Enlivenminds’ Ten Pathways to a More Inclusive Classroom

1) Promoting Education of All Students Equally

In order for the best learning environment to take place, the teacher will value all students equally. This means playing no favorites, balancing the participation among all students, respecting gender, race, religion and any other identifying facts. This approach is not complete with just the teacher adopting equality; more importantly, the teacher must be hyper-vigilant about how students are interacting with or responding to each other, and the teacher’s modelling, correcting, and guiding will be of significant importance in promoting equality.

2) Creating Learning Centers in the Classroom

We will see more of these classroom structures with multiple centers in the K-8 divisions of school; I feel there is a place for these in high school as well, albeit with a teenage appropriate purpose. Giving young children options within an environment of multiple learning centers will give them comfort, assurance, and compatibility so that their learning strengths or emotional needs at the moment can be best channeled into a center suitable to their disposition or learning style. A place to read to oneself; a place to collaborate with other students quietly; a place for working on the computer; a place to learn while

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standing up; a place for high challenge and enrichment learning—the options are many, but the availability of choices for students will be conducive to an inclusive classroom where student needs are honored and respected.

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3) Valuing Differences

There is an art to valuing differences in the classroom. The teacher who does this well will seek to know each of her/his students and will develop and grow that knowledge as the year progresses. As knowledge grows, so will the references the teacher makes to each student’s unique qualities, interests and perhaps tidbits of family information and background. These touch points in the classroom are vital to fostering diversity awareness and acceptance among the students. Of course, diversity awareness must extend to the subject matter as well, such as cultural

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studies, global studies, regional and geographic differences on the planet. When teachers value differences within the content of their subjects, and equally apply appreciation of differences among the students in the classroom, that’s a recipe for establishing a mutually respectful atmosphere.

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4) Culturally Responsive Teaching

This approach to teaching is less about making associations between the lessons and the ethnic or racial backgrounds represented among the students in your classroom. It isn’t about choosing only anecdotes or stories whose characters or locations are similar to those among the minority students in the class. Rather, culturally responsive teaching has more to do with instruction that reflects the cultural learning styles among the students. Some students may have more experience with learning from oral strategies; others will have sing-song ways to promote memorization; others may want to role play to understand lessons; some prefer a more social approach to learning,

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such as small group problem-solving; others work best independently and quietly; still others will like to fashion a story in order to make the lesson come alive. Going back to my emphasis in several locations on this site, I put the responsibility on the teacher to know her/his students well, and an important part of that knowledge will be how that student learns best, what traditions their family may be committed to, what their background and home environment is like. It takes time and effort to become a culturally responsive teacher.

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5) Academic Support Across the Board:

The common perception or expectation that the classroom teacher needs to teach “down the center” of her/his students, because the highly capable kids will take care of themselves and all those with learning issues will be addressed by the school’s professional support staff, is completely out of step of where teaching needs to be. Yes, there is such a thing as learning specialists, and these people are very valuable in the school’s organization, yet teachers must reach out to all capabilities in the classroom.

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Failure to make this sincere effort each and every day is tantamount to malpractice. This is a matter of inclusivity because no matter what the capability, teachers must approach their profession with the mindset of having high expectations for all students, but this doesn’t mean having uniform expectations. The bar needs to be set above those highly capable students, just like it needs to be set above those who need accommodations or methods that address their learning profile—yet the absolute elevation of that bar is different, of course, for these student types. Unfortunately, in schools the energy, resources, teacher team meetings, and such are typically geared around supporting those students with learning challenges of one kind or another—I think this focus is laudable, but often the highly capable children get ignored in the frenzy to help the other end of the spectrum. This should not be a zero sum game—all students need our effort and attention.

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6) Creating a Welcoming Environment:

For children, effective learning and sufficient motivation to learn don’t just happen in a vacuum. The classroom environment, specifically the tone that the teacher sets and maintains every day, is crucial for students to enter into the zone of engagement. When I mention a “welcoming environment,” I am referring to the tone of mutual respect that the teacher must cultivate between students and teacher, and also this same tone must take root student to student. There are many touches that teachers miss

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when it comes to opportunities to be welcoming: for example, immediately following an episode of teacher correction of a student behavior, that student should be welcomed back into the lesson and the activity and embraced fully; likewise, the tardy student need not be reprimanded upon walking into the room (that issue can be dealt with later via one to one communication), but should be promptly settled in and welcomed into the flow of the classroom proceedings. Creating a welcoming tone means honoring all voices and questions in the classroom; it means welcoming all perspectives; it means seeking out contrasting opinions when students all seem to be on the same page with a point of view. It can also mean communicating value to each and every student, so that the chess player will get the same kudos that the star athlete gets. Brain research tells us that a welcoming, supportive tone in one’s classroom environment will keep anxieties at bay and will allow the right components of the brain to be firing. The tone of welcoming also includes establishing a sense of belonging for each student—this takes skill on the part of the teacher, but it is definitely possible to establish social norms inside the classroom that can cut through the cliques and tensions that form outside the classroom.

