out if she meant that term in general or if she meant that she was part of the skeptical community (the class discusses philosophy, particularly epistemology). I had heard her use an advanced phrase “personal continuity” to describe how she conceived of her own identity so I figured she chose her words carefully. I decided to go to Skeptic Magazine’s website and downloaded an article to use as a resource to understand diverse beliefs of students in class and how the beliefs of the communities they belong to enter the class and affect discussion. Perhaps a teacher should familiarize themselves with the various belief systems of their students in order to be prepared for the type of concepts that come up in discussion. Conclusion Of the two kinds of artifacts I collected the hardest to interpret was the indirect ones. Coming up with the likely effect required a lot of abductive reasoning which relies too much on the limits of the possible explanations I can think of. The direct artifacts have the funneling effect of their obvious

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reasons that helps narrow down the possible explanations, the indirect ones are much more open ended and require more creativity. Also some of these artifacts, like the skepticism observation and Skeptic Magazine involve elements form outside of the classroom which add more variables to my analysis of classrooms than I can manage. In further inquiry stages I will try to keep things focused on elements inside the classroom only. Not because I doubt external forces play a role in student behavior in the classroom but because my main interest is in the classroom itself and to look at immediate factors that influence student behavior. The following table will summarize the artifacts and their categorization in this chapter. The categories, direct influence and indirect influence, will define the columns while the general qualities in each will be listed along with the artifacts that belong in the category. Figure 8 Table of Influences: Comparing direct and indirect attempts to influence classroom culture.

Description

Examples Artifacts

Direct Attempts to Influence Culture Teachers make an overt attempt to get students to act a certain way through some sort of direct interaction. Teachers tell students what they want them to do directly. Giving directions, formal discipline, classroom activities. Knowers: Directions on a board that told students to write about a complicated topic and to share it with the class. This artifact provided an example of a teacher getting students to share their thoughts on a complicated issue without resorting to cold-calling. Syllabus: This artifact suggested to me that teachers can be honest about their shortcomings when they give their students instructions about what to do. Wheel: While observing this artifact it

Indirect Attempts to Influence Culture Teachers make a subtle attempt to influence students’ actions or mindset. Teachers do not directly tell students what they want them to do but use other means to influence them. Seating arrangements, classroom decorations, the teacher’s outfit. Paintings: An abstract painting teacher placed in class. I interpreted it as a means of creating an environment of mutual sharing to get students to share what they believed. Manifesto: An excerpt from The Skeptical Manifesto which explains the goals and principles of a group that a student openly identified with in class.

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appeared that creative methods of punishment are no more effective than the conventional method of punishment, detention. Poster: A poster of on-screen information from a READ 180 computer program that students who were often disrupting class during other times were silently working when at the computer with screens that told them what to do. Final Question Because there is so much input that goes into the interactions that form classroom culture it sometimes feels like an overwhelming element to deal with. There is a lot of uncertainty a teacher may deal with planning on how they want to establish their norms because of the complex nature of understanding what effect, if any, behavior management can have on the culture or vise versa. Because of this my driving question is: What is the relationship between classroom culture and behavior management and to what extent, if any, can a teacher influence and predict classroom culture? Thoughts Before Starting Chapter 2 A major problem with my inquiry at this point is the challenge of finding what actually influences the events I observe. The relationship between a student behavior and the fixture of the classroom or the interaction with the teacher that I consider an influence on the behavior is ambiguous and upon reflection I will have to adopt a new method for artifact collecting in my next rounds of analysis. The connection between Cheryl’s participation in class and the syllabus for example is tenuous and I later decided that there were many other possibilities for influences on her behavior and zeroing in on the syllabus is not as justified as I thought it was at the time. Another shortcoming with my methods for this round is the method I used of finding influences on specific examples of student behavior or examples of teacher’s behavior management techniques does not lend itself well to analysis. I have taken my observations and put them into categories but am

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not sure how useful these categories are for improving my own practice. At this point all I have found is that teachers can communicate with students directly and indirectly and that these might influence student behavior in some way. My methods of finding artifacts for the next rounds should be something that is more helpful for considering my own practice.

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Chapter 2 Artifact Analysis For the next step of my inquiry I started searching for strategies teachers use to create a shared set of values in the classroom between the teacher and the students. At some point there has to be something that is important to both the teacher and the student if they are going to have a working relationship with each other. This change in thinking came from attempts to define what classroom culture is. One thing I had to come to terms with after completing my first round of artifact analysis was that there is not a consistent look or thought process behind classroom culture. I thought that teachers could use or construct it but the term is purely descriptive. Every classroom is going to have a culture, even classrooms where the students and teacher hate each other. Instead my thought process became about classroom community. The word community is stronger and describes something much more specific than culture, it has to do with what the group described shares. Merriam-Webster provides a definition for the word community; “A unified body of individuals as a body of persons of common and especially professional interests…” from which I will use to define classroom community (Merriam-Webster). A classroom community is a unified body of students and a teacher with overlapping values. I believe if the teacher's values and his students' values do not overlap at all then there is nothing to motivate the student to participate in learning activities, hence the relationship between the teacher and the students will not be a community. My guiding question for this stage of the inquiry is “What methods can teachers use to establish a common value with students with which to build a classroom community and how much do students get to influence what those values are?” For the purpose of this inquiry I will explain what I mean with the word value and what a common value is. A value is something that someone thinks is important enough that it influences their choices and actions. One example of a common value is money. Almost everyone who participates in

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the economy values money to some degree evidenced by how the acquisition of it motivates them to work. A shared value is a value that more than one person has and that influences how those persons interact with each other. When students and teachers share a value they are agreeing to a common concept that they find important. In many situations grades are that value. For the purposes of this inquiry a value can be a means to another value. For example, many students may not care what the shape of the letter they receive on their report card is but do enjoy the peer recognition for receiving an A or the approval of family members. Even though the value of social recognition is what the student really values in this situation he still values the grade because it gets him that social recognition. Even though the grade is a means of getting what he wants he still values it. Both the teacher and the student see the grade a student gets as important and are willing to put effort into improving the students’ grade, the student by doing homework and turning it in on time and the teacher by working with the student during lunch or providing extra study guides. When both the teacher and the student value grades they also work as a reward and punishment to get create a shared value of doing homework on time and studying for tests. In my previous inquiry my focus on behavior management led me to consider what teachers did to get students to exhibit behavior they wanted. Using the terms I have for this stage of my inquiry that could be phrased as the following: my focus was about teachers getting students to adopt the values the teacher brought to the classroom. For this stage of the inquiry I am going to consider what values students bring to the classroom. There is no reason why the teacher cannot allow students to affect his values to reach the point of commonality. For this round of artifact collecting I have collected notes and images from classroom observations of methods teachers use to establish a common value between themselves and their students. The methods teachers use vary in how teachers establish this commonality; I will describe how I analyze these methods in the next section.

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Establishing Common Value I saw that the different methods teachers use to establish common value fall somewhere on a scale between the teacher changing or influencing the values of the students and the students changing or influencing the values of the teacher. These different methods can be described spatially. There is a place where the teacher can meet the students in something I call The Zone of Shared Values. This is a conceptual meeting point where the teacher and the students agree to the same values and thereby form a community (as defined earlier as a group with overlapping values). The Zone of Shared Values is that overlapping point from the definition. Both the teacher and the students have their own starting point. A hypothetical example would be for the teacher to value students having their homework completed before the bell rings while the students, wanting more time to do their homework, would like to keep working on it until the teacher collects it. The teacher has various things he wants from his students and students have various things they want from their teacher (even if it is to be left alone to finish their homework). At some point the teacher and students have to work their way to a point where they share some values so that they are not in constant conflict from each trying to get what they want from the other. Teacher can move toward the students to get to this Zone of Shared Values or he can bring the students into a shared value zone closer to him. The following diagrams explain this. Figure 9 Finding Shared Values: A graphic representation of establishing common values Item 1

Zone of Shared Values

Zone of Shared Values

Zone of Shared Values

Students

Teacher

Students

“Distance” between values

Teacher

Item 3 “Distance” between values

Students

“Distance” between values

Teacher

Item 2

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Each item in Figure 9 shows a teacher and his students meeting each other in their Zone of Shared Values. The difference between each item is who is expected to move more. There is an assumed starting point where the students and the teacher do not have their shared values (the commonality of something that forms their community and influences their actions). The lack of commonality is represented by a ruler that shows the “distance” between the teacher and student. They all have their own values that are independent of each other. At this point there are three methods that can bring about a classroom community. The teacher can apply some sort of method that influences the students to accept the values they want them to have, thus bringing the students closer to the teacher. Item 1 represents this situation where the students move toward the teacher to reach the Zone of Shared Values. This would be a technique where the teacher brings students into a Zone of Shared Values that is closer to his own starting point. In this particular situation the teacher is unconcerned with what the students’ initial values are. An example of a scenario like this would be a military boot camp. The drill sergeant yells at the recruits and punishes them with push-ups or extra duties which makes them value following his orders. In Item 2 the teacher moves toward the students to reach the Zone of Shared Values. The teacher is looking for things students value and is using those things to establish a commonality. Because teachers are incorporating values from the students to find a commonality with their students the graphic shows the teacher moving toward the student to reach the Zone of Shared Values. Item 3 shows a situation in which the teacher is concerned with what students value and uses their values to a commonality but also expects students to incorporate his values. The graphic shows the student and the teacher meeting halfway. In this type of scenario teachers would combine different methods of establishing common values, some of their methods would involve incorporating student values and other methods would involve either appealing to students emotionally

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to adopt his system or adopting a punishment and reward system that make students value what he does. The following T-chart shows the differences between the methods the figures represent. Figure 10 Item Description T-Chart Item 1 Method -Teacher expects students to adopt their values. -Tend to use punishment or reward system to establish norms. -Might use other method to change students’ values like appealing to them emotionally.

