​​​​Jason Wakeman​

In my classroom I try to create an environment for learning. This is largely a matter of lesson planning, communicating purpose to my students, and ensuring that their work is meaningful--both educationally and to my students themselves. A big part of this, as I've already discussed, is my use of Understanding by Design, which I use to create units in which each activity is closely tied to the focus standards we are working on and performance tasks that can meaningfully demonstrate those skills.

A more tangible way in which I construct a learning environment is through the poster I construct and display in my classroom. In the gallery to the left, you can see a number of different posters from my classroom. Several--Hayakawa's Ladder of Abstraction, Bloom's Taxonomy, etc.--are anchor posters. Constructed by myself or my lead teacher prior to our units, these posters visualize important skills or concepts that we can then reference throughout our teaching. They are helpful visuals when first introducing concepts, but they are more helpful as anchors, fixed points we can reference continually throughout the year. This continual relevance helps students see what we learn really is important going forward. It is not merely an arbitrary hoop to be jumped through and then forgotten.    

Other posters in the gallery are constructed with students during units and discussions. These serve to record and display student learning. The elements of narratives poster, for example, was constructed by students as a conclusion to their discussion of Sherman Alexie's "Superman and Me" and referenced later in our unit when students began writing their own narratives. 

Like our reconstructed anchor posters, these serve to highlight the purpose and interconnectedness of what they are learning, but I find student constructed posters to be more powerful since they capture the thinking of a specific group of students. The "How should we understand difference?" semantic scale is one of three, constructed in one of our three sections of sophomore English. On the scale each class was able to place two authors we had recently read according to where they thought the author stood on the question, "are there universal cultural values?" We also used it as a vocabulary sort before beginning the second reading, sorting key terms I picked out from the reading. This way, as we read, we were able to refer back to the scale, adjusting the position of different terms. 

In this way, student discussion can become an ongoing process in which students have genuine control. If one group comes to different conclusions, those conclusions can be revisited in later lessons. Rather than directing each group towards a single conclusion, or worse ignoring groups that come to outlying conclusions, that dialogue is respected and relevant as we move through the unit. What they say has a real impact on what we do and talk about later in the unit. 

Creating this environment in which what students do actually matters--which to my mind isn't possible unless it results in real control over their environment--goes a long way in establishing respect and rapport not only between myself and my students but between students as well.