Every semester and every class, I wonder what the classroom culture is going to be. I often have very positive classroom cultures, and I often attribute that largely to my approach to teaching [pats own back]. However, every once in a while I have a class where everything falls apart, and the class feels like poison to walk into. The class is grumpy and doesn't want to work or think, and I turn from prompting participation to requesting it, or even begging. Usually I am unable to turn such a class around to a positive and supportive culture. I know that my students hate it every bit as much as I do, and we all just wish the semester would end. This might manifest as a class that is just non-participatory and sluggish, or worse as a class that is actively vocalizing bad attitudes. When the latter happens, I can usually point to 1 or 2 students who were vocal about their bad attitudes in just the right way to infect the entire class.
Wait.
This is also true of the great classes. The classes that I love to walk into, where everyone has become friends, and they are texting on weekends to talk about math, and they all go "wow" whenever we settle another concept. Those classes, too, I can usually point to 1 or 2 students who were vocal about their positive attitudes in just the right way to infect the entire class. So maybe it's not about my approach to teaching [hold off on that self-back-pat].
I mean, I know that I do some good things as a teacher, and I firmly believe that I generally influence my classroom cultures toward the positive side of the spectrum. But I want to find ways to be far more intentional about the specific classroom culture I engineer, so that it is less dependent on the particular group of students that make up the class.
This semester, I have to observe a colleague in a class that has turned to poison. He's looking for help, and I honestly don't know what to say to help him. So I'm turning to the internet: what resources can you suggest, say reading materials or specific tools to try, to help us recover from unproductive/uncomfortable classroom culture? And what resources do you have to help us get better at engineering a more intentional classroom culture from the beginning?
I feel like it's relevant to mention that I teach at a community college, where students are adults who are in our classrooms for 150–250 minutes per week, and the classrooms are almost all built to cram exactly 45 students sitting side-by-side and facing the front of the room. None of these outright barriers, but definitely large hurdles for a lot of the group-work goals I aspire to. Also, I still think I'd have this issue even if I had better group-work habits in the classroom.