Item 2 Method -Teacher adopts the values of the students. -Teacher is constantly working to understand student values and incorporate them into lessons and classroom routines.

Item 3 Method -Teacher expects students to adopt some of their values but is willing to incorporate student values in other areas. -Teacher will use reward and punishment system to establish norms but will still work to understand and implement student values. In reality teachers will likely never be completely in line with Item 1 or Item 2. Most teachers

combine elements of the two extremes in something like what is represented in Item 3. Item 3 can also be divided into two basic methods.

Figure 11 Combining Methods: A breakdown of Item 3: T Region

S Region

Students

Zone of Shared Values

Zone of Shared Values

S

Teacher T

S Students

“Distance” between values

T

“Distance” between values

Teacher

These new figures represent the different elements of compromise. In it the all-or-nothing approach described earlier is replaced with areas that the common value is established in. Even though both the teacher and students are adopting new values to find the Zone of Shared Values therefore

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fitting into the compromise figure (Item 3) there are several ways this can be done. On this way of looking at establishing common values rather than resorting entirely to one side or the other the Zone of Shared Values falls into one of three regions. When teachers tend to expect students to adopt their own values it falls into region T (for teacher) and when teachers adopt student values it falls into region S (for student). Figure A shows an area that is closer to the teacher's initial value. The teacher considers what students already value but leans toward values that he already has that he expects students to acquire. . In Figure B the teacher, while still bringing in some of his own values, will ultimately find a commonality that is closer to what students before school valued. Point Economy This artifact is an observation of an eighth grade Spanish class. The teacher of this class patrols the hallway during the few minutes between classes as students are walking down the hall and sings to them in Spanish. The words that he is singing are Spanish words that are telling students to get to class. The students inside the classroom can hear him and many are looking toward the door and smiling, which I interpret as them finding humor in his behavior. I was interested to see what how this teacher thought singing would affect his relationship with his students and what sort of outcomes he would like to see. The class had a lot of participation and signs of student involvement in the learning process. Students demonstrated that the students value the learning process the teacher has established. The teacher broke his class up into groups and each group gets points based on the behavior and participation of the individual members of the group. The daily class routine involves a lot of exchanges in this token economy between the teacher and students. Points are documented on a large grid in the corner of class that most students can see.

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The teacher uses a point system to get students to value participating in class, silencing their cell phones, and interacting with each other respectfully. The following are examples of instances I observed that are evidence of this with the time they occurred during the class (the class time went from 9:50 am to 10:35 am). I note the time because the sequence of when each event happens can impact my interpretation of the events. For example, students may respond a certain way to one event because of something that happened earlier in the class period. This way, students’ actions will have a context. Observations Showing Effectiveness of Points: 9:53 – The teacher asked students for a volunteer to write something on the document camera. About three-fourths of the class raised their hands within one second of the teacher's request. When the teacher selected one student I could hear an audible groan from several of the students who were not selected. It was clear that most of the class wants to participate in this activity. 9:58 – The teacher called on students to answer a question. Again, the majority of students raised their hands very quickly. 10:03 – A quote from the teacher to a student who was looking away from the teacher and talking, “Calvin, you lost two points for your team!” Calvin responded in a defensive tone, “Why?!” While Calvin's behavior would indicate that he does not share the teacher's value of having a classroom where students do not hold side conversations his value system meets the teacher's when it comes to him wanting to earn points for his group and not lose them. His response to the teacher's comment that he is losing points showed that he desired not to because of the defensive tone of his voice. 10:07 – A student's cell phone beeped during class. Students all had shocked faces and looked toward where the noise was coming from. It was unclear who the phone belonged to so the teacher continued teaching after a silent pause during which students were looking around the room. I could hear several students gasp at the sound of the cell phone. Students could have laughed or simply

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ignored the sound seeing it as the teacher's problem but instead they seemed upset that a cell phone had interrupted class. The teacher does not allow cell phones in class and allowing one to make noise was a violation of the classroom norms. The teacher had recently removed points from Calvin who sits in the general vicinity of where the noise came from so it is possible that students reacted the way they did because they thought they were going to witness the teacher instigate a very severe penalty on Calvin because they thought it was his cell phone that went off and he had already been in trouble once that day only a few minutes ago. 10:08 – Students had gained points for their groups by answering questions. One student said to the teacher, “You also need to add my points.” This student was interested enough in gaining points for his group that he wanted to make sure the teacher remembered to add them to the score board. Observations Showing Ineffectiveness There were two events I observed during the class in which the points system did not appear to be a shared value between the teacher and the students. In these instances either the teacher’s use of the point economy did not have a noticeable affect on the student or students showed a sign of valuing the learning process independent of points. I have included this part because it is important to consider the limitation to how well the point system works. There do appear to be flaws in the system, for example, some students simply are not motivated by points. Though the point of the inquiry at this stage is not to exhaustively show the effectiveness of any one method teachers use it is important to note that no method is perfect and most teachers will have to resort to a combination of different methods. 10:05 – The teacher looked at a student and said, “You lost two points for that.” He had been bothering another student sitting near him. The student shrugged casually indicating that losing points did not bother him. The teacher then made him apologize to the student he had bothered. This appeared to be a response. In previous situations like at 10:03 the student’s reaction to losing points

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indicated that he was concerned about them. This student’s lack of reaction indicated to me that he did not value his points, it apparently did to the teacher as well because the teacher then made him apologize. 10:24 – After going over an example of Spanish sentence structure one student said, “Can we do some more?” I interpreted this as a student valuing the learning of Spanish syntax and not about points because the class has filler activities if it finishes early where students can earn points but does not have a way for students to earn points learning about syntax. This student wanted to spend more time learning the subject matter and was willing to forgo the extra time at the end of class to do games. In addition to these observations the teacher explained to me afterward that occasionally there will be a student who does not value the points and other methods will have to be used like parentteacher conferences or detentions because it becomes unfair to any student placed in a group with a student who does not value points. Figure 12 Classifying the Point System: Tracking student participation using points.

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The students in each period are divided into groups and the behavior of individual members of the group can earn or lose points for the group. During a three week period students are put into groups, which get their points totaled. They get points for classroom participation, conduct towards students and the teacher, and starting work like Do Nows on time. Students can also volunteer to help with classroom routines like passing out papers, cleaning and writing on the document camera. Volunteers gain points for their group. Students lose points by disrespecting classmates or coming to class unprepared. At the end of the three week period the group with the highest score is rewarded, the students have a new seating chart, and the points are reset to zero starting the system over again. Prizes can be snack food, a homework pass or extra credit. Students often pressure their group members into participating because they want to win. So while the teacher can enforce classroom rituals by giving and taking points, students will enforce them among their peers in their groups in order to win the points game. While the fact that students help enforce the rules with the points system may make the enterprise look like student values are incorporated into this method, it is my opinion that this system leans heavily toward region T. The teacher is using the point system to get the students to adopt the values he had before class started. He wanted students to value the classroom rituals he came up with initially and the points are an artificial attachment to the rituals to motivate students to follow them. The teacher is not moving closer to something the students themselves value but is using a reward and punishment system to bring student values closer to his.

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Figure 13 Region of the Point System Point system

Common Values

Zone of Shared

T

S Students

“Distance” between values

Teacher

The above diagram shows the point system located in region T. The student’s values that they had before interacting with the teacher have been changed to the teacher’s from the point system punishing and rewarding students adopting this behavior. Because ultimately it is the points and the reward that comes from winning the point game that students value and following classroom norms is simply a means to receiving points for a reward I consider this method an artificial means of establishing shared values in a classroom. The teacher is using this system to get students to adopt values that are similar to his own coming into the classroom. Inclusive Language My second artifact is an observation of an English Language Development class for 8th grade students. This class uses a rotation system where some students are on computers, some are reading and others are doing an activity with the teacher. The class is run on a very tight schedule because activities have to be completed in a certain designated time for different rotations of students. The teacher cannot have her group go overtime because the students who finish reading or finish with computers will not have a rotation to move to. In this situation the teacher values activities being completed in a timely manner.

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This is a portion of the observation: A student does not have his workbook open after the bell has rung. The students sitting around him do. The teacher is standing in front of the class ready to begin and is looking around at the different students. She notices Ivan does not have his notebook open. “Ivan,” she says, “you are robbing your fellow students of their precious learning time. Please open your notebook now.” Ivan opens his notebook after this.

