I believe in rules, and my teaching life would be impossible without them. In this article I talk about the ‘Safe Zone’ my classroom rules are intended to create.
Students
who arrive in high school reading at a second grade level are, more than
anything else, SCARED. They’ve had six years or so of spending seven hours a
day on one thing – hiding the fact that they can’t read. They’ve been hurt in
school in a thousand ways a million times before. Their fear reveals itself in
many forms, of course, ranging from truculence to silence to disruption.
Safety,
then, is of the utmost importance, and it got first position when I wrote my
rules.
-----------------------------------
Our Classroom is a:
SAFE ZONE
- Give every person as many
chances as they need to succeed.
- Respect personal space,
personal property and personal dignity.
- Ask for help, and expect to
get it.
------------------------------------
Give every person as many
chances as they need to succeed.
Mistakes
are a regular, and I’d say essential, part of learning, but the reaction of
peers to your mistakes is something to be feared by high school students. Along
with that, my students have ‘failed’ so many times they have ample reason to consider
giving up. None of THAT allowed. Rule number one says you get another chance,
and another, and that anyone who made that difficult would be breaking a rule
and face normal consequences for it.
Respect personal space, personal
property and personal dignity.
This is
one of the fairly standard ‘thou shalt nots’ spun to the positive. Yes, I’ve
seen many violations of all three of these, and was left saddened that the
students would do those things to one another!
I also
took this to heart. I realized early on that the well-worn idea of ‘teacher
proximity’ that works well in some classrooms would not do so in mine. After all
the years of pain my students had endured in school, there had to be much more
positive ways for me to interact with them than to loom over them at their desks.
I would still need to watch – carefully – EVERY second, but always while leaving
them their personal space!
The
respect for personal dignity is closely related to the rule about extra chances
above, of course.
Ask for help, and expect to get
it.
Asking
for help requires a level of trust that is not easily built at any age, but is
especially difficult for adolescents. I have made structured sharing a regular
part of lesson plans, but have also gone a step farther and have individual
conferences with students at least once every unit [ten times a year, more or
less]. These conferences give me a chance to deliver praise, offer
encouragement, and give whatever help the student has the ‘courage’ to ask for.
Safe
Zone is just one of the three Zones in my classroom: Safe Zone, Quiet Zone, and
No Parking Zone. My ramblings will get to the other zones soon!
Jo
Karabasz
www.overlooktutorialacademy.net
No comments:
Post a Comment