Civil and Reflective Classrooms

Engaging Students’ Lived Experiences To Inform Instruction

Your students will come to you with lived experiences that can inform and enhance your classroom practice. Take time to have them reflect on their experiences from the past, have a voice in recalibrating classroom practices to create routines for success, and engage in a collective renewal of goals throughout the school year.

The following activities can be used to help students reflect on their lived experiences with the essential questions being explored in the curriculum. Choose one to start with and use the others to check in throughout the year to recalibrate classroom practices.

• Have students individually complete the following sentence, “When I think about (topic), I feel_____ because____.”

Use some of the Visible Thinking Routines from Project Zero

• Compass Point Reflection has students identify something that is worrisome, exciting, a need to know, and a suggestion for moving forward.
• Color, Symbol, Image students share and discuss color, a symbol and an image they think represents the topic for inquiry.
• 3-2-1 Bridge can be used to have students identify 3 ideas they have about the topic at hand, 2 questions they have, and 1 idea they have for moving forward.
• Claim, Support, Question can be used to have students make a claim about the topic at hand, support it with evidence from their past experiences, and ask questions they have.

Collect the responses and display them in a chart or word cloud. Discuss the responses. Engage in a proactive conversation about what can be done to address past issues and create new routines.

• Question Formulation Technique provides a simple protocol to have students develop, revise, and use questions in civic inquiry.
• The Q Matrix provides question starters at various Depths of Knowledge.
• Visible Thinking strategies from Project Zero provides question strategies including See-Think-Wonder and Think-Puzzle-Explore.
• The 5 Whys Technique has students create a series of questions to probe deeply into the root causes of current and societal issues.
• Is Your Classroom Academically Safe?  from Cult of Pedagogy provides powerful ways you can make your classroom a place where students feel free to ask questions and take academic risks.

Engaging Student Voice In Creating Norms

One of the essential questions addressed in any classroom is “How Should We Live Together?” Address this prompt at the start of school in the context of the classroom, whether in person or online. Students must feel safe and secure in the learning environment. Student voices should be included in establishing and maintaining expectations.

• Ask students to imagine a space that was educational, productive, and comfortable for learning. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What does it sound like? Capture these ideas in a collective online document and then discuss the norms that both teachers and students can operate under to make that vision a reality.
• Class Contracting from Facing History and Ourselves can be used to help students discuss expectations and norms of how class members will treat each other.
• Have students jot down their needs for a successful learning experience with a common google doc or with a tool like Padlet. Have students in breakout groups organize the ideas into categories and share them with the larger group to reach a consensus.

Tools for Building Community in Traditional, Remote, and Hybrid Classrooms

Many of your students belong to one or more communities. Why? They feel a connection, they are curious, the community adds value to their life. Successful communities are built with intention. You will have to build your classroom community with intention too.

• Learning for Justice shares the importance of creating a Classroom Culture to foster respect for oneself and others and its uses.
• Edutopia has 10 Powerful Community Building Activities.
• Dave Stuart Jr. has great tips on How to Humanize Your Classroom or School When You’re Teaching from a Distance: Principles and Practices.
• Ditch That Textbook shares 50 Back-to-School Activities for the Remote Learning Classroom.
• Award-winning educator Pernille Ripp responds to the question, But How Do We Build Community? Ideas for Virtual and Hybrid Learning.
• Cult of Pedagogy has a 4-Part System for Getting to Know Your Students.
• Restorative Justice Circles  Templates to explore the habits of mind through a restorative justice circle format. 

Leveraging Technology to Build Rapport and Collaboration

Twenty-first-century workplaces require skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity. Start with what you know and then slowly add new tools to your toolbox. Don’t forget families and students! Here is a Comprehensive Student/Parent Tutorial Guide to help these educational partners navigate online spaces.

• Edutopia has collected Essential Apps for the Physical and Digital classrooms. These are teacher-recommended tools for promoting collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, and equity whether students are in school or at home.
• Need a refresh or tutorial on some of the Distance Learning Tools available, these resources have you covered!
• John Spencer recently shared ideas on Improving Student Collaboration in Remote and Hybrid Learning.
• The New EdTech Classroom has How to Teach Remotely: The Ultimate Guide.
• The Return to Learn Playbook has resources promoting engagement, feedback, and communication in any learning environment.

• Rewordify.com. to simplify text language
• Text to Speech Reader.– free Google extension
• Talk Points. is a free tool to communicate with families in their home language.
• Read Aloud. is a text-to-speech voice reader.
• Announcify is a Chrome extension that lets students listen to articles on the web.
• Voice In Voice Typing. allows students to voice in their keyboarding on any website.
• Dyslexia Friendly. increases the readability of websites by changing to easier-to-read fonts and adding visual enhancements.

Tools For Formative Assessment And Reflection

How do we know students are learning? How can we use assessment not merely as an “autopsy” of learning, but as a tool for reflection that enhances the learning process?

• 56 Formative Assessment Ideas, curated by David Wees, Formative assessment specialist, New Visions for Public Schools
• Edutopia – 53 Ways to Check for Understanding
• Formative Assessment Tools
• 75 Tools to Improve Student Learning – Stefanie Wager, Iowa DOE
• Reflective Writing and Thinking – UTM Experiential Education Office
• Visible Thinking: Harvard University Project Zero
• I used to think, now I think…
• What makes you say that?
• IllinoisCivics.org hosted a one hour webinar that demonstrated how the resources above can be used in remote learning spaces.