Before you start reading, think back on the class in which you learned the most, or think back on the professional environment in which you performed your best work, and ask yourself the following questions:
Although many words may come to mind, one of the main motifs that you will probably find running through and connecting all of them is the concept of safety. When people feel safe in the workplace, they tend to do their best work. When children feel safe at school, they tend to learn the most. When we think about college students, the same pattern applies to their learning and performance levels. Students of all ages learn best when their environment enables them to take risks, participate, and focus on class content; one way to create such an environment is to foster the emotional and intellectual safety of our students. In doing so, instructors can improve the success rates of their students. This blog entry will discuss emotional and intellectual safety in the college classroom and will follow the format:
Emotional SafetyWhat? Emotional safety in the classroom refers to an experience in which a student feels safe to be her/himself in front of a professor and/or peers, feels secure as a participant in the classroom with valued ideas, and feels confident in her/his ability to succeed and try new things. So What? When students feel emotionally unsafe, they are unable to complete work to their best ability. A professor could be doing everything right in the classroom, but once she/he loses a student’s sense of safety and trust, she/he has lost the ability to truly reach that student. This is evidenced in “To My Professor: Student Voices For Great College Teaching”, a book written based on interviews with students from the University of Michigan, who made statements like:
This same loss of trust occurs when students are allowed to treat each other disrespectfully or judgmentally in class during discussions or participation in group work. A professor’s lack of attention to student behavior can lead to students feeling emotionally unsafe with each other, which will also impact student performance on tasks and comprehension of content. Student success requires emotional safety across all relationships within the educational environment, and as a result, emotional safety needs to become a priority in course planning and management. Now What? Below, you will find some suggestions for establishing and maintaining a sense of emotional safety for your students: Strategy 1: Keep it professional...even when it’s personal The first thing that faculty members can do to encourage a sense of emotional safety in the classroom is to remain professional, even during personal moments. It always a challenge to try to build relationships with your students, to keep up rapport and connection, but the line can too easily be crossed even with the best intentions. You know those moments before and after class, when students are shuffling in or out, where conversation can be non-academic? Those moments are when the best teacher-student relationships can be built, or when students can become distressed by a comment that wasn’t supportive, was over a line, or was critical but not constructive. Professors are encouraged to always ask themselves, “Will the student grow and feel supported if I say this? If not, is there another way that I can say it?” When faculty members stop themselves first and reflect on the above questions, a student’s emotional crisis could be averted. Strategy 2: Teach Teamwork A second strategy that can be used to promote student-student emotional safety is instructor-structured discussions, teamwork, and assignments. This can be done in a variety of ways such as: providing “sentence starters” for group discussions (e.g. “Although you make an excellent point, I’d like to suggest the consideration of the following angle…”, etc.), developing criteria/rubrics for collaboration so that participation & contribution is equal among all students, teaching collaborative skills explicitly, and monitoring team progress closely. Oftentimes, professors innocently expect that students will come to college prepared with the interpersonal skills needed to function on a team, work well with others, etc, however, this is frequently not the case. When professors actively work to teach the social and interpersonal skills, as well as modeling the desired behavior, using team rubrics, and structuring assignments, they create an environment where students feel empowered to thrive rather than feeling fearful or insecure about their place. Intellectual SafetyWhat? Intellectual safety in the classroom refers to the fostering of an environment where students feel comfortable sharing ideas or opinions openly and freely. So What? When students feel intellectually unsafe in their educational environment, they feel restricted in their thinking and question their ability to think for themselves. As one student from the University of Michigan said in the book, “To My Professor: Student Voices for Great College Teaching”:
