Pre-Assessment for More Effective Teaching

Nowadays, much of the focus of teacher training and development is on differentiation, providing each student in a class with different learning experiences based on their individual needs. This focus is based on several things. First of all, students may come from different back-grounds, such as countries, cultures, sub-cultures, etc. Second, students have different baseline abilities. Some students have special needs, some students are learning English while they learn everything else, some students have innate talent and are already ahead of other students. Even within the same culture and the same group, every student is an individual with different experiences, learning styles, and interests. All of this leads to the inevitable conclusion that the most effective teaching will be teaching that is individualized for every student.

Unfortunately, this just isn't feasible in most classrooms. With the help of technology, learning is becoming more and more personalized. But currently, this challenge is addressed through differentiation. Teachers will provide different learning experiences to different groups of students in their classes based on similarities in a few students' needs versus the rest of the class. Any teacher with some experience will quickly be able to tell which students are ahead of the rest in a class and which students need extra support, so this is the starting point of differentiation. But in order for differentiation to be more effective, each unit of teaching can begin with a pre-assessment. A pre-assessment is an assessment before teaching that gives a teacher a clear idea of exactly where each student is in relation to what they should learn during a unit. Generally, a pre-assessment will not contribute to the students' grades. Not only does a pre-assessment help with differentiation, but it also gives an idea of where the class as a whole is relative to the teaching goals of a unit.

The most important part of a pre-assessment, in my opinion, is prerequisite skills. These are skills and knowledge that students should have coming into a unit. It's basically assumed that most students will not know most of the core content of a unit before going through the unit (although some of course will), but if they don't know the prerequisite skills, that's a warning sign that they might struggle during the unit. I made a unit plan for teaching about circles in a geometry course where the prerequisite skills are the following:

They need to know how to do proofs, what are the relationships between postulates and theorems. They need to understand congruence and similarity. They need to understand coordinate planes and how to use them.

So in a pre-assessment for teaching this unit, these skills would be the first thing to assess for. Secondarily, I would want to assess for ability to accomplish the unit objectives. These objectives include "Students understand terms about circles, such as tangent, secant, chord, radius, diameter," " Students understand and can use the properties of tangents. For example, using a tangent property to find the length of a tangent segment to a circle," and others. These objectives cover a lot of material and information, so it is unnecessary to fully assess on the objectives in the pre-assessment, but it's good to get information about the students basic knowledge, like vocabulary, and a little bit about whether they can already do more difficult tasks related to these objectives.

My fellow TeachNow cohort members have compiled a list of pre-assessment strategies in this wiki page. These include things like pre-quizzes, KWL charts, graffiti (a.k.a. mind-maps), and other techniques. I will probably use a combination of different pre-assessment techniques during my teaching. For example, for the above-mentioned unit on circles, I would start with  KWL chart (or perhaps the extended KWHL chart--"know," "want to know," "how to learn it," "what have I learned"). Then I would have a pre-quiz. A KWHL chart is more for students. They will identify for themselves where they are and what else they need (or want) to know. The pre-quiz is more for me as the teacher. As mentioned, I would assess for prerequisite skills, basic knowledge, and some parts of more advanced knowledge. I've made a pre-quiz for that unit, which you can find here.

After pre-assessment, I will have data on the different levels of readiness for the material in the unit. This can guide differentiated teaching during the unit. One example of how this can be done is shown in the article Differentiation: It Starts with Pre-Assessment by Emily Pendergrass. She describes a science class in which students are divided into task groups for the day based on a pre-quiz at the beginning of class. As a high school teacher, I feel this strategy wouldn't be as useful to me, because high school students are highly sensitive to perceived unfairness, whether it is there or not. Another strategy is described below.

My cohort members also made a great flow-chart of how pre-assessment can lead to teaching and progress-monitoring during and entire unit. For dividing students into groups, I would go with pairs, which is a natural grouping based on the fact that students generally sit in pairs anyway. For most of the time, I will have students in heterogeneous groupings, to allow stronger students to help weaker students through the unit, but for some activities, I may switch to homogeneous groupings. I will also have differentiated homework, which will give the weaker students extra work and help in the areas that they struggle in. Throughout the unit, progress will be monitored through in-class problems, homework, exit tickets, self- and peer-assessments. For example, on an exit ticket, students will be asked, "How well do you understand the material from today's lesson?" so they can evaluate themselves. Likewise, in-class problems will sometimes be done individually followed by pair discussion so peers can give each other feedback. Other times, the pair will do it together to practice collaboration.