The following is an incident that took place one week later in the same class with the same student: Students are sitting in desks moved to form a large table like a corporate boardroom. In this group they are supposed to practice their test-taking skills. Ivan has turned to a student sitting next to him (Lyle) and is talking with him. The teacher looks at Ivan and says, “Be considerate to those around you and work quietly.” Ivan quiets down after hearing this. He is quiet for five more minutes then starts talking again. “I need you to focus on the task.” Ivan then is quiet for a few more minutes until his friend Lyle starts talking to him. The teacher says to Lyle, “Lyle, will you switch [seats] with Eve?” Then to Eve, “Because he is not being mature enough to sit with Ivan.” In these pieces of dialogue the teacher shows that she is attaching respect for the classroom environment and those inside it to her classroom norms in order to get students to value being on task and punctual. I call her method “inclusive language.” When she uses inclusive language it suggests to

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the class that an infraction of the class rules or rituals is an offense to the class and the people in it and not just an issue between the offending student and the teacher. In her first reprimand of Ivan she said, “You are robbing your fellow students of precious learning time.” The teacher did not make Ivan’s disrespect for the rules a matter between him and the teacher by saying “You are taking my time” (which would mean Ivan has wronged only her) or even simply “You are wasting time” (in which Ivan has not wronged anyone but is simply being wasteful of a vague resource). On this method of establishing a common value the teacher has made smooth classroom rituals a common resource that students share and contempt for the rituals as wasteful and therefore harmful to other students like spilling water from a town well during a drought. The observation includes a portion where the inclusive language did not end Ivan’s contempt for the shared classroom rituals and the teacher had to resort to using punishment; moving students’ desks. Classifying Inclusive Language While use of inclusive language is a way of establishing a shared set of values for the classroom the origin of those values ultimately rests with the teacher. Much like the point system the teacher expects students to adopt her values. The major difference is that it does not use an overt punishment and reward system. The teacher is using this language to convince students that acting in line with the teacher’s value system (valuing students being ready to work on time and working at appropriate noise levels) is the best thing for them to do. There is also a subtle underscore of reward and punishment in the fact that it supports the existence of social consequences as a form of punishment. If other students buy into the notion that the classroom routine is a collective good and infractions are offenses against them students will value the norms the teacher sets because they do not want to upset their peers.

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Figure 14 Region of Inclusive Language Common Values

Zone of Shared Values

T

S Students

“Distance” between values

Teacher

Inclusive Language

Inclusive language ultimately ends up in region T of the spectrum because the Zone of Shared Values is closer to the teacher, in fact initial student values are not considered in this method but instead students are convinced to adopt the teacher’s values. It is not as far into region T as the points system because it uses the fact that students tend to value what their peers think of them in its method. While students come over to the teacher’s value system it attempts to use support from peers to move students. Excitement This next artifact is observations from a 7th grade World History class. In this class the teacher spends a lot of time finding things students will have initial interest in and incorporating them into his lessons so that students prioritize learning what he is trying to teach them. The teacher in this class uses conventions such as props, dramatic storytelling, cliffhanger previews, and references to pop culture to accomplish this. The classroom is completely covered in historical props. These items are used both for decoration and to help students visualize places or people the class studies. When students learn about a person the teacher can present them with a three dimensional image of the person they are learning

Elements of Community about. Students can even pass the image of the person around class to stimulate their tactile senses. Props can also be used for dramatic presentations that teach content. Figure 15 History Class Props from Mr. Zed

The following is from an observation of the teacher in a lesson about the Samurai: The teacher is explaining the importance of the sword to the samurai warrior who owned it. Teacher: “The samurai kept his katana with him all the time.” The teacher is reaching into his closet and pulls out his replica katana. There are audible gasps from several students. All of the students are looking at the teacher. Teacher: “If a samurai ever lost his sword he had to perform a ritual called seppuku.” The teacher draws the sword out of its sheath. The following words are punctuated by motions with the sword.

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Teacher: “He had to cut open his own stomach and show no sign that he was experiencing pain until he died.” One of the students says “whoa!” The use of props and dramatic storytelling are intended to be exciting to students. When this teacher is able to present his props to students successfully then learning the material becomes something that the students value. This also happens when the teacher is able to incorporate elements of popular culture into a lesson. In one observation he used the show South Park to teach students about Islam. Figure 16 South Park Article: Using things students are interested in.

In order to teach students about the Muslim ban on portraying the Prophet Muhammad this teacher has students read an online CNN article about controversy over the show attempting to break that ban. The show is popular among students (despite its adult themes) and is a subject of many conversations outside of school between them. The teacher is using the students’ value of watching and discussing relevant popular culture to establish common values.

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Classifying Excitement Because the teacher is finding what students will get excited about in order to establish common values this is an example of the teacher adopting values that originated with the students. He has to take time to research popular culture to find references that the students will find relevant and has to find out the kinds of things that excite students in props and dramatic storytelling. Figure 17 Region of Excitement: Using props and student interests in teaching. Common Values

Zone of Shared Values

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S Students

“Distance” between values

Teacher

Excitement This method of establishing common values falls into region S because of the fact that the teacher uses values students start out with (the things that excite them) to reach their commonality. Students take interest in learning the material because of the excitement and it becomes a priority for them over things they might do that the teacher would find undesirable (like hold side conversations or be disruptive). The only part of this method that involves the teacher influencing the values of his students is the fact that there is a very implicit reward system behind it. Students can authentically prioritize the learning with their behavior in showing that they are doing what is rewarded by the teacher when he continues to interest them. Because of this there is a small element of teacher values in meeting in the Zone of Shared Values.

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Conclusion My main assertion in this chapter is that there must be a hypothetical space that teachers share with their students where they have similar enough values so that both can be motivated to work together and get what they want out of the arrangement. I assert that a scenario in which such a space is not reached would be chaotic because students have no reason to give the teacher what he wants and the teacher has no reason to give the students what they want. In all likeliness classrooms naturally reach this shared space unconsciously the only issue is how it happens and how comfortable it ends up being for both parties. It is self evident to me that humans have values and naturally act in ways that are influenced by those values so it makes logical sense that these values will come into play in the classroom. The question is about the how and the who behind the values that dominate the classroom and build community. How are these values expressed? Who gets to determine what values dominate the classroom community? The artifacts I collected gave different answers to these questions. The point system and the use of inclusive language made the who primarily the teacher while the use of excitement made the who primarily the student. While the how in the point system was the use of reward and punishment through the giving and taking away of points to establish common values the how in the use of inclusive language and excitement involved persuading students that they ought to adopt common values. One question not answered in this inquiry process is “which of these sorts of methods is the best method for establishing common values?” In the end all of the classrooms I observed had reached a point of having a classroom community and as I stated above it is very likely that any classroom naturally will develop into something resembling a community. Even though community is probably a matter of destiny one can still consider what that community looks like and how it came to be. What

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are the basic components of community and what do they mean for what I want my community to look like? The problem with answering this question is that the answer will depend on who is asking the question. It is a question similar to “Should I eat an omelet for breakfast?” That question depends entirely on what I want to get out of breakfast. I have to consider if I need a high protein diet, if I need to consider how quickly I need to be able to make breakfast and what I feel like eating. For the next stage of my inquiry I will need to consider what the communities established are actually like in order to consider what kind of community I would want to establish in my classroom instead of just how I would establish a community. One starting point to engage in the next stage of my inquiry would be to find out which methods leave a positive impression on students about the class or subject. After all, if a student misses content in the class or forgets it they have the rest of their lives to learn it over again. In life, however, they do not have a teacher picking what it is they ought to be learning. If they have a positive impression about the subject then it likely they will be willing to revisit the information. In a class designed to give students homework support I interacted with a student who had taken World History from the excitement teacher (Mr. Zed) the previous year. He complained to me about how boring history is for him this year. The following are observation notes from our conversation. Student: Mr. Zed made history really interesting. Last year it was my favorite subject. (I ask him some questions about the class that he is able to answer. Like the fact that the Moors invaded Spain in 711 or how the Abassids conquered the Umayyads. The student even volunteered his own information.) Student: Did you know that both the Queen of Spain and Columbus were gingers? That’s why she made him go.

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Because I value making students into life-long learners the next stage of my inquiry will use long term retention of information as a goal for what I want students to get out of my classroom. With that goal in mind I will find a way to analyze classroom communities and consider what kind of community I want for my practice.

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Review of the Literature Before the third round of artifact analysis I wanted to familiarize myself with the literature regarding the building of communities. My driving definition of community was focused around shared values and my area of interest for collecting artifacts centered around methods teachers use to achieve a state of shared values with students. I used special proximity as a useful metaphor for describing this state. Community was a point at which the teacher and student met after starting out separated in a Zone of Shared Values. While perusing the literature on the topic of education and community I wanted to find what researchers have said about the previous topics that I have discussed in this inquiry. I would also like to see if the general academic concept of community and education that is commonly mentioned in published papers lines up with my own concept that I have been using for this inquiry. Justifying Community My inquiry is based on the hypothesis that community in schools affects student retention of and interest in subject matter after the class is finished. This makes logical sense and conforms to anecdotal experience. Intuition, experience and a review of education literature strongly suggests a link between learning and emotion. The connection has been plotted on a theoretical four-quadrant graph (Kort, Barry, Reilly, Picard. 2001) and correlations between different emotional states and learning have been tested in empirical studies. Neuroscience literature also suggests a link between learning and memory from research dealing with long term potentiation and the amygdale. It is clear that emotion plays a role in the students’ abilities to learn. My interest is in the effect emotional states brought about by the community of the classroom have on the students’ retention and interest in the subject. Certainly there are other factors into a students' emotional state besides their sense of community in the classroom but for the sake of my inquiry I have chosen to keep my focus limited to the one common influence all the students have on their emotional state and that is the classroom community.

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Community in a classroom can be valued for reasons independent of its effect on learning. Thomas Sergiovanni considers community in schools a good in and of itself. One does not have to justify an interest in classroom communities at school because they are a legitimate end (Sergovianni 1994). The Goals of This Review for Chapter 3 I have three goals for my literature review for where to go in my third chapter based on the direction of my inquiry from the conclusion of my second chapter (the role of community in making students into life-long learners): 1. To have a more student-centered approach to acquiring data and qualitative information. 2. To find a technique for more in depth analysis of a classroom community. 3. To learn a useful method of getting quantitative measurements of community. The reason for my first goal is because my artifacts were limited to one school and only a few hours of observation data from teachers chosen by me. In order to pick something to look for in my third round of artifact analysis I would like to find a way to get information from students about how they feel about the classrooms they were in. This ties into the conclusion section of my second chapter in that I would like to see what kind of classrooms students remember fondly and maintain an appreciation for the subject matter after completion. The reason for my second goal is that I would like to review literature that deals with community building and what ways others have analyzed communities, more specifically what categories they have come up with to address different elements of community. I would like to break down my definition of a community into the anatomy of a Zone of Shared Values and would like to see what the literature has to say about about the elements of a community. The reason for my third goal is that in my second round of artifact analysis I did not have a quantitative way of measuring the students’ sense of community. In fact, I generally assumed the class

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I observed had a community and the question was what method was there to establish it. I would like to find research in the methods of measuring the sense of community that students feel in the classroom. Measuring Community According to Alfred P. Rovai one can successfully measure a classroom community using a 20item scale. He broke down community into five elements: “feelings of connectedness, cohesion, spirit, trust, and interdependence among members” (Rovai, year?). The definition offered by Rovai, “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together”, is similar enough to my definition (the area where the teacher and students’ values overlap). Information gathered from his paper is relevant to my inquiry. The reason I used the term “common value” is because I was looking for the reason that people, according to Rovai’s definition, “[commit] to be together.” My concept of community involves this and explains it by saying that they share values. I intend to use these methods to get an accurate assessment from 8th grade students of how much sense of community they had in their 7th grade classes. His work involved using a 5-point Likert-type scale to measure these qualities of community by having students who participate in an online classroom respond to twenty statements that were tied in to the five elements. This scale was created for college students to measure community in an online environment. The conclusion of the study holds “…the 20-item Classroom Community Scale is an efficient instrument to assess graduate students’ sense of classroom community. Moreover, measurement of classroom community adds a useful tool that can be used in future research to measure the extent of classroom community, as well as the effectiveness of subsequent course design and instructional delivery changes meant to promote classroom community and reduce feelings of isolation”. It seems that their method was effective and can be adapted by me for use in my inquiry.

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Certain changes will have to be made, like the wordings of the questions for younger students and the focus on a physical classroom instead of a digital one. I have created my own scale based on Rovai’s which I have modified to use with 8th grade students and to pose the questions for students in physical classrooms. Because my interest also involves student memory retention of subject matter my scale has questions that conform to a sixth element: sense of satisfaction. I added this category because it gives students a chance to consider how satisfying, from a consumer perspective, they were with their experience in the class. This is concerned with the satisfaction of the education experience and not with satisfaction of being entertained by the teacher. The items on the survey that connect to satisfaction will reflect the academic nature of the component. For the purpose of this particular study I have defined learning as remembering information. So the questions are focused on how well students remember information from the class and how interested they are in attempting to remember more information about the subject. This study has helped with all of my goals for reviewing the literature. A Likert-type survey will be useful for the student-centered approach I would like to adopt. This will be an effective way to get student feedback regarding their sense of classroom community because the survey is quick, allowing me to get information from more students than another method like interviewing them. It will also be clear, students simply have to choose on from five responses to questions that I will word for 8th grade students. It is useful for my second goal because it has helped me find a more in-depth way of analyzing a community by breaking community down into subcategories. Now I have six components that are found in communities and the ability to measure them for evaluating a cohesive sense of community. This will be useful for analyzing various classroom communities beyond the binary strategy I have used for classifying management techniques (the S and T regions from chapter 2) to actually looking at what emotional sense students receive from being in the classroom. For my third

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goal the Likert scale survey will help me find a quantitative method for describing the communities of the classrooms that I observe. I have multiple questions, each one is designed to assess one of the components of classroom community. From this I can create a frequency table for the score communities get for each component. The Focus of Community – Japan’s Schools Besides helping me come up with a methodology of generating artifacts for my third chapter I wanted to use reviewing the literature as a time to compare how I use the term community (a body of people with shared values) with how different works used the term. This could have one of several results: it could lead me to expanding my definition of community, it could show me that I use an odd definition of community and need to be explicit about that in my inquiry, or it could vindicate my use of the term community by showing that others have used it for the same meaning (even if their definition is worded differently). On the other hand I could find a definition of community that fits into my concept better than what I have been using, in which case I will change my definition for chapter 3. Midorigakoka Elementary School Almost every definition of community that I read used the term values or a synonym with one exception. The exception comes from Elwyn Thomas in literature that examines a Japanese elementary school (Thomas 2000). The definition from this school is that a classroom community is a group of students whose character and independence are nurtured by the teacher. This school seems to equate the concept of classroom community with behavior management, as in the onus is on the teacher to establish classroom community by implementing a behavior management plan. In my chapter 2 analysis I tried to avoid this limitation on the notion of community by classifying the methods of achieving shared values as one in which initial student values are adopted and ones in which initial teacher values are adopted. Because the concept can be thought of a physical space with teacher starting on one side and students on the other I used the term Zone of Shared Values

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for the community and T Region for communities in which the teacher brings students closer to them to achieve shared values and S Region for communities in which the teacher goes to the students to achieve shared values. The problem with my distinction is that creating a class in the S Region can be a part of a behavior management strategy. A behavior management strategy could be completely laissez-faire and still properly be considered a behavior management strategy (though not necessarily one that teachers would recommend). While the Japanese classroom Thomas researches considers it the teacher’s job to implement behavior management techniques it is not a completely teacher-centric view of community because of its emphasis on strengthening self-awareness toward group attachment. Thomas notes that the school is focused around developing kokoro, “developing the child’s sense of well-being and his or her relationships with peers, teachers and others,” and kakari, self management through goal-setting and performing duties, (Thomas 190). The child’s sense of personal responsibility, self esteem and connectedness to others is nurtured by collaborating with the teacher to develop a behavior management program. In this situation the community is dominated by behavior management but students take part in establishing it. Can I reconcile the view of community as the intersection of student and teacher values with community as an environment in which individuals realize their value and obligation to others? Just because both concepts use the term “value” does not make them compatible. My definition seems very individualistic. People have their own personal values (things they think are important) and when both the teacher and students agree on what is important then community exists. In the Japanese school the focus is more collective. Students get their sense of self worth from their usefulness to the whole. The only solution I can think of is that there is an implicit shared value behind the classroom concept. The Zone of Shared Values does not have to be the classroom norms that get established. If the story ended at the norms the class would exist on the border of the T Region and S Region

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depending on how the management programs are negotiated between the students and the teacher. Because the story extends beyond management techniques it sees them as a means of establishing a shared value of group loyalty and duty. Teachers want students to value collective identity and their seemingly S Region-leaning method of building their behavior management program is actually a part of a T Region plan to achieve that. From this research I learned that I have to clarify my concept of community for my inquiry to show that I try to go beyond behavior management techniques and norm establishment. Explaining my broad scope of community and keeping it set at something that does have limits so that it can be reasonably discussed has been a challenge of this inquiry. Explaining the exact scope of shared values will be necessary to show precisely what I mean by using the word community.

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Chapter 3 Artifact Analysis For this stage of my inquiry I decided to come up with quantifiable measurements of various classroom communities in order to analyze them. This is to continue with the work my second chapter led me to: assessing the merits of different kinds of classroom communities and finding what sort of role community had in a student’s interest in subject matter. In this stage I hope to examine the sort of classroom communities that seem to affect students’ memory of the subject matter after the class is over. In doing so I will have to collect artifacts that help me analyze classroom communities in a way that shows their differences using quantitative data. The artifact generation for this stage can be broken down into two main parts. The first part has three stages and the second part has two. An outline of the method would look like this: Figure 18 An Outline of Chapter 3 I.

II.

Part 1: General Practice a. Student Experience of Classroom Community − Collect data from students analyzing classroom community. b. Seeing Classroom Community − Observe teachers that students mentioned during analysis. c. Teacher Experience of Classroom Community − Collect data from teachers analyzing what they think is important in classroom community. Part 2: My Own Practice a. My Experience of Classroom Community − Analyze what I think is important in classroom community. b. My Students’ Experience − Collect data from students analyzing my own classroom community.

Overall Summary As mentioned earlier I am using Royai’s method of measuring and classifying community by dissecting it into five categories and using a Likert-type survey with items that correspond to the

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categories. I then gave the surveys to a class of 8th grade students and instructed them to answer the survey items for a 7th grade class they remember the best. I then took the top three teachers who were mentioned by students and gave another class of 8th graders the same survey but instructed them to choose between the three teachers. I also modified the survey for use of a teacher to consider what sort of classroom community they thought was important and gave it to the three teachers who were selected by the students. This was to see, in this instance, how much influence these teachers had on establishing their desired community. This was not intended to evaluate the teacher’s effectiveness or score the kind of classroom community they helped create. These teachers have already been selected by the students for having a class that was memorable (a subjective value that I chose as my area of interest for this inquiry). Because these teachers’ competence had already been established a discrepancy in the surveys between the teachers and the students was considered evidence of a balance of power in establishing classroom community on the part of the students and not a lack of ability on the part of the teachers. While accumulating the data from the surveys I observed each of these three teachers in their classrooms. The reason I observed the classes was to see what techniques the teachers themselves employ to achieve the communities they think are important. This part of the survey also helped me connect things I observed in their classrooms with their answers on the teacher survey. This part of the process connects to my chapter 2 artifact analysis and helps in one of my goals for this stage of my inquiry: to find things that one ought to consider when establishing a classroom community in which students appreciate and remember the content. The next part of the inquiry process for this chapter was for me to take the teacher survey myself and give the student survey to the students in my classroom. This helped me connect my research to my own practice in helping me see the kind of classroom community that I actually created versus the one I would ideally have based on what I think is important.