An educational environment should be based on trust...not simply on tolerance. If a student does not trust the person who is questioning her/his idea, it is likely that the student will feel criticized rather than critiqued. As a result, that student may “shut down” and stop trying to push the boundaries of her/his own intellectual capacity, as the desire to conform or please the professor begins to outweigh intellectual curiosity. In essence, intellectually unsafe environments potentially reduce a student’s personal success as a thinker and scholar. Now What? One way to foster a sense of intellectual safety is to create a strong sense of classroom community, where student voices are able to be heard on a regular basis. Below, you will find four strategies that can help to establish such a community: Strategy 1: Develop Shared Norms This strategy works well at the beginning of a course, but could be implemented at any time. To start, split the class into small groups - say, three- four students in each - and provide each group with a piece of chart paper. Students will work together to generate a list of four rules/expectations that they think are necessary for the class to run effectively; once each group has come to a consensus, students will record their lists onto the chart paper. Once all of the groups are finished working, one student from each will be asked to share her/his group’s list and justifications to the class. Generally, there are commonalities between the lists and the rules/expectations that the students produce will likely be what the professor would produce if she/he generated a list him/herself. Finally, the class will collectively select the top four rules/expectations - chosen from the groups’ lists - and these top four will become their guiding rules for the remainder of the course. This strategy not only increases student accountability and agency, but it allows students to feel a sense of belonging in the class. This activity can foster a sense of individual value and mutual respect, which in turn fosters a sense of intellectual safety. Strategy 2: Jigsaw Activity Place students in groups of four or five; assign each student within the group a different number. The number that they receive corresponds with the section of text that they are responsible for reading, annotating, and developing a summary for. After the given time frame has ended, each member of the group is responsible for “teaching” the other students their section of the text that they were responsible for. For particularly complex texts, provide all group members with the same piece of text. Group members will work together to decipher or analyze that piece of text. Next, students will regroup - according to the numbers you provided - and teach their peers about the piece of text that they were responsible for. This concept of “everyone getting to be the teacher” helps equalize student voices and allows everyone to feel responsible, accountable, and valued. Strategy 3: Look Diversity In The Eye. In order to increase intellectual safety in the classroom, professors should be actively teaching diversity. It is a common misconception that “teaching diversity” means acting colorblind, however diversity is something that could be brought up on a regular basis, in the right way, to help develop trust. When hard topics are shied away from, we are not teaching students how to cope with and communicate about them...we are simply teaching them to turn away, which sends the message that diversity isn’t accepted or celebrated. To start, professors can invest time from the beginning of the semester in learning about their students’ backgrounds, interests, and needs, and then incorporate this information into lesson planning. A simple strategy for gathering information - without using too much class time - is distributing interest or background inventory surveys. This tool is quick, efficient, and easy to find on the web, plus there are hundreds of variations of surveys that already exist, so professors can choose choose which one they think might be the best fit. Strategy 4: Socratic Seminar Once the course is underway, professors can also use a “Socratic Seminar” activity to structure conversations or debates on controversial topics. The following link provides further information on the process of setting up a socratic seminar in the classroom: http://www2.ncte.org/blog/2017/12/crafting-conducting-successful-socratic-seminar/ . The socratic seminar is a fantastic strategy to equalize student voice, as well as to address topical diversity in a structured, safe way. SummaryIn sum, while most students can easily follow basic rules, absorb basic information, and regurgitate that information in class, w when emotional and intellectual safety are present, students go from inactive to active, from quiet to heard, from regurgitating to learning, from absorbing to thinking. Professors who work to create emotionally and intellectually safe environments for their students are upping the anti in education and are truly giving students the opportunity to reach their fullest potential as thinkers and scholars. We salute you! Sources1. Carmeli, Abraham, et al. “Learning Behaviours in the Workplace: The Role of High-Quality Interpersonal Relationships and Psychological Safety.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, vol. 26, no. 1, 2009, pp. 81–98., doi:10.1002/sres.932.
2. Quiros, Laura, et al. “Creating Emotional Safety in the Classroom and in the Field.” 3. Airwood, Bryce, et al. To My Professor: Student Voices for Great College Teaching: What College Students Really Say about Their Instructors: with Advice from Master Educators and Teacher Trainers. Read the Spirit Books, 2016.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |