Building and Sustaining a Classroom Community

April 10, 2025

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Welcome to the Teaching Toolbox. I am grateful to you for reading this edition. Before we begin, let’s start by greeting someone nearby and asking them the last song they listened to or the last book they read. Okay, now let’s take a couple of deep breaths to center ourselves and focus on learning together.

This opening is representative of my general welcome ritual for one of my classes in an attempt to foster a sense of community that will support classroom learning. I welcome students to class, encourage them to check in with one another, and help them recognize that they are now entering a learning space for the next 75 minutes built around our classroom norms.

But what I have been recognizing is that this welcome ritual needs to be supported by additional actions to sustain a classroom community that supports student learning. Therefore, I have been puzzling over the following questions:

• Do I really know the students? I do use a beginning-of-the-semester survey to get to know the students, disclose information about myself, and create a learning environment associated with their goals, interests, and needs. I also continue to develop rapport with students and check-in with students throughout the semester. Yet is the classroom community welcoming to all students? Have I made certain assumptions about students? Are my attempts to create a sense of community intrusive? How do I address outside factors that influence our learning community? Are there factors I am not considering that influence the sense of community?
• Do I really support student learning appropriately? I do mid-semester check-in to get a sense of how I can better support learning. But am I grading assignments in ways that support learning? Am I doing enough to motivate learning as the semester progresses? Are early interventions needed to support student success? Am I engaging in overfunctioning that is denying students opportunities to grow and learn? Am I drawing appropriate boundaries?
• Does the class really abide by the classroom norms? This semester I start each class reminding students of our classroom norms and connecting them to the activities we are doing for the day. I have also started praising the class and individual students that I find engaging in the classroom norms. But am I modelling these behaviors in the classroom? Am I reinforcing these norms in class? Do I intentionally embed these norms into classroom activities? Am I providing opportunities for shared learning experiences that support the metacognitive skills students will need to be successful in the learning community? And are the community and its associated norms something that are really valued by the students?

Overall, while I feel like I am making progress on building a sense of community (celebrate my successes and learn from my failures), I still have a lot more to do to build and sustain a classroom community that supports student learning. Thanks to Courtney Plotts (2024), I am thinking about the classroom culture more broadly incorporating community, collaboration, and thinking. Finally, I am more thoughtfully considering how classroom membership is established and nurtured, my process for developing shared norms and values, and how I intentionally structure the class culture over the course of the semester. I shall see how this new view and my personal reflections unfold during the next academic year.