The Classroom Learning Environment

Analysis and Synthesis paper EDST 5001G Professor: Bill Hunter By: Sharnjit Moondi Student #: 100467957 Due Date: October 31, 2011

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There are various types of learning environments just as there are various languages, sports, subject areas, and etc. to be learnt. First of all, what is learning? Learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs through experience. (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 258). The learning environment that I have decided to analyse is the classroom in which I have volunteered and supply taught in the most and this is due to many reasons. One reason being that I feel that I am the most familiar with that environment because I have been observing this environment since I was conscientious enough to understand what is going on around me. I have observed the environment as a student, as a student- teacher, as a volunteer and as a supply teacher. The second reason for choosing the classroom environment is because I feel that as much as every environment is important for learning, the classroom is the environment in which a student spends the majority of their youth and adolescent years in learning or at least should be. In this learning environment, students are expected to learn everything required of them for the grade 8 curriculum and to develop their life long skills such as organization, teamwork, and etc. Teachers should be highly effective instructors in their teaching because this is the environment that the future generation should be developing a significant amount of their learning. This also involves not only finding interesting ways of teaching material but also creating a physical environment that is learner friendly. The classroom that I am going to focus on is a grade 8 class that has 5 IEP students out of a total of 29 students in the class. The two teachers that I have observed in this class have both been teaching for many years but do not have experience teaching many of the subjects. They are both teachers who studied music in their undergrad and taught music at the school for many years. Now they are both teaching various different subjects. What does a classroom look like? Generally when an individual imagines a grade 8 classroom, they think about student desks, the teachers desk, a bullet board and some sort of writing board in front of the class. The writing board in front of the class could be imagined differently as well depending on what that individual is familiar with; it could be a chalkboard, white board or projector screen or even a smartboard. When imagining the classroom, not many people think about whether the environment is comfortable to be learning in,

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sometimes not even the classroom teacher. For instance the class that I have worked with is a large class with a few bulletin boards that had nothing on them till mid-October when a couple art projects had been finished and marked. Around the class, it has a few posters around a heater box that goes right to the ceiling but not all posters can be seen from all angles. Teachers desk is by the door, not central to all students and the students are sitting with partners, for easy collaborative learning, which is great. It can be noticed by observing this environment that the teacher is not entirely aware of how important the environment is for learning. The physical environment that is surrounding a student for most of their day at school is highly important in their learning process. The physical environment people create can both reflect and shape interaction. (Adler, Rodman, & Sevigny, Pg. 197). In a learning environment, a teacher wants to make sure that their students are understanding the material accurately and are interacting with others in a manner that is appropriate to the content being presented. The overall idea that is embeddied into a teachers mind in teachers college and in staff meetings is that students need to be engaged to learn. Some teachers dont see the connection between student engagement and the environment in which they are establishing the foundation for learning everyday. In an experiment performed by Maslow and a colleague, explained in their paper, Effects of Esthetic Surroundings, they found that the attractiveness of a room influenced the happiness and energy of the people working in it. This was due to the fact that the results showed that in a less attractive room the subjects became tired and bored faster and they took a longer time to complete the task. When those subjects were in a beautiful room, they were happier and showed a greater desire to work, and expressed feelings of importance, comfort, and enjoyment. (Adler, Rodman, & Sevigny, Pg. 198). Therefore, from the results of this experiment it is obvious that to achieve a higher level of success with students in their learning process, teachers need to make their classrooms into a place that is more comfortable and enjoyable because the physical environment plays a critical role in student engagement, which is an important stepping stone towards higher learning. After understanding how important the physical classroom is, I will design the interior of my classroom to make it a friendly learning environment. I will design a comfortable classroom by having it all decorated from the day my students walk into the class. I will have a Math wall, which will have q-cards on it saying what they should already know from the previous grade. Each q-card will have a definition and examples of what it is so that students can refer to it as a review tool. As new topics are covered I will add them to the wall.

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This allows students to have a wall in the classroom that is full of review material that they can look at if they have forgotten something while doing their homework. I will place a yellow star on the topic that was covered the day before, so that students that were absent are able to look on the wall as well as my binder for students and my calendar at the back of the class to see what they have missed. This wall will obviously be covered by a white roller sheet that I would just have to pull down during tests. I would also decorate the bulletin boards with my own posters until I had student work to display. I would also make a confortable corner for students with pillows and a carpet so that they are able to do some silent reading or group work in a different area then their desks. In high school classes, this is obviously not always possible but I would make sure to design my classroom as much as possible to make it the most comfortable place that I can. Along with the physical environment of a classroom, the teacher should also be making a students experience at school, a memoriable one. As Wubbels and his colleagues (1999) note: ...They should be able to empathize with students, understand their world, and listen to them. Good teachers are not uncertain, undecided, or confusing in the way they communicate with students. They are not grouchy, gloomy, dissatisfied, aggressive, sarcastic, or quick-tempered. They should be able to set standards and maintain control while still allowing students responsibility and freedom to learn. (Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, Pg. 44). Students need to feel comfortable in the physical environment they are learning in, safe with the students that they are learning with and comfortable with the teacher who is teaching them what they need to learn. Students need to be able to trust the teacher blindly and students will only understand a teacher if they see that the teacher is understanding them and is actually there to help them succeed. This same understanding is applied to supply teachers, if a supply teacher displays a sense of care for the students during his/her time in the class, most students will see this and cooperate with the teacher. There are many different styles that a teacher can teach by. A study conducted by Lian Chiu and Michael Tulley in 1997, presented students with 4 options for the learning style that they preferred; the rules/rewards-punishments style, relationship-listening style, confronting-contracting style and no preferred approach. The results showed that the majority of students preferred the confrontingcontracting approach, in other words the confluence of appropriate