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Description of the Survey For the purpose of analyzing the kinds of community established by different classrooms I have broken down what it means to have a sense of community into six components (the first five borrowed from previous literature): feelings of connectedness, cohesion, spirit, trust, and interdependence among members (Rowai 2002) and sense of satisfaction. Each of these components has three items on the survey intended to see which components of community stand out in each classroom. In order to discourage students from simply agreeing with statements eight of the items were worded negatively. For the teacher survey none of the items were worded negatively because the question was not about how much the teacher agreed to a statement but how important they found the statement to be. The following is a description of each component with the survey items that correspond to them for both the student survey and the teacher survey. Feeling of connectedness This component measures how much students felt like they were a part of a group in the classroom. The items that fit in this component are designed to measure the students’ perceived relationship with the other students in the class. If the component were phrased as a direct question it would be “Do you feel like you were a part of a collective of students or did you feel like an individual?” The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how the felt about the class they were in. I have put numbers next to each statement. Later when data from the surveys is shown these statements will be items on the survey and the number it has here is the same as the number item it is when the data is displayed. All of the statements are listed in order in the Appendix on page 90. 1.I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other. 2.The classroom felt like a family.

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3.I felt isolated in this class. The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 1. The students in the classroom care about each other. 2. The classroom feels like a family. 3. Students do not feel isolated. Cohesion This component measures how well the student felt the members of the class worked together both among the students and between the teacher and the students. The concern is over the students’ perception of how well the members of the class collectively or individually respond to his needs. The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how the felt about the class they were in: 4.The speed of the class often felt rushed. 5.I felt like other students listened to my ideas when I shared them. 6.I felt like the teacher and other students supported me. The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 4. The class is paced so that students do not feel rushed. 5. Students listen to each others’ ideas. 6. Students sense that the teacher and other students are supporting them. Spirit This component measures the shared vision that the unit of the community has. I use the term spirit as an English version of the German word geist, this would cover the collective mindset of the class. The difference between spirit and cohesion is that spirit is less practical minded. Rather than

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simply being an assessment of how well everyone worked together and responded to each other spirit has to do with a feeling of togetherness that the class fosters. The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how the felt about the class they were in: 7.I did not feel a spirit of community. 8.I had a sense that students and the teacher were working toward the same goal. 9.I felt like many of the students did not want to be in that class more than other classes. The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 7. Students feel a sense of community. 8. Students feel like they are working with the teacher. 9. Students would choose to take this class even if it were not required. Trust This component measures the feeling of safety students have being a part of the classroom community. The trust is in the other students and teacher respecting members of the class and in the system of the class itself. This is best measured by how willing students are to share their ideas or ask questions because both are situation in which students become vulnerable to abuse by other students and by teachers. The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how the felt about the class they were in: 10. It was often hard to get help. 11. I did not like sharing my opinions, questions or answers in this class. 12. I felt I could trust other students in the classroom.

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The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 10. Students feel entitled to get help from the teacher. 11. Students feel comfortable sharing their opinions, questions or answers in class. 12. Students trust each other. Interdependence among members This component measures the sense of teamwork in the classroom community. A strong component of it is how much students feel encouraged to participate in the class. Do students feel like they can build on the work of other students and contribute to a greater body of work. Also, how much students felt they could depend on the teacher to support them. The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how they felt about the class they were in: 13. I felt that I was encouraged to ask questions. 14. I could rely on other students in the class. 15. I often got individual attention from the teacher. The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 13. Students feel encouraged to ask questions. 14. Students feel like they can rely on each other. 15. Students feel like they get individual attention from the teacher. Sense of Satisfaction This is a component that I added to the set that I got from reviewing the literature on the subject of community. The term satisfaction here is used the same way it is when using the phrase “consumer satisfaction.” If the students were customers who purchased their learning, would they be satisfied

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with that purchase? The satisfaction here is academic. They are satisfied with the product (the learning) that the teacher supplied them. The other components of classroom community came from analyzing college level classrooms where participation in the system itself is voluntary and costly to join. There is an initial filtering mechanism in a system like that that makes results biased toward satisfaction (they are in a class that they chose, so some component of it must interest them and they are in a school they willingly paid money to be a part of). Secondary education is not voluntary so it makes sense to measure how much a student would desire to be there in a hypothetical scenario where they are not required to be there. The following are the items that measure this component from the scale for the student survey for how the felt about the class they were in: 16. I felt like I only learned a little bit. 17. I am still interested in learning the subject matter of this class. 18. This class supported my desire to learn. The following are the items form the scale that measure this component for the teacher survey for how important the items are for their classroom: 16. Students have a sense they are learning a lot. 17. The class inspires students to continue learning the subject matter even after it is over. 18. The student has a natural curiosity that can be incorporated into lessons and activities. The students will indicate how much they agree with the statement on a scale of 1 to 5. Instead of being given numbers students indicate their agreement by circling one of five statements with each item: Not at all (1), Not much (2), Sort of (3), Sometimes (4), A lot (5). After collecting data I will record the information on a frequency table in order to get the mode score for the item. Each item will be treated like a literal scale with the frequency being the weight placed upon it. The scales will then be tipped toward the affirmative position or the negative position indicating agreement or

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disagreement. At this point negatively stated items on the student survey will be inverted so that all scales are indicating a lean toward a positive position. The teacher version of the survey does not have any negatively worded items because it asking the teacher to rank how important they think a proposition is and is not about agreement with a statement so the bias towards agreement is not there. The five point scale asking for teachers to rank importance is worded: Trivial (1), Mildly important (2), Important (3), Very important (4), Essential (5). Here is an example of the analysis: Figure 19 How Survey Analysis was Done Survey Analysis Infographic Item # 1

1 1

2 1

3 4

4 3

5 0

The first item on the survey was: “I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other.” The mode response scored this statement at 3 (“sort of”) with almost as many students at 4 (Sometimes).

1

1

4

3

0

Scale is evenly weighted.

Figure 19 is intended to describe how I am analyzing the information from the surveys. I treat the frequency numbers as weights on a scale. When an item is ranked a 1 it means the student had said that they did not feel that the students cared about each other at all. This would be a strong negative response. A rank of 2 indicates the student felt that the students did not care much about each other. This would be a negative response. The plurality of students choose the answer “sort of” (which was number 3) for this item and three other students chose “sometimes” (which was number 4). On the scale the frequencies for rankings below three are like weights placed on the left side, the frequency of rankings at 3 are like weights on the fulcrum of the scale and frequencies of rankings of 4 or 5 are on the right side of the scale.

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In the example from Figure 19 two of the frequency weights fall on the left side of the scale while three fall on the right side. I have determined that the scale is even because one of the weights on the left side fell on the extreme negative (a rank of 1) while all three of the weights on the right side fell on the regular positive (a rank of 4). For the purpose of my analysis I consider this even, while there were more weights on the right side, one of the weights on the left was spaced (given a more extreme rank) further from the fulcrum generating more torque to even out the scale. In the next part of this inquiry I will look at the response students gave me for all the items for each teacher and determine the slant of the scale. The items are grouped by the component of community that they represent. Components with the most items that slant right (have greater frequency of responses ranking 4 or 5 than lower) will be considered strong components of the community of that teacher’s classroom. Part 1: General Practice The method at this point of the inquiry involved me approaching an 8th grade advisory class and having the students take a survey. In order to prevent the survey from being skewed I chose an advisory class because they are made up of an assortment of students at different academic abilities and English proficiency. Students were given an 18-item survey to fill out, each item was ranked on a five point scale. It contains the 18 items that each link to one of the six components of community that are being measured and begins with three priming questions to get them to picture themselves in the class. I assumed that the teachers will score relatively high in different areas because students have chosen these teachers so the importance is in what components of community score high compared to the other components for each teacher. First Round of Data Collection The first part of data gathering involved a class of 18 eighth grade students of different academic abilities and language proficiencies. At this point they were allowed to choose any teacher that had taken the year before from whom they best remembered the academic content. From this I

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noted the results of the top three teachers chosen (Zed, a history teacher selected by 2 students –the same one observed in chapter 2, Wrenwilde a science teacher selected by 6 and Whynose an art teacher selected by 3). Every other teacher listed only came up once making it hard to find a mode for. The results are noted on the following frequency charts. All of the negatively worded questions have been reversed so that what was marked a 1 is now a 5 and vise-versa so that their scores show positive statements. With the charts is a list of the components of community with the items that measured them. Under the term “Item#” is the number of a statement given on the survey (see page 90 in appendix for a list of what the items said). The numbers across the top of the tables represent the degree two which the students agreed with the statement. They go with the following: (1) Not at all, (2) Not much, (3) Sort of, (4) Sometimes, (5) A lot.