Advanced students will be given chances to do challenging problems during homework and also to do projects where they extend their knowledge individually. A report or presentation on the history or and idea, or the way it can be applied in other fields, are examples of these projects.

A differentiated classroom with individualized instruction for every student is the ideal. A pre-assessment followed by differentiated instruction and progress monitoring is a way to move toward that ideal. It will also help teachers and students be on the same page and work together more effectively.

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REFERENCES:

TeachNow February 2018 Cohort 3. Pre-Assessment for Differentiation. Retrieved from http://218cohort3.pbworks.com/w/page/126881315/Pre-Assessment%20for%20Differentiation

TeachNow February 2018 Cohort 3. Pre-Assessment to Groupings. https://www.lucidchart.com/documents/edit/417b3a04-9916-48f2-85c0-dc3ad1db08b4/0?shared=true&

Pendergrass, E. (2013, December). Differentiation: It Starts with Pre-Assessment. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational_leadership/dec13/vol71/num04/Differentiation@_It_Starts_with_Pre-Assessment.aspx

PBL assessment

PBL, or project based learning, is an effective way to help students engage actively with a topic while they are learning about it. Here I will describe a project that I designed, my plan for guiding the students through the project, and my rubric for assessing it.

Project: Global Warming Community Opinion Video

My students will create questions to find out people's knowledge and opinions about global warming, then they will go out into the community, ask people these questions and videotape the responses. They will also research the correct answers and provide them in the project deliverable along with community opinion. Finally they will make suggestions about how scientists can better communicate about global warming and climate change.

Read more about this project here.

Project execution

I will give my students two weeks to do this project. During this time, this is how I will monitor and follow their progress: The first step is: they have to make a plan for the project complete with milestones and the days when they will finish the milestones. Then that plan will be the basis for my monitoring. Every day or two, the team will make a short report telling what milestone they are working on and how far they've gotten toward completing it.

During the next day's class period, I will walk around to the different groups and discuss with them their report, their plan, and how they can stay on track to finish the project effectively and on time.

This way they get practice with project planning and management along with other parts of the project.

Project assessment

Here is my assessment rubric that I will use to evaluate the students. They will also receive this rubric.

 

Using formative assessment to fine-tune teaching

 A formative assessment is usually an ungraded assessment that helps the teacher and the students to know the level of understanding of a certain topic being taught. This helps the students, because it is basically practice for the “real test” (the summative assessment). It also helps the teacher to know how he should modify his teaching to make sure that most or all of his students actually know what they are supposed to know. If he uses the results of the formative assessment to review and discuss difficult areas, students basically get double learning from the formative assessment.

My my TeachNow teaching certificate course, I recently designed three formative assessments: a Venn Diagram compare and contrast exercise for physics (an idea I got from this article on TeachThought.com ), a “Write your own test” exercise for Geometry (an idea I came up with), and an online self-grading quiz with answers for physics (basically the canonical example of a formative assessment).

Then after that, my fellow trainees gave me feedback on how to improve my formative assessments. The main result was: I need to integrate the results more directly into teaching that comes after the formative assessment, otherwise I waste a good learning opportunity.

This is true. It might require a little more effort or a little more time devoted to review, but the benefits for students could be substantial.

There are also ways of making sure that a formative assessment is accessible for all, including English Language Learners and learners with special needs. This can include adding visuals to an assessment, providing key words or sentence starters, modeling a task before students do it, and letting students discuss it with other students if necessary. It's important to include some of these scaffolding devices if there is a danger of some students being left behind. But they can also be removed when necessary to give students a different kind of practice.

Formative assessments are great because they are a low-pressure way for students to practice and learn. And they are a way for teachers to tighten the feedback loop between them and their students. This allows them to personalize and differentiate even better as they go forward.

When teachers implement formative assessments, it's best if they can allow students to get feedback as quickly as possible.

As Marianne Stenger writes in Edutopia, “Numerous studies indicate that feedback is most effective when it is given immediately, rather than a few days, weeks, or months down the line.” As far as feedback goes, the sooner the better for learning. This feedback could be from an online system, other students (peer grade or discussion), the teacher, or some combination. This tight feedback loop also helps the students just like the tight feedback loop of assessment results helps teachers.