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dominance with appropriate cooperation (Marzano, Marzano, & Pickering, Pg. 44). I find that the best way to describe how the teacher should be with students is firm but fair. In the grade 8 class, the IEP students and other weaker students are placed beside students that are academically strong. Many people would hear this and think that it is because teachers are trying to reduce the amount of running around they have to do by placing weaker students beside stronger students for assistance. As much as that is a small reason to why some teachers place students like that, there is a theory that states another reason. According to Albert Banduras Social Cognitive Theory, an individuals bahaviour is determined not only by environmental conditions but also by how thoughts modify the effects of environment on behaviour. (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 10). His theory showed how if a student is observing something in front of them, their mind will process what is going on and they could possibly adapt the behaviour for themselves. For instance if a weaker student observes a stronger student on the process that they take to complete a task, a weaker student could possibly take on the same process to complete the task at hand and understand how to complete tasks similar to that. It is like the saying monkey see, monkey do. This obviously could go the opposite way as well in that, the weaker student could be very disruptive and could get the attention of the entire class, perhaps making him well liked in the school, the stronger student may choose to adapt the weaker students habits to become popular if they are not already. As a teacher, I would actually pair a weaker student with a stronger student because I feel that generally speaking a stronger student has an urge to succeed in school that cannot be taken away and they normally make friends with similar goals. I also feel that they realize that they are a great rolemodel and generally they want to help the weaker students by setting a good example. Observing a few teachers and as a new teacher, I can say that one of toughest students to handle in a class are the misbehaving students because they take up class time with their disruptions, which requires a lot of a teachers time and energy. What needs to be remembered is that these students are just simply children that are probably experiencing some difficulties in other areas of their life. As Freud believed early relationships with parents are the chief forces that shape an individuals personality. (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 11). As teachers, we do not always know what these students are going through outside of school and we should always be taking that into consideration. There are many ways of dealing with misbehaving students

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according to different behaviourists. Thorndikes Law of Effect, which Skinners operant conditioning approach expanded on in terms of consequences for behaviour, is one great example. Thorndikes theory states that behaviours followed by positive outcomes are strengthened, whereas behaviours followed by negative outcomes are weakened. (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 267). The law of effect shows us that in a teaching environment, if a student is behaving badly, then they should receive consequences for their actions. The consequence should be something that they really like or value such as missing a part of their break. This should result in the student improving their behaviour because they do not want to endure the consequence of not obliging to the appropriate behaviour the teacher expects. Similarly, if a student in my class is actually cooperating with me, then they should be rewarded by something, in turn the student will want to act better to be rewarded all the time. Thorndikes theory is similar to the principles of reinforcement, the only difference is that with the principles of reinforcement, the frequency of a behaviour always increases because it is followed by a rewarding stimulus or by the removal of an unpleasant stimlus. For instance, an example of positive reinforcement is when a student turns in homework on time and they are rewarded by the teacher praising them on their performance. As a result the student will increasingly turn in homework on time. This same example but this time with negative reinforcement is that after a student turns in their homework on time, the teacher stops critizing them on their late homework and as a result, the student will increasingly turn in homework on time. (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 271). Using these two theories and many others, they have the potential to change a students personality in class and outside of class as well. Skinner stressed that our behaviour always has the capacity for change if new experiences are encounteredbehaviourists believe that personility is learned and often changes according to environmental experiences and situations (Mitterer & Santrock, Pg. 466). Therefore, an aggressive student can be shaped into a docile student. In the process of teaching, some teachers forget that they are not only there to cover everything that the curriculum has stated but more then that. Dewey rejected the notion that a childs education should be viewed as merely a preparation for civil life, during which disjoint facts and ideas are conveyed by the teacher and memorized by the student only to be utilized later on. The school should rather be viewed as an

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extension of civil society and continuous with it, and the student encouraged to operate as a member of a community, actively pursuing interests in cooperation with others. (Field, 2005). From this statement made by Richard Field about John Deweys beliefs, it is noticeable that a teachers job extends beyond the four walls of a classroom. What is taught to them carries on into their everyday lives. As much as it is hard to establish an interest in students for each subject, there is always a way. An interest in a subject is a reward for students to learn more about that subject, it motivates them to continue. There is a world of resources that can be used. The most step by step subjects such as Mathematics can be taught in a manner that is more appealing to students, even if it is just making up questions that has students lifestyle interests involved such as shopping and sports, students could also take the opportunity to partake in subject related after school clubs such as a geology club or math club. Therefore, students should be able to establish the foundational life skills in the classroom such as teamwork, initiative and etc., which they would also use and partly learn in the extra curricular activities that they participate in at school and outside of school. As a teacher, I would like to ensure that my students are leaving my class learning everything that they are required and more, and storing it in their long-term memory system as an explicit memory. At the end of the day, all of this should occur in a classroom, one of the largest learning environments for a student. The environment in which a student feels comfortable enough to trust in shaping them to be a great human being.

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Bibliography
Adler, R. B., Rodman, G., & Sevigny, A. (2008). Understanding Human Communication. Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Oxford University Press Canada. Field, R. (2005, July 14). John Dewey (1859-1952). Retrieved October 22, 2011, from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/dewey/ Johnson, J. S. (2008). Deweyan Inquiry: From Education Theory to Practice. New York, United States of America: State University of New York. Marzano, J. S., Marzano, R. J., & Pickering, D. J. (2003). Classroom Management that works: Research- Based Strategies for Every Teacher. Alexandria, Virginia, United States of America: ASCD. Maslow, A., & Mintz, N. (1956). Effects of Esthetic Surroundings. Journal of Psychology , 247-254. Mitterer, J. O., & Santrock, J. W. (2005). Psychology (2nd Edition ed.). United States of America: Mcgraw-Hill Ryerson.