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Figure 20 Data Gathered from First Round of Student Likert Surveys Frequency Tables Round 1 Zed Item #* 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Sample Size: 2 1 2 3 4 5 1 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1

Wrenwilde Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Sample Size: 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 3 2 5 1 3 3 1 3 2 4 2 1 1 3 1 4 2 1 1 3 1 1 5 1 2 3 2 3 1 2 4 1 1 1 2 1 2 3 1 1 5 1 3 2 1 3 2

Whynose Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Sample Size: 3 2 3 4 5 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 2

1

Items for Each Component Feelings of Connectedness: Items 1-3 Cohesion: Items 4-6 Spirit: Items 7-9 Trust: Items 10-12 Interdependence Among Members: Items 13-15 Sense of Satisfaction: Items 16-18 Scale: (1) Not at all, (2) Not much, (3) Sort of, (4) Sometimes, (5) A lot. *List of items by number in appendix on page 90. Mr. Zed The following components of community are the ones whose scales slant right most significantly (to continue the simile from above). Sense of Satisfaction appears to be the strongest on the affirmative side because all responses ranked at 4 or 5, Trust and Feelings of Connectedness also stand out more than the other components because there was only one response in an item that ranked

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below 3. This suggests that Mr. Zed’s class’s community emphasizes taking an interest in the subject matter, feeling safe enough to participate, and being a member of a group instead of a collection of isolated individuals. Mr. Wrenwilde The community of this teacher’s classroom emphasizes Sense of Satisfaction because all responses were 3 or above with one item (I felt like I only learned a little bit, reversed so that a high number indicates a positive score) receiving five responses at 5. The second most positively ranked component was Cohesion and Trust because all scores were 3 or higher with only one response in that component indicating a 3. Like Mr. Zed this teacher has a class that emphasizes taking an interest in the subject matter and feeling safe enough to participate. Unlike Mr. Zed’s class instead of focusing on group membership this class focuses on functioning collectively. Mr. Whynose The community of this teacher’s classroom emphasizes Sense of Satisfaction the most because all responses for the items in this component had a mode of 5 with item number sixteen being unanimously ranked at 5. This component has the strongest right-leaning weight to the scale for this teacher. After that the two next heaviest components are Cohesion (only one item ranked below 4) and Feelings of Connectedness (no items ranked below 3 with one item having a mode rank of 5). The community of Mr. Whynose’s classes emphasized taking an interest in the subject matter, Students in this class also feel like they function collectively and they feel like a useful part of the class. Second Round of Data Collection There were two problems with the first round of surveys. The first was that there were not very many respondents and the second is that it is prone to students selecting the class based on a natural affinity for the subject and not the community of the class. In order to solve both of these problems I went to another Advisory class of 8th grade students and gave them the surveys but limited their choices

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to the top three teachers from the last round. This would give me more information for the teachers I had limited my focus to and lower the chances that the student picked the class only because they happened to like the subject matter because they could not pick any class they wanted. I then added the information to the frequency tables to see how it affected the results. Figure 21 Data Gathered from All Students Surveyed

Frequency Tables Round 2 Zed Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Size: 9 1 2 3 1 1 4 3 2 1 1 3 1 1 2 2 3 1 4 2 2 1 1

4 1 1 4 1 1

2 2 1

3

4 3 3 4 5 4 6 1 2 4 4 4 4 1 4 3 2 3 2

5 1 4 3 1 3 2 1 5 4 1 4 2 1 6 5 4

Wrenwilde Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Size: 14 1 2 3 1 3 1 2 7 1 3 2 2 1 4 1 2 7 1 3 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 3 4 1 5 1 1 3 3

4 9 4 5 6 4 5 10 5 3 4 6 5 5 6 2 4 6

5 1 10 5 3 4 3 3 9 5 2 6 1 2 10 7 5

Whynose Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Size: 8 1 2 3 2 3 5 1 2 2 3 1 4 1 2 2 1 4 2 3 2 2 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 3 1

4 3 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 1 2 2 3 3 1 1 1

Feelings of Connectedness: Items 1-3 Cohesion: Items 4-6 Spirit: Items 7-9 Trust: Items 10-12 Interdependence Among Members: Items 13-15 Sense of Satisfaction: Items 16-18 Scale: (1) Not at all, (2) Not much, (3) Sort of, (4) Sometimes, (5) A lot. The following is a table that will help compare the survey results of the three teachers on bar graphs. The responses for each teacher will be displayed on a bar graph for each teacher by item

5 1 3 2 1 2 1 3 2 5 2 4 2 2 1 5 3 2

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number. The areas of the bar will represent the frequency of the response on the scale. The graphs will also have a label for which component of community each item falls under. For example, on the chart below (Items 1-6) Mr. Zed’s mode for item 1 “I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other” was a 3 on the scale or “Sort of.” For the same item Mr. Wrenshaw’s mode was “Sometimes” and Mr. Whynose’s mode was a tie between “Sometimes” and “Sort of.” That item is under the component “Feeling of Connectedness.” Figure 22 Bar Graphs Showing Frequency of Rankings for All Items and All Teachers Items 1-6

Feeling of Connectedness

16 14

1

12

3

4

4

5

5 A lot

10

1

Teachers by Item Number

2 4

4

3

2

2

2

1

1

1

1

1 6 (Wh)

1

1 Not at all

6 (Wr)

1

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2 Not Much

1

6 (Z)

1

2

1

7

5 (Wh)

3

6

2

5 (Wr)

2

2

4 (Z)

1

3

3 (Wh)

5

3 (Wr)

2

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3 Sort of

1 2

4

5 (Z)

2 4

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2 1

3 (Z)

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2

3

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3

2

2

3 1 1

7

2 (Wh)

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2 (Z)

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1 (Wr)

4

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2 (Wr)

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4

4 (Wh)

1

1

4 (Wr)

3

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4 Sometimes

10

1

1 (Wh)

8

9

1 (Z)

Score on Scale

Cohesion

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Items 7-12

Spirit

16

Trust

3

4

2

3 5

2

1

3 Sort of 2 1

2 4 2

4

2 Not Much 1 Not at all

2

3

2 12 (Wh)

2

1 2

4 Sometimes

6

4

2

12 (Z)

2

4

2

11 (Wh)

1

1 1 1

11 (Wr)

1

1 1

11 (Z)

1

2

3 4

1 1

4

5

10 (Wh)

1

2

4

5

10 (Z)

4

4

2 1 1 2

9 (Wh)

7 (Z)

4

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4

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9 (Wr)

2 0

10

1 3

2

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9 (Z)

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8 (Wh)

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1 2

8 (Wr)

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8 (Z)

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5 A lot

9

12 (Wr)

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10 (Wr)

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7 (Wr)

Score on Scale

14

Teachers by Iten Number

Items 13-18

Interdependence Among Members

14

1

Sense of Satisfaction

2 5

1

2

3

3

2

2 Not Much

1 1

1 Not at all

3 3

3

1

1 18 (Wh)

2

6

18 (Z)

1

1 1 1

3

1 1

4

1 1

17 (Wh)

1

2 2

17 (Z)

1

4

1 1

3 4

16 (Wh)

1

2

15 (Z)

3

3

5

1 5

2

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16 (Wr)

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14 (Wh)

13 (Z)

0

1 1

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14 (Wr)

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1 1 1 1

13 (Wh)

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3 Sort of

1

16 (Z)

1

4 2

4 Sometimes

10

15 (Wh)

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2

14 (Z)

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15 (Wr)

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5 A lot

7

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17 (Wr)

6 10

13 (Wr)

Score on Scale

12

18 (Wr)

16

Te achers by Ite m Numbe r

The Top Component From the students’ perspective the strongest component of the community of the class they remember the best is Sense of Satisfaction. This suggests that, at least for the 31 students who took the

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survey, that students tend to have a very consumerist approach to education. In the same way that happy customers remember their shopping experience, students who are satisfied with the education service they have received remember the content from the class better. For my own practice I will have to consider the results in this scenario from treating students like customers. I should consider the items that related to that component as well. Prioritize the following things: showing students how much they are learning, working with their natural desire to learn, and convincing them that the subject matter is worth learning for its own sake. Mr. Zed The results from the larger group were mostly the same for this teacher’s classroom community with the exception that Feeling of Connectedness was replaced with Cohesion (Cohesion had no responses ranked below 2 and nineteen items at 4 or 5 as opposed to Feeling of Connectedness which had items ranked at 1 and 15 items ranked at 4 or 5). Now Mr. Zed’s classroom community emphasizes taking an interest in the subject matter, feeling safe enough to participate, and functioning collectively. The Sense of Satisfaction component’s score conforms very well to my experience observing Mr. Zed’s classroom. As noted in the previous chapter this teacher works hard to present information to students in ways that they will be interested in using artifacts, dramatic storytelling and current events. He takes time to find out the sorts of things his students are interested in and adapts his teaching to fit that. It would make sense that connecting his subject matter to students’ natural interest would keep them interested in it outside of class. It makes sense that “Still interested in subject matter after class” is an item he swept in. Mr. Wrenwilde Again only one item changed when the additional surveys were added. This class emphasizes Sense of Satisfaction the most followed by Cohesion and Spirit, which dethroned Trust. Spirit only has 8 responses ranking items below 3 while Trust has 10. Even though Trust has more items ranked at 5