REFERENCES:

Heick, T. (2017, August 23). 10 Assessments You Can Perform In 90 Seconds. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/pedagogy/10-assessments-you-can-perform-in-90-seconds/

Stenger, M. (2014, August 6). 5 Research-Based Tips for Providing Students with Meaningful Feedback. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/tips-providing-students-meaningful-feedback-marianne-stenger

PBIS: What is it and is it useful?

What is PBIS?

PBIS, which stands for positive behavioral intervention & support, is a flexible framework of behavior management techniques designed to do what it describes: support positive behavior and intervene to recover it if students don't have it. PBIS is a framework that is supported by the US department of education and you can read a lot about it at PBIS.org.

There are many aspects of PBIS, but some of the key ones are listed below:

- Define, talk about, acknowledge, and reward positive behavior. The key idea here is that people respond better to encouragement and praise than they do to criticism and punishment.

- The bigger the group implementing PBIS, the better. In other words, multiple teachers and classrooms works better than one teacher. A whole school works better than just some of the teachers. A whole district works better than just one school. The more that students can hear the same message and get the same principles reinforced, the more effective the whole program will be.

- Every student will receive some level of "support." All students receive the general positive behavior acknowledgements and rewards (this is known as Tier 1 support). Some students with more problem behaviors will also get Tier 2 support, which could be behavioral plans, special groups to talk about behavior and goals, or special classes. A few students with severe behavior problems and high risk behaviors will also get Tier 3 support, which is individual intervention from behavior specialists or administrators. This could include a personal behavioral change plan and weekly meetings with their specialist. Thus, these are overlapping categories. Students with tier 3 support also get tier 2 and tier 1 support. Students with tier 2 support also get tier 1 support.

- PBIS requires consistent application in order to be successful.

I put an infographic about PBIS together which you can find here: https://infogram.com/step-by-step-charts-1h706eo88rwq25y

Much more information about PBIS can be found at http://www.pbis.org/, which is put out by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs. However, I have found that the most understandable explanation of PBIS can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Behavior_Interventions_and_Supports .

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Is PBIS useful?

PBIS is being widely adopted and has a lot of supporters, but there are also a lot of people pointing out problems with it. These are some of the problems or potential problems that have been identified:

- Inconsistent giving of rewards can lead to students believing that they are being treated unfairly (perhaps correctly).

- Tying so many positive behaviors to rewards can lead to students only wanting to do something good if they believe it will be seen and rewarded.

- Tying class or school-wide rewards to the behavior of every student can lead to students punishing other students if they endanger the group rewards.

Let's take a look at these problems one at a time:

Inconsistent rewards:

As Michael Ryan Hunsaker notes in his blog: "It is far too easy for any of us to reward one student for a given behavior and not another student for the exact same behavior; we do it all the time as teachers. This inconsistency and violation of expectation justifiably cause distrust, frustration, and anger. Unfortunately, this type of asymmetrical reward is a feature, not a bug, of PBIS. PBIS uses asymmetrical reward as a motivational tool, to the detriment of the students that struggle with their comportment."

Extrinsic motivation:

Ideally, we want people to do good things because they personally want to do those good things (intrinsic motivation). But tying most good behaviors to rewards easily leads to extrinsic motivation (and exhausted teachers, who are responsible for handing out rewards--as fairly as possible). Several teachers have mentioned this problem. For example, in a forum on Proteacher.net, one said, "If I hear, 'What are we gonna get or what am I gonna get,' one more time after giving a student a complement, I'm going to scream. I just might scream, 'PBIS sucks and feeds right into the cycle of poverty by teaching kids to always have their hand out for something!' " (Daphne333). This might be an individual perspective, but other teachers have similar perspectives as well.

As another poster said on a city-data.com: "I'm not a big fan of PBIS. We shouldn't have to bribe kids to behave in school." (HappyTexan)

School-wide or class-wide rewards leading to antisocial behavior

Here's an example of the kind of downstream effect which is unexpected but quite probably for this kind of reward: "I have had teachers look at a line of students in the hallway and say to their teacher, “I would have loved to give you [a class] dollar, but Student X was out of line. Too bad.” Then the two teachers would passive aggressively talk about how they were 1 student away from getting a class dollar and just how sad that was because those dollars add up to a class party. Can anyone guess what the response from the group was at Student X? It certainly was not kind. In this case the whole class went into an loud uproar (in the hall no less) and started threatening this student for losing them class cash. Did I mention this student was autistic and overloaded with sensory stimulus and had their fingers jammed in their ears? They were. They were just trying to maintain." (Hunsaker, 2016, "We Need to Re-Evaluate School-Wide PBIS")

Overall, PBIS has been getting a fair amount of push-back. As was summarized by the Bakersfield Californian at bakersfield.com, "Opinions on the effectiveness of the approach known as Positive Behavior Interventions and Support are a mixed bag of high hopes, praise, reservations and fervent opposition." Likewise, advocates of other systems for promoting positive behavior feel like they are being pushed aside for the sake of a Federally sanctioned program (see Education Week, https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/28/2pbis_ep.h33.html ).

