Journal #4

Journal #4: Beliefs as Filters? Effects on Class Building

“Beliefs as Filters…” (Roose, Vantieghem, Vanderlinde, Van Averaet, 2019) piqued my interest. Reading this article made me realize that, despite being well-intentioned and understanding people, teachers aren’t infallible. We are only human, and so we bring subtle, unintended biases into our work. Bringing inclusivity into our classrooms is hard: the more diversity we encounter, the more work we must do to ensure equity.

At my school, we take class-building very seriously. Each May or June, we work as a team to create the most balanced, reasonable classes possible for our upcoming year. We consider both social and academic needs of children. Our discussions largely reflect a need to balance: enough boys and girls? Enough of the older grade group and younger? Strong learners blended with ones with learning challenges? Students who present with behavior challenges verses those that do not.

As a means to efficiently identify students who, for one reason or another, are prone to taking up a larger amount of “teacher time“ than others, our class building process asks teachers to colour-code students. The school uses stop-light colours: green denotes “typical” students, yellow flags students who take up more teacher time than is expected, and red denotes students whose needs are great, and will likely present challenges to their teacher in the following year.

The problem I see with this system is that students identified as yellow or red will more likely face teacher bias. While these learners may not necessarily have some of the traits identified by Roose, et al., as likely to be diversity filters (“i.e. ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status and disability”), they still face being identified from the outset as “challenging”. This amounts to a “learning challenge”, or a “behavior challenge” filter. I can’t help but think that there has to be a better way.

The colour-coding system is not fail-safe anyway. Every year, one or more teachers seem to end up with a discordant group of learners – “misfits” and anxious children, bullies and followers, the quick-tempered and the hyper-competitive, the mistrustful and the untruthful, wriggly ones and reluctant participators. Classes built with the best of intentions in May look reasonable on paper. But in September, classrooms may seem less safe than the ones that at-risk learners left in June. For these children, in these new environments, learning readiness is more difficult to achieve.

This brings me back to my first point; that teachers with more diverse classrooms must work harder to ensure an equitable learning environment for all. (Equality, of course, is one of the most critical elements of the CREATIVE framework, and is one of the primary drivers of differentiated instruction.) Readiness for learning might look quite different for any given child. Students must feel safe, feel good, and feel that their teacher believes in them. These preconditions for readiness rely on consistent, positive teacher-student interactions.

Achieving the state of learning readiness will follow a different route for every child, and perhaps more so for the most diverse learners. This is a strong argument for personalizing instruction. Classes are never homogenous groupings. As described above, they can often be more diverse than expected. Teachers should see this as a challenge, but not a challenge of “behavior management”, or of “academic adaptation”, but a challenge of finding and providing the optimal learning conditions for each and every individual child in their care.

Roose, I., Vantieghem, W., Vanderlinde, R., & Van Avermaet, P. (2019). Beliefs as filters for comparing inclusive classroom situations. connecting teachers’ beliefs about teaching diverse learners to their noticing of inclusive classroom characteristics in videoclips. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 56, 140-151. doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.01.002