Simplify Your Classroom

How do you set up your classroom for success? ⁣
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It’s July and that usually means seeing ALL of the back to school posts. I’ve seen quite a few already, even though most of us don’t know what next year will look like. ⁣
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As someone who has taught for 18 years and spent time as both a general education teacher and special educator, taken numerous classes on being trauma-informed and resilience focused, and is actively working on becoming anti-racist, I know that trying to do all of these things can feel like A LOT….so I made a visual that helps me to organize it all and hopefully it’s helpful to you as well. ⁣
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The best analogy I can think of, is this – setting up your classroom is a lot like building a house. To build a house that is sturdy, you have to get dirty. You have to dig in, literally. When building our classrooms, we need to dig into information and research on things like: trauma-informed care and what that looks like, resilience, inclusion, diversity, brain functioning, sensory functioning, and developmentally appropriate practice…it’s a lot. I just want to pause here for a minute. Take a collective breath with me. I’m going to share with you something that hopefully helps you to align all of these.

By getting a better understanding of those topics, you can then lay the foundation of your house. You absolutely should do your own work on understanding all of these topics and be as well read and versed as you can be, however, as someone who has two degrees, is working on a certification, and has presented on some of these topics over the years…here’s what I want you to know. The components that run through each of these topics in education are this: meeting students where they are, creating connections, using a student’s individual strengths to reach and teach them, and responding to their individual needs. It means you see every child as the unique individual that they are and start there. What systems are you going to put in place in your classroom to be able to do this? Are you going to have flexible seating, movement breaks, etc? Are you going to allow the students to get up and move when they need to or have a snack if they need it (did you know eating can regulate yourself if you are feeling dysregulated)? If the answer to the second question is no, think about why that is. Is it for compliance? Safety? Think about professional development or staff meetings. Are you able to get up out of your seat or eat? Why do we expect children to act in a way that adults, actually their teachers, do not? No judgement, just genuinely asking.

The next part of simplifying your classroom is to decide what the pillars of your classroom are built around. I have a whole IGTV on this on my Instagram. You can find the video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CB3yrblhvhM/ Mine are the same as Starr Commonwealth’s Four Universal Needs : Belonging, Mastery, Independence, and Generosity. You can find out more about those here: https://starr.org/universal-needs/

After you have spent time building your foundation and creating your pillars, then you can add the roof, which is all of the academic content we teach. You may be wondering why I arranged them in this order or thought of them as house and here’s the thing that kept coming back to me. You can try to build a house without a foundation, but it won’t stand for very long. Just like a house without a foundation and support beams, a child who is stressed, struggling, or is not having one of their universal needs met, will collapse under the weight of all of the academic and cognitive content we are throwing at them. A stressed brain cannot learn.

I hope this was helpful for you to see that while we have a ton of things to juggle in education, all of the things aren’t meant to be in separate silos. They’re all meant to be together in one house (kind of like the Real World, but without the dysfunction 😂). In all seriousness though, we need to make sure we are building the strongest houses possible for our students. They deserve it.

Interested in hearing more about this? You can follow me on IG: https://www.instagram.com/thepurposefulclassroom or shoot me an email at shannon@thepurposefulclassroom.com