PBIS seems to have some good and useful aspects of it, but if I were an administrator, I would not recommend it as it is usually practiced. The Wikipedia article on PBIS lists some alternatives to PBIS, including one called "Responsive Classroom." This system is similar to PBIS, except that it emphasizes intrinsic motivation over external rewards. Considering that most of the identified problems of PBIS come from the reward aspect, I believe that the Responsive Classroom system is much more likely to be an effective program for all parties involved.

REFERENCES:

PBIS.org . Retrieved May 20, 2018. US Department of Education resource on PBIS.

Wikipedia. Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. (2018, February 17). Retrieved May 20, 2018, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Behavior_Interventions_and_Supports

Hunsaker, M. R., Ph.D. (2018, April 16). PBIS is Broken: How Do We Fix It? Retrieved from https://whyhaventtheydonethatyet.wordpress.com/2018/04/16/pbis-is-broken-how-do-we-fix-it/

Daphne333. (2013, December 10). The problem with PBIS - ProTeacher Community. Retrieved May 20, 2018, from http://www.proteacher.net/discussions/showthread.php?t=477703 . Discussion forum for teachers.

HappyTexan. (2012, December 16). PBIS - Why this program should be cut (university, high school, paying) - Education -universities, high schools, elementary schools, teachers... - City-Data Forum. Retrieved May 20, 2018, from http://www.city-data.com/forum/education/1753263-pbis-why-program-should-cut.html#ixzz5G0qwd34x . city-data.com education discussion forum.

Hunsaker, M. R. (2018, April 18). We Need to Re-Evaluate School-Wide PBIS. Retrieved from https://whyhaventtheydonethatyet.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/we-need-to-re-evaluate-school-wide-pbis/ 

Foreman, L. (2016, September 13). PBIS program gets mixed reviews. Retrieved from http://www.bakersfield.com/news/pbis-program-gets-mixed-reviews/article_03b68ada-464c-5a70-8b2a-04b08a2fca1a.html 

Samuels, C. A. (2018, February 28). Tensions Accompany Growth of PBIS Discipline Model. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/08/28/2pbis_ep.h33.html

When to provide positive and negative feedback to students

Feedback is very important for almost everyone, and to a teacher, it may be even more important than for other people. Teachers and their students are in an almost constant feedback loop, with teachers and students giving feedback to each other in one way or another basically every day. Tests are feedback, grades are feedback, demeanor, tone of voice, facial expression, the way that you talk. All of these are ways that teachers give feedback to their students. Likewise, students are always giving feedback to their teachers as well, through similar things, such as demeanor, attitude, tone of voice, homework, class and test performance.

With all of that feedback going on, it's important to think about how to do it right, because done right, it can be a driver of success. But done wrong, it can slow you and pull you down.

So lets look at some principles of effective feedback:

1. Teachers should use both positive and negative feedback. It can be easy to forget the positive part, because our job is to help students improve. But positive feedback is just as important as negative feedback, if not more. This article from chron.com talks about some of the benefits of positive reinforcement in the workplace (which is not identical to positive feedback, but close enough). These include helping employees feel valuable, encouraging good behavior, and helping employees to fit it. Students are even more emotionally driven than employees, so they might even be more sensitive to the presence or absence of positive feedback.

2. Negative feedback should be present but not overdone. This is easy to say but not necessarily easy to do. It can seem like a delicate balance, but one way to approach it is to make sure that there is a good amount of positive feedback early on. This builds a sense of good feeling and trust toward the teacher, building a platform from which to provide negative feedback.

3. Positive feedback should be given somewhat randomly. People like rewards, but if the reward becomes predictable, it stops feeling like a reward. So build some unpredictability into your positive feedback by not always following the same pattern. If you surprise yourself sometimes, it's alsoo a good chance that you might be surprising your students as well, which is a good thing when the surprise is a good thing.

As Rosenthal and other researchers have noted, our expectations for ourselves and others have an uncanny way of turning out correct. This is known as the self-fulfilling prophecy. Feedback is one way that you communicate your "prophecy" to your students. Try to make it a good prophecy and you will have a better chance of getting the good result that you hope for.