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than Spirit the negative rankings make it overall lower. This teacher now has a class that emphasizes taking an interest in the subject matter, functioning collectively and sharing a similar mindset or vision for the class. My observation of this class showed that, much like with Mr. Zed, this teacher often connects information to students’ own experiences. While teaching students about recording observations he, in a demonstration of what not to do, said in a mocking voice, “My plant died because I gave it Red Bull.” He also, when discussing class procedure, referred to Jedi mind skills. In both of these instances he is taking something from a child’s own experience (Star Wars or a popular energy drink) and connecting it, even if it is superficially, to class. Like with Mr. Zed, it makes sense that this technique would foster a strong interest in the subject matter outside of class and through a positive association could increase student desire to learn. These are two subjects that Mr. Wrenwilde swept. One odd thing about my observation and the data from the surveys is that I observed several instances that I thought would create a classroom of Trust which did not make it to the top three (though it only lost by one point). While patrolling the classroom Wrenwilde would stop to help individual students and at one point was kneeling down in front of the student he was helping putting him and the student at eye level. This made the interaction more intimate. One of the items he swept was the negatively worded “It was often hard to get help.” This gesture of intimacy in helping a student accomplish classwork could fix the memory of receiving help form the teacher in the students’ mind. This type of experience could be something many students have and why they tended to rate that item so high. This teacher also hangs a guitar on the back wall of the class and takes it down to play when students are doing work. Playing guitar for his students shows them a personal talent he has. One could consider this an example of Trust because he is willing to share something about his life with the class. In modeling trust to the class it is possible that he working to create an environment where

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students feel free to share things about themselves. This would help explain why the teacher swept the negatively worded item: “I did not feel like sharing my opinions, questions or answers in this class” on the surveys for his class. Mr. Whynose After the second round of surveys Mr. Whynose’s class now only has two components that stand out more than others. There was not a significant enough different between other components to pick a third place component. Trust is the highest ranked component with item number ten (access to getting help) having five responses ranking it at 5 and item number twelve (feeling like they can trust other students) having four responses ranking it at 5. Sense of Satisfaction is now the second highest ranked component because item number sixteen has five responses ranking it a 5. This is a classroom where students feel like they can trust other members and the left the class feeling satisfied with their experience in it. While observing Whynose’s class I noticed that he had lots of artwork on the wall. I asked him if it was from students and he said that it was and showed me a permanent gallery of student artwork that he keeps. He likes to use student work from previous years as examples for his students. “Give them an example at the beginning of the year and they will match or exceed it,” is his reason. Showing students what other people like them have been capable of is, in his mind, something that is motivating because it proves to them that it is possible for them to succeed in class and offers a potential reward of having their work immortalized in his gallery. The item weighted Sense of Satisfaction so strongly on the surveys for Whynose’s class is the negatively worded “I felt like I only learned a little bit.” Students clearly believed that they learned a lot in this class when their work starts to look like the example they saw at the beginning of the year.

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The Teacher Surveys After collecting the data from student surveys and observing the classrooms I asked the teachers I had been studying the classrooms of to fill out a version of the survey tailored to them. This took each item and changed the wording to reflect a statement about an element of community that teachers could rate the importance of for a classroom. For example: “I felt isolated in class” became “students do not feel isolated” and teachers ranked the item on a five point scale. None of these items was worded negatively because teachers were not asked how much they agreed with the statement, they were asked how important a statement was. One would think that the teacher rankings would resemble the student rankings and that if one were to draw a line connecting all the marks the teachers made it would identify the “heavy” points of the student frequency charts. This is not necessarily the case because in the way this survey was worded teachers were encouraged to note an ideal state (judging what was important and not what they actually do) which is necessary for answering questions about classroom community. Teachers are not always going to be perfect at achieving the community they want and, though their actions influence it, students also influence the classroom community. This part of the inquiry is designed to tease out from teachers what they think a community ought to look like in a classroom. The following is a table showing what teachers put on their surveys next to the frequency tables from the student surveys that responded based on the classroom that teacher was in. Components of community that rank high with a teacher will be considered along with the community their classroom scored highest in. As stated earlier this is not to assess the teachers that are being analyzed. Teachers are assumed to be competent. This is to consider what sort of community one ought to consider based on the advice of veteran teachers who have shown they can teach in a memorable classroom and to see how much of the community in the classroom is based on what the teacher wants it to be instead of what the students want it to be.

Elements of Community Figure 23 Teacher Surveys Compared With Their Students Surveys Given to Students

Surveys Given to Teacher Zed Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

TEACHER 1 2 3

Wrenwilde Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

TEACHER 1 2 3

4 X

5 X

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

4 X

5

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

Zed Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

STUDENT 1 2 3 1 1 4 3 2 1 1 3 1 1 2 2 3 1 4 2 2

Wrenwilde Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

STUDENT 1 2 3 1 3 1 2 7 1 3 2 2 1 4 1 2 7 1 3 1 1 1 1 4 1 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 3 4 1 5 1 1 3 3

1 1

4 1 1 4 1 1

2 2 1

3

4 3 3 4 5 4 6 1 2 4 4 4 4 1 4 3 2 3 2

4 9 4 5 6 4 5 10 5 3 4 6 5 5 6 2 4 6

5 1 4 3 1 3 2 1 5 4 1 4 2 1 6 5 4

5 1 13 5 3 4 3 3 9 5 2 6 1 2 10 7 5

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Elements of Community Whynose Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

TEACHER 1 2 3 X X

4

5

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

Whynose Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

STUDENT 1 2 3 2 3 5 1 2 2 3 1 4 1 2 2 1 4 2 3 2 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 1 1 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 3 1

4 3 2 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 2 2 3 3 1 1 1

79

5 1 3 2 1 2 1 3 2 2 2 4 2 2 1 5 3 2

Now I will list the most important components of classroom community based on the results of the teacher survey for each teacher. For Zed it is Cohesion, for Wrenwilde it is Trust, and for Whynose it is Cohesion. Zed is the only one of the teachers whose most important component was one of the top three experienced by his students. Wrenwilde came in close because Trust missed the list by one point. When I was in his class observing him I noted actions that I thought built up Trust as a component of his community so it was odd to me as well that students did not note it as one of the leading components of their community. I would have thought that reasonable, conscious effort on the part of the teacher to establish a component of community would get results. This observation led me to believe that this may not be true. I will have to consider, for my own practice, how much influence I actually have over my class to make realistic judgments about how to establish my community. Another interesting result of these surveys is that none of the teachers considered Sense of Satisfaction to be a very important component of their classroom culture yet that was the highest scoring component for each of the teachers. That is not to say that the teachers did not think learning is

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important. The results of the teacher surveys just indicated that it was not one of the most important components to the teachers. The teachers do not think it is very important but students definitely appreciate it when they reflect upon classes they have completed in the past. This could be a bias in the survey, however, in that teachers were focusing their importance rankings off of what they thought it would take for a student to learn content and the students were considering which class had the most entertainment value. This seems less likely, however, because one of the primer questions was for students to write the most memorable aspect of the class and all of them had to do with an academic element of the class. None of the students wrote “the funny jokes” in that section so it is safe to assume the academic portion of class is what students are remembering. For the three teachers and thirty-nine students surveyed there does seem to be a disconnect between what a teacher thinks is most important for their classroom community and what students actually experience in the classroom. Though that does not seem to harm the class in any way as students chose the class as one that was memorable (even the students who were limited had a choice between the three teachers). One thing to take away from this development that I did not expect is a possible solution to a question not addressed in my previous chapter. When looking at the different classrooms I categorized methods teacher used to create classroom community (meaning how they achieved a state of sharing values with students) in terms of whether they focused on adopting student values or found a way to get students to adopt their values. Using a spatial metaphor I put students and teachers at opposite ends of a ruler to represent the starting point of teacher values and student values. The “location” where the students and teachers met was placed somewhere along the ruler and if that location was closer to the student (in the S-Region) it showed the teacher focused on adopting student values and if the location was closer to the teacher (in the T-Region) it showed the teacher worked to get the students to adopt their values.

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The question I did not address in my previous chapter was “Which method is better?” I did not have a good concept of what better meant to me (now I have student memory of the subject matter to be my method of finding what better is). Because in this inquiry there were differences in the community the students perceive and the community the teachers wanted I should consider having an S-Region classroom for my own practice. While this is not a definitive answer it is something I will consider in my own practice that an S-Region classroom can have a positive effect on student memory of class content. Part 2: My Own Practice In an attempt to connect this stage of the inquiry to my own practice I decided to take the tools I used to study other classrooms and use them on my own. I gave my own students (7th graders in a college prep history class) the survey that I had given the 8th grade students in the two Advisory classes and instructed it to fill it out for my own class. Two main differences between this iteration of the survey and the previous one are: 1. Students have not had that much time after the class to reflect on the community involved. This could be helpful or harmful. Their memories are still fresh and more vivid but they do not have the distance from events that sometimes help see them more clearly. 2. Students were not given a choice of which class to address in their survey. Because my students are not taking this survey a year after the class is over this will not necessarily help me determine the kind of community supports long term retention of the content but it will help me consider the kind of community of the classroom I have and whether or not it relates to the classroom community I think is important. Before giving my students the survey I first have to take the teacher version of it so that the student results will not influence me. The following is a table of my answers to the survey in the order I answered them in. On the table each item is given a letter that corresponds to the component of

Elements of Community community the item is addressing. Next to the table is the code along with the scores I gave the different items for the component. Figure 24 My Response on the Likert Survey Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

1

2

3 X X

4

5

X X X X X X

Item # Component Modes 1-3 Feeling of Connectedness 3, 3, 4 4-6 Cohesion 2, 3, 3 7-9 Spirit 4, 4, 2 10-12 Trust 3, 4, 3 13-15 Interdependence Among Members 4, 3, 2 16-18 Sense of Satisfaction 2, 5, 3

X X X X X X X X X X

I have ranked four of the components higher than the other ones and about at the same weight: Sense of Satisfaction, Trust, Spirit, and Feeling of Connectedness. Because Sense of Satisfaction has my only 5 in it I will consider that my most personally important component. The following is a frequency chart from the surveys I gave my students. The items will be listed with the corresponding component of community which will be noted to the right along with the three modes the items within that component received.

