Classroom Climate - How Students' Perceptions Will Guide My Progress as a Teacher

Eighteen months ago (!), I wrote a blog post about classroom climate, which was essentially comparing my perceptions of my class with my students' perceptions of the class. This information was then used to adjust my teaching for that specific class.

I have continued to use the survey to adjust my teaching in my new school this year.

The graph above shows my end of year survey that I conducted with one of my classes and I will be using it to set my own teaching targets for next year. Although I won't be teaching all of this class next year, I feel that the teaching and learning that went on in that classroom was typical of my teaching and I didn't want to set my targets upon on average of all of my classes put together.

These questions were based on Professor Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds' research on classroom climate and effective teacher behaviours which are listed below. All go towards creating an effective classroom climate. Generally, all teachers should be aiming for as low a score as possible (the questions where this is perhaps debatable are highlighted below, but that is a whole other discussion!)

1. How fairly are students treated in the classroom?
2. Do students learn interesting things?
3. Do students behave in class?
4. Do students work in groups?
5. Do students find what they learn interesting?
6. Are students expected to get the work done?
7. How difficult is it for students to say they don’t understand?
8. How clear is it to students that the lesson relates to prior learning?
9. How neat and tidy is the classroom?
10. Do the students only get blamed when they have done something wrong?
11. Does learning seem fun in the classroom?
12. Do students pay attention in the class?
13. How clear are students on what they should have learned?
14. Do students damage each other’s things?
15. How easy is it to get excellent marks in the class?
16. Are students encouraged to help each other?
17. How clear are students on what they will be tested on?
18. What condition is the classroom kept in?
19. How fairly is work marked?
20. Do students get excited about what they are learning?
21. Do students speak when they should do in the classroom?
22. Are students allowed to discuss things in the classroom?
23. Do students hurt each other after class?
24. Are students expected to do their best on tests?
25. Are students encouraged to try again if things don’t work?
26. Do students get a chance to present in class?
27. Does the classroom always have fresh air?
28. Do students only get praise when they deserve it?
29. Are students encouraged to say what they think?
30. Are students expected to try really hard in the lesson?

If I analyse the data from my responses, the average positive differences (of over 2) between my and the students' perceptions of the climate were in questions 5, 11, 12, 13, 17, 21. This tells me that these things are better than I thought!

My pessimistic personality is perhaps shown that there were no negative average differences of over 2. However, I want to set my targets based upon what my students' perceptions say about the classroom climate so what did we both judge as being as being quite poor on the scale?

Target 1 - Do Students Get a Chance to Present in Class?

Although I also judged this to be poor in my classroom (5), my class judged this to be 3.4. There are probably some educators out there who would judge this to be a non-essential in the classroom, but I feel that it is a skill which every young person needs to develop so I will be doing my utmost to ensure that there are regular opportunities for my classes to present to each other in the classroom next year.

Target 2 - How Easy Is It to Get Excellent Marks in the Class?

For this question, I judged myself to be 3 and was rated 3.1. The problem with this question is that I feel that it isn't worded perfectly. To score 1, the student perception would be that 'it is easy to get excellent marks' and to score 6 the student perception would be that 'it is difficult get excellent marks'. This could be judged by the student to mean 'it is easy to get excellent marks because the work is far too easy for me', or it could be judged by the student to mean 'it is easy to get excellent marks because of the work that the teacher does to help me get there. 

However, I am going to set another target for my teaching to ensure that students feel like it is possible for them all to obtain excellent marks if they work hard. I will be trying to implement more strategies that will promote a Growth Mindset culture in the classroom.

Target 3 - Do Students Find What They Are Learning Interesting?

For this question, I judged myself to be 5 and was rated 3.1. This was one of the questions which I highlighted above as debatable which side of the scale was positive. On one side of the scale is 'students find what they learn interesting' and on the other 'students find what they learn boring'. This makes me think that this should be one of my targets. I don't want my students to find everything that they learn to be boring. Some things are out of my control, especially with the changes in set texts, but I believe that, in order to foster a love for learning and specifically a love for English, I need to make the lessons more consistently interesting.

As can be seen in the graph above, there were other questions where I scored below 3 by my students ('do students work in groups?'; 'do students get excited about what they are learning?'; 'does the classroom always have fresh air?'), but I've decided to focus on those targets next year to try and improve my students' perceptions of the classroom climate.

The Structure of Learning

The three part lesson. Beginning/middle/end. Starter/activity/plenary. This was what I was told was the best way to structure a lesson during my PGCE, so much so that every lesson plan was structured in this way. It was only during my placements, when I could speak to colleagues about different ways to structure a lesson, that I really thought about how important this is to a student's learning. Moving on to Cramlington Learning Village helped me further with the Accelerated Learning Cycle developed by Derek Wise, Mark Lovatt and Alistair Smith. Further reading of education blog posts, books and twitter has developed my thinking on the matter further, along with my development in my current role and school. So what is the right way of structuring a lesson?