Here's a quick-run-through decision tree for giving positive or negative feedback that I made to help myself (and you, if you would like):

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References:

Joseph, C. (2018). Why is Positive Reinforcement Important in the Workplace. Retrieved May 7, 2018, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/positive-reinforcement-important-workplace-11566.html

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Psychology: 10 Examples and Definition ( PDF). (2018, May 01). Retrieved May 7, 2018, from https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/self-fulfilling-prophecy/

From The Positive Psychology Program

High Expectations in Teaching

High expectations are a proven way to help students believe in themselves and perform better. Here is a Flipsnack book that I made about some techniques for communicating high expectations to your students:
High Expectations Handbook

Roller Coaster Physics Lesson

After having watched this video on the roller coaster physics lesson, I was very impressed with the teacher, Donna Migdol (Teaching Channel). Her method of teaching physics, math, engineering, and economics all at once. The kids got hands on experience building roller coasters for marbles that cemented in their minds what kinetic and potential energy were, as well as concepts like momentum and friction. The built a roller coaster in a group after each person designed their own idea for the project. This obviously promotes creativity, problem solving, team-work and some negotiation. On top of that, she had the kids pay for the parts for their roller coasters with money from their class allowances, which also taught them budgeting and economic concepts. I really feel like the whole class was a home run. It was so impressive to watch the fifth graders discussing the project with such maturity, so obviously their teacher has been cultivating a positive, can-do attitude from the beginning of the year.

The teacher in this class has high expectations for her students and its clear that the students have similar expectations for themselves. The classroom procedures and orderly and promoting positive student characteristics, like the "chime" technique where students report back on last weeks efforts, or the dividing of teams into different roles and cooperation. The procedures seem natural and automatic, but this just means that the teacher has putin the work at the beginning of the school year to make sure that students got into the habits of doing these procedures.

Even when the students make mistakes, there is no judgment or feeling that they have failed, so it appears that Ms. Migdol has also taught them about learning from mistakes and why it's important to make some mistakes sometimes

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REFERENCES:

 "Roller Coaster Physics: STEM in Action." Teaching Channel. Accessed: Apr. 22, 2018. https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/teaching-stem-strategies

Managing Classroom Transitions (video annotation)

This annotation is based on the video "Ms. Noonan: Managing Transitions," which can be found here: Managing Transitions (Teaching Channel).

"Super scholar style": this is a way for her to make sure that students are paying attention and using good posture. This is effective, because it helps everyone to be on the same page, it helps the students develop good study habits, while at the same time the teacher is being inspiring instead of annoying. Also the students now feel good about themselves.

"Word of the day": a student will choose a word of the day. This is such a good idea. First, the student feels good because he did something significant for the class. Second, she has the word of the day which is a great tool for her. Finally, students will hear the word over and over which means that they will be more likely to remember it for a long time.

Using the word of the day: Every time the teacher wants the students to transition to the next place or activity, she uses the word of the day. This makes transitions more fun for the students. It also makes it very clear when they need to move or start the next activity. It also tunes their ears to hear this word, which they will definitely notice the net time someone uses it around them.

"Grab bag quiz": the teacher comes up with questions based on material that they've been studying that day or recently. Then the kids will slowly transition to the next place as students answer the questions. This is brilliant, because allows the teacher to review whatever she wants in a fun way while helping the transition be smooth and not a stampede. Also it motivates the kids to pay attention throughout the day.

"How do you feel about that?" After a student answers one of her questions, the teacher will say, "How do you feel about that?" This is great because it gets everyone involved even when only one person answers a question.

I'm so impressed with this teacher. She really nailed her transitions and the students were hanging on her every word.

As a high school teacher, I can't really use the same techniques, because the students would think I'm treating them like little kids, but I can adapt the principles. I like the word of the day concept. I might adapt it to my own classes by putting a short question on the whiteboard. Then as I ask students to bring their attention back to me, they can look at the question (which might be about a word or idea) and think about it as we get ready for the next activity.

Establishing a positive classroom climate

One of the most important facilitators of learning for any class is the classroom climate. This includes student attitudes (and teacher attitude), relationships between students and other students and between students and the teacher, acceptance and appreciation, respect for the rules, respect for other people, a sense of optimism, and a collective willingness work hard.