82

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Figure 25 Frequencies for Each Rank in Each Item From My Students Kissel Item # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

1 1 2

2

2 1 2 3 3 3 2

Size: 22 2 3 3 9 7 6 2 6 3 5 10 1 11 4 8 3 8 4 5 4 1 3 3 10 2 1 4 4 6 5 8 3 1 3 3 2

4 8 4 6 6 5 5 7 8 7 5 6 6 11 7 5 1 7 8

5 1 3 14 7 5 3 3 4 12 9 2 6 2 1 14 12 7

Item # Component Modes 1-3 Feeling of Connectedness 3, 2, 5 4-6 Cohesion 5, 3, 3 7-9 Spirit 3, 3/4, 4 10-12 Trust 5, 5, 3 13-15 Interdependence Among Members 4, 4, 3 16-18 Sense of Satisfaction 5, 5, 4

My top four components were (highest points to lowest): Sense of Satisfaction, Trust, Feeling of Connectedness and Spirit. This conformed very close to my own sense of what I think is important (this should be taken lightly because I am the designer of the survey though I took the teacher version before I administered the student version). All four of my top priorities were listed on the students’ experience and my most important component, Sense of Satisfaction, weighted strongest in the affirmative on the student surveys. Conclusion From this round of artifact collection and analysis I have a list of things to consider for my own practice: − The teachers that I surveyed tended to think a community with strong cohesion and trust and the most important. − What teachers consider important will not necessarily reflect the community of the classroom.

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− When students are told to choose a class that they remember best a year later they tend to remember classrooms that had a community where they got Sense of Satisfaction (in the consumer sense: they felt they learned a lot, the class promoted their desire to learn and they are still interested in the subject matter of the class). − Techniques to help build trust and satisfaction could involve patrolling the classroom and kneeling at students’ desks to put yourself at eye level when helping them, give students examples of what they can achieve by the end of the year, and make content relevant to the students’ own experience even if it is simply making references to popular culture. The method of acquiring information for this round of artifacts gave me things to think about but it did not allow me to make generalizations about correlations or links between memorable classrooms and the community to an extent where I can generalize. A more refined survey with a significant sample size of former students of varying ages would be far more useful for that. Another direction to take this inquiry would be to focus on what students see as important in a classroom culture. While I noted the possible benefits of creating a classroom community that leaned towards students’ initial values I kept most of my inquiry very teacher-oriented. For further study one could make a student survey that finds out what kind of community students think is important and see if it connects to the community students perceive the class as having one year later. There are two possible problems with the methods of the survey that could have influenced the results. One is the potential for classroom communities to change from year to year. There is a heavy assumption that a teacher’s community is going to be the same for the year the teacher took the survey as it was for the previous year (the year that the student surveys covered). One possible solution could have been to ask the teachers to answer the survey items with what they thought one year ago. The other is that the item “The student has a natural curiosity that can be incorporated into lessons and activities” on the teacher survey could have been misinterpreted as the need for students to already be

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interested in the teacher’s subject matter as opposed to the importance of catching student interest in the subject matter. This would explain why the component Sense of Satisfaction was rated much lower by teachers than it was by students.

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Concluding Thoughts This inquiry process brought me from looking for the “best” way to manage student behavior to getting to the root of behavior management, namely the different values that students and teachers have that contradict and how the synthesis that is a community is formed. From there I started looking at what specific instances of those syntheses look like my ranking the significance of six different components of community by class that I identified with the teacher. Problems My inquiry was very teacher oriented. I tried to keep my language objective and use phrases like “attain common value” rather than “create classroom community” to not assert that it is the teacher’s job to do so and therefore have to defend that statement but throughout my inquiry it is clear that I am writing with the thought that teachers do, if not create then at least, strongly influence the community of the classroom. A notion that is at odds with my findings that what the teachers I surveyed was not necessarily reflected in the community reflected by the experiences their students took away from the class. Where To Go From Here At this point an interesting area of study would be in seeing what aspects of the students contribute to the community. Find out what they want the community to be like, use surveys to find out what the communities ended up being like and then start looking at different aspects of the students themselves that could have played a part in the process. My concluding questions are: What role, if any, do students play in establishing classroom community? What characteristics of students are most significant in forming the type of community the classroom has?

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References Barry, Kort, Picard & Reilly. (2001). An Affective Model of the Interplay Between Emotions and Learning. Learning Technologies. Community. (2012). Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster Incorporated. Retrieved April 16, 2012., from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/community Craig, Gholson, Graesser & Sullens. (2004). Affect and Learning: An Exploratory Look into the Role of Affect in Learning with AutoTutor. Journal of Educational Media 29 (3). Leopold, T. (April 21st, 2010). Has South Park Gone Too Far This Time? Retrieved April 20, 2012. From http://articles.cnn.com/2010-04-21/entertainment/south.park.religion_1_south-parkprophet-mohammed-islamic?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ. Maren, S. (1999). Long-term Potentiation in the Amygdala: A Mechanism for Emotional Learning and Memory. Trends in Neuroscience 22 (12). 561-67. Rovai, A. (2002). Development of an instrument to measure classroom community. The Internet and Higher Education. 5. 197-211. Sergiovanni, T. (1994). Building Community in Schools. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Thomas, E. (2000). Culture and Schooling: Building Bridges between Research, Praxis, and Professionalism. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley.

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Appendix Survey as it appeared to students: How Do You Feel About A 7th Grade Class?

Name: ________________

Class you remember best:_______________ Teacher: __________________ Most memorable aspect of that class: _____________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________ For the following please circle the response that applies to this class: 1. I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 2. I felt that I was encouraged to ask questions. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 3. It was often hard to get help. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 4. I did not feel a spirit of community. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 5. I often got individual attention from the teacher. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 6. The classroom felt like a family. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 7. I felt like many of the students did not want to be in that class more than other classes. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 8. I felt isolated in this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 9. I did not like sharing my opinions, questions, or answers in this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 10. I felt I could trust other students in the classroom. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 11. I felt like I only learned a little bit. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 12. I could rely on other students in the class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 13. I felt like other students listened to my ideas when I shared them. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 14. I had a sense that students and the teacher were working toward the same goal. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 15. The speed of the class often felt rushed. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 16. I felt like the teacher and other students supported me. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 17. This class supported my desire to learn. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 18. I am still interested in learning the subject matter of this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes

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Elements of Community

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Survey given to my class: How Do You Feel About A 7th Grade Class? Mr. Kissel

World History

Most memorable aspect of that class: _____________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________ For the following please circle the response that applies to this class: 1. I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 2. I felt that I was encouraged to ask questions. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 3. It was often hard to get help. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 4. I did not feel a spirit of community. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 5. I often got individual attention from the teacher. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 6. The classroom felt like a family. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 7. I felt like many of the students did not want to be in that class more than other classes. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 8. I felt isolated in this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 9. I did not like sharing my opinions, questions, or answers in this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 10. I felt I could trust other students in the classroom. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 11. I felt like I only learned a little bit. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 12. I could rely on other students in the class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 13. I felt like other students listened to my ideas when I shared them. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 14. I had a sense that students and the teacher were working toward the same goal. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 15. The speed of the class often felt rushed. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 16. I felt like the teacher and other students supported me. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 17. This class supported my desire to learn. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes 18. I am still interested in learning the subject matter of this class. Not At All Not Much Sort Of Sometimes

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Elements of Community List of Items on Student Survey By Order on Frequency Tables Feeling of Connectedness 1. I felt that students in the classroom cared about each other. 2. The classroom felt like a family. 3. I felt isolated in this class.

Cohesion 4. The speed of the class often felt rushed. 5. I felt like other students listened to my ideas when I shared them. 6. I felt like the teacher and other students supported me.

Spirit 7. I did not feel a spirit of community.

8. I had a sense that students and the teacher were working toward the same goal. 9. I felt like many of the students did not want to be in that class more than other classes.

Trust 10. It was often hard to get help. 11. I did not like sharing my opinions, questions or answers in this class. 12. I felt I could trust other students in the classroom.

Interdependence among members 13. I felt that I was encouraged to ask questions. 14. I could rely on other students in the class. 15. I often got individual attention from the teacher.

Sense of Satisfaction 16. I felt like I only learned a little bit. 17. I am still interested in learning the subject matter of this class. 18. This class supported my desire to learn.

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Elements of Community List of Items on Teacher Survey By Order on Frequency Tables Feeling of Connectedness 1. The students in the classroom care about each other. 2. The classroom feels like a family. 3. Students do not feel isolated. Cohesion 4. The class is paced so that students do not feel rushed. 5. Students listen to each others’ ideas. 6. Students sense that the teacher and other students are supporting them. Spirit 7. Students feel a sense of community. 8. Students feel like they are working with the teacher. 9. Students would choose to take this class even if it were not required. Trust 10. Students feel entitled to get help from the teacher. 11. Students feel comfortable sharing their opinions, questions or answers in class. 12. Students trust each other. Interdependence among members 13. Students feel encouraged to ask questions. 14. Students feel like they can rely on each other. 15. Students feel like they get individual attention from the teacher. Sense of Satisfaction 16. Students have a sense they are learning a lot. 17. The class inspires students to continue learning the subject matter even after it is over. 18. The student has a natural curiosity that can be incorporated into lessons and activities.

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