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7) Being an Ally for the LGBTQ+ Community:

This topic will come across to many, understandably, as a topic pertinent only to college campuses, but the K12 school community must also be a locale whereby all students, of whatever identity, feel they have their teachers’ and administrators’ support. Standing up for differences, and setting the classroom stage and tone to allow support for identity differences, is crucial in today’s school environment. If teachers or school leaders stray or duck from overt support, or falter in their expectation that all students should feel welcome, then the school’s spirit of community can quickly unravel.

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This is why sex education, or what some schools call human growth and development courses, in the middle school years becomes so vital for preparing students to embrace diversity as they head into high school and beyond, because these phases of schooling will be the time these issues play out most prominently. I recognize that school cultures will be at very different stages in their cultivation of diversity and in their willingness to openly educate the community on LGBTQ+ awareness and issues, but it is vital that we don’t ignore this element of identity when it comes to establishing a welcoming environment for all.

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8) Teaching Tolerance

Some may regard the word tolerance as a meek word, a ground floor attitude in the upward gradation of attitudes necessary to achieve full acceptance and the celebration of differences—of minorities, gender identities, immigrants, disabilities, socio-economic diversity, or religious identity. But tolerance is extremely important in schools, as typically children seldom receive at home a thorough acclimation to understanding diversity, nor are they learning from home the practice and values relevant to tolerance or appreciation of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and such.

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While it takes superb teacher expertise to create a fully embracing atmosphere in the classroom where differences are celebrated, one way all teachers can advance the teaching of tolerance is by leveraging the curriculum that already have in place—the literature through the years, the social studies projects, or even classroom discussion on scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The opportunities are almost always right there in front of teachers to angle their instruction in ways to teach tolerance and to educate children about racial and ethnic or religious experiences or achievements among characters in literature and real people from history. Inclusivity is not just a teacher’s attitude toward students; rather, it should be an overarching goal of how content and knowledge is treated and made manifest in the classroom.

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9) Safe Places and Mindfulness

The most overlooked element in getting to whole child education is the social/emotional. With so much emphasis on quantitative assurances that we are advancing students along the trajectory of standards, skills, and curricula, the attention necessary for qualitative social/emotional learning gets shortchanged. Because anxiety is rising among schoolchildren to an alarming degree, it is paramount that teachers take the time to implement daily strategies to calm children down, get them academically ready following transitions, and moderate their hyperactivity in order to provide for the most conducive atmosphere possible for learning. Safe places may sound like an early childhood

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corner of the classroom, but some form of the safe place can still be valid for many years throughout the K8 sector of schools.  Alone time, quiet time, decompression time—you name it; some call it an inappropriate indulgence, but emotional stresses are real and they can mount quickly among children, leading to disastrous results if not tended to. Adopting mindfulness strategies—breathing exercises, kinesthetic preparation and breaks, relaxation exercises—will calm the air and allow students to re-enter the field of positive engagement. Mindfulness is not a curriculum, and it is not a time-consumer, as many consider it. Mindfulness is meant to increase the time of effective learning throughout the day.

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10) Celebrate Togetherness and Community

Developing a classroom culture of togetherness takes a lot of time—not time away from the syllabus, but time invested in the methods, the tone, and the awareness that teachers must bring each day in order to build cohesion in the classroom. This is never a matter of simply barking out rules on day one.  A classroom culture of mutual support takes a lot of teachable moments, lots of diversity awareness, lots of time knowing each child, plus time for consistency to take hold and respect to be cultivated among the students. One of the glues that can cement progress toward building classroom community is that of celebration.

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I don’t see celebration as a reward or a carrot at all; celebrations have to be woven into the classroom without fanfare. The teacher just needs to determine when the time is ripe to take a few minutes to celebrate each other. And this doesn’t mean snacks and treats and party hats; it means switching gears and trying out some game playing, role playing, something out of the ordinary that is fun and engages all students, and that may still be delivering on the skills and content of the class. I’ll leave this up to the imagination of the teachers, and even the imagination of the students to come up with games or activities that can be invoked from time to time, when things are going well, and everyone is in the mood for some playful learning.

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