To have all of these things at once could be a challenge, so it is a culture that needs to be built piece by piece. The foundation of a positive culture is the relationships between the students and the teachers. In order to foster strong relationships, you need mutual respect, trust, and interest. Hopefully you also have mutual appreciation. It's important to start on a positive note for all of these area. People are not always 100% trustworthy, but it's better to start from a place of trust. Later, that may need to be modified, but it's always important to give as much trust as possible. For example, if someone cheats on my test, I will punish them on that grade, but I will also tell them that I believe in them and I still think they are a good student. As a teacher, we sometimes forget the pressure that some students have from the parents or other sources, so we may forget to be empathetic even for students that do something wrong.

The respect component is also extremely important. I'm not always the best at this, especially if I feel that a student has a bad attitude about learning or being in my class. Nevertheless, I'm trying to improve my consistency in respecting all students. The basic premise is that every student is a person and should not be treated as a product or a vessel for filling with knowledge. I show my respect by listening to my students feedback about my class, by sometimes allowing them to sit where they want even if they don't want to, and by always trying to speak respectfully to everyone. One time my students told me that I was giving them too much homework. I listened to them and I realized that they had a good point, considering how many classes they had and how much homework they could reasonably be expected to do in one day. So I told them I would modify my homework policy to make sure they didn't get too much in one day from me.

Mutual interest is also important and it's another area where I have to say that I haven't always been that great. In the book The Art and Science of Teaching by Robert Marzano, he suggests that you try to take a few minutes to talk with at least one student every day (p. 155-156). I don't necessarily agree with his method of randomly trying to run into different students, because it seems unreliable, but I like the idea of taking some time to talk to one student every day. Perhaps I will try to schedule time where I can talk to students and then have different students come to talk to me during that time. It's something to experiment with. I find that students are naturally interested in me, so I want to reciprocate by also being interested in them.

When it comes to relationships between students, in general the students in one class will like each other, but they will often dislike students in other classes. This is my observation at least. I believe this comes from the tendency to develop affinity for whatever group you are in and a dislike for other groups. Teachers can encourage students liking other students in their class by giving students opportunities to collaborate productively and by not pitting students against each other (for grades, for example). Teachers will have a harder time encouraging respect for other groups, but I believe it starts with modeling respect for all people. Schools in general can also foster a school spirit by having group activities or having projects that are done by mixed groups of students.

Unfortunately, even within classes, sometimes there will still be outcasts. This could take the form of bullying, shunning, ignoring, or some combination of the three. This can be very hard to combat. Bullying an evolutionary adaptive behavior practiced by many species. Most of the time bullies actually benefit from bullying (Volk et al, abstract), so tackling it is an uphill battle. Nevertheless, it can be productively addressed. Teachers can contribute to this effect by modeling empathy and respect. It will be more effective, however, if the issue is addressed in a school-wide effort.

One of the most effective ways to address bullying is to teach victims and potential victims (or everyone) how to be resilient (Kalman, 2014). The victims have control over their responses, especially if the bullying is subtle. This can also help them develop skills that will be useful for their whole life.

If the class if diverse, with students of different races, backgrounds, disabilities, or sexualities present, there is more of a potential for conflict or bullying. Teachers can proactively try to head this off by honoring people of diverse backgrounds, including historical figures, cultural figures, and people in the class or school. Teachers should also initiate a culture of shared inquiry, which can show that everyone in the class is valued (Teaching Tolerance, p. 10). Taking active steps to build a community of respect can also prevent many problems. Teachers can work with students to develop class rules, which students will then be more motivated to follow, because they feel invested in them. Incorporating material about respect, tolerance, inclusion, and diversity into the curriculum will also help students to develop a mind-set of respect for all (Teaching Tolerance, p. 11).

In general, a positive classroom climate begins with respect and trust. When that foundation is laid, the teacher can use that trust and respect to continue to improve the classroom climate. As long as it lasts, continuous improvement is possible.

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References:

Marzano, R. J. (2010). The art and science of teaching: A comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Alexandria, Va: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Volk, A. A., Dane, A. V., Marini, Z. A., & Vaillancourt, T. (2015). Adolescent Bullying, Dating, and Mating. Evolutionary Psychology, 13(4), 147470491561390. doi:10.1177/1474704915613909

Kalman, I. (2014, May 30). Why Telling on Bullies Backfires. Retrieved April 08, 2018, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/resilience-bullying/201405/why-telling-bullies-backfires 

Teaching Tolerance (2016). Critical Practices for4 Anti-bias Education. tolerance.org