Firstly, it's important to start out by saying that this is what works for me. It could work for other teachers, but ultimately you can't set out a learning structure for every teacher as they'll interpret in their own way. For instance, you could argue that every lesson that has ever been taught has the basic structure of the three-part lesson; it's just that teachers then interpret this in their own way. The Accelerated Learning Cycle has the elements of the three-part lesson; it is just broken down further.

To begin a lesson, you must always know where your students are in their knowledge. Unless you are trying to consolidate their knowledge, there is no point going over the same material again and again; you need to find out what they know and what they don't know. This needs to be done regularly, as what they might know one lesson, might be forgotten when it comes to the next lesson, hence the need for revisits to previous knowledge regularly. Therefore, the Do Now/Starter/Connect the Learning/Beginning needs to have some kind of assessment of the knowledge you are wanting them to learn, so that you know how to make progress with their understanding of that knowledge. To further complicate matters, this does not necessarily need to occur in that lesson, but might have happened in the previous lesson. The students' retrieval/understanding of that knowledge might have changed in that time, so it is always best to do the assessment at the start of the lesson.

This is where it gets even more complicated for the teacher! This is a crucial part of the lesson, as the teacher must decide (through their assessment of the students in the Do Now and the marking of the students' books) what they can do, as the teacher, to help the students' understanding/retrieval of the knowledge you want them to learn. Learning objectives/outcomes are shared (this is another future blog post of its own!) so that the pupils understand what they are attempting to learn, how they're going to learn it and how they will know that they are successful in doing so.

In order for the students to learn something, they need to have some new information shared with them. Whilst I initially thought this had to be done at the front in a didactic way, I have adjusted my thinking over the course of the last few years. All practitioners and theories seem to suggest that the new information should be shared via modelling and then the students practise the skill/knowledge learnt from it. This is present from a primary point of view, to active bloggers and from schools' lesson plan structures to education bigwigs. This could be argued to be the 'middle', the 'activity' or the 'demonstration of the new learning', but it should be present so that the students can essentially be introduced to the new idea and practise it.

Whilst this is going on, the teacher and student should be consistently assessing where the students are in their learning. The student should use the learning objectives shared at the start of the lesson to assess where they are in their learning and how they can learn even more essentially. This can include a 'final assessment' at the end of the lesson cycle structure, but the teacher and student should be seeing what stage the student is with their learning and what they can do to improve. 

The problem with all of this, is that it doesn't always nestle nicely into the time period allocated for a lesson. This is why I'd suggest that this isn't necessarily a 'lesson structure', but is instead a 'learning structure'. At the start of my practice, I was trying to neatly fit the Accelerated Learning Cycle into every lesson, which very rarely worked. When I spoke to Mark Lovatt about this, he instead suggested that it isn't designed for a lesson, but for part of a lesson, a one-off lesson, a series of lessons or longer. Thus you could have a whole 'lesson' of modelling and practising the knowledge with the consistent assessment embedded, if the knowledge/skill could not be learnt into a one-off lesson. A teacher should not be thinking about how to structure their lesson, but instead be thinking about how they can structure the students' learning.

The Percentage Board

As with most teaching ideas for the classroom, this one has been adapted from an idea by another teacher. I have no idea who that teacher was or how I came by acquiring this, but thank you!

I have used the percentage board as an English teacher, but it can be adapted for all subjects. It is simply a print out of:

0%; 25%; 50%; 75%; and 100%

These are stuck on the wall as a straight line which the students can then use to stick post-it notes (or other item if needs be) to indicate a percentage. This can be used as:

• Students' agreement of a character's decision
• Students' certainty of their argument
• How hard they have worked this lesson
• What percentage of the learning objectives they achieved

And countless other uses. I have adapted it slightly to get the student using the post-it notes to record information which I can then use for future lessons. 

For example, the picture above shows my class' responses to the question 'How confident am I with structuring an analysis on Shakespeare's language?' The overview quickly shows me that the majority of the class are between 40% and 80% confident. Although students' understanding of where they are is not always accurate, it lets me know how confident they are to how confident they should be.

I can then look at the post-it notes afterwards to see each individual's response to not only the question above, but more importantly 'Why am I this confident when structuring an analysis on Shakespeare's language?'

For instance, this student suggests that they are 70% confident because they cannot explain the effect the language has on the reader. 

Whereas this student has a different reason, but is still at 70% confidence.

This allows you to see the students' thinking behind their responses. With this information I was able to give support to the first student around the effect the language has on the reader, whilst to the second student I supported only the start of their analysis.

I also used the percentage board when meeting a new character in a novel. On the board, there were five facts about a new character that they hadn't met; the students had to make deductions about what they could predict about the character and how certain they could be.

e.g. Information on board:

1. Former boxer
2. Wife doesn't care about him
3. His dad is the boss of the ranch
4. Small in height
5. Likes to fight big people

With this information, my year 9 class were able to deduce that the character might get into a fight with another character who flirts with this wife. The student was only 20% sure of this.

Another deduction was that the character was aggressive - the student was 80% of this. 

The percentage board is a very simple visual tool which can be adapted to all subjects for different uses.