What is your process for building positive classroom culture? Do you focus on making your space organized and welcoming? Do you greet students and make everyone feel accepted? Perhaps you throw energy into planning meaningful activities. Or maybe you strive for a spirit of collaboration where learners have input on classroom life.
If you are intentional about classroom culture, it is likely that you invest in all these endeavors. But do students always respond in the way you envision? Prevailing advice on how to create supportive environments works wonderfully . . . until it doesn’t.
Whose fault is it?
When my efforts at building culture backfire (e.g., when students belittle each other or make trouble instead of participate in learning), I sometimes blame myself: “I must be some kind of loser if I can’t get this right.” On other occasions, I blame the students: “How do I build a positive learning environment when these kids keep wrecking it?”
Where does the fault really lie, and where can we turn when the classroom culture falls to pieces?
Maybe we need to reexamine the ways we have been conditioned to think about this important aspect of teaching. Classroom culture is often presented as an entirety that we create or build. These terms imply that any professional should be able to construct a supportive learning environment: all we need are willpower and the right set of tools.
What is classroom culture?
But let’s first clarify what we are trying to build. What is classroom culture? I perceive classroom culture as the collective attitudes or values that shape the way a learning community functions. Learners in a healthy classroom culture may be marked by a prevailing sense of curiosity, respect for diversity, and desire for mutual success. By contrast, individuals in an unhealthy classroom culture (one devoid of mutual respect) tend to chase after things like attention or status (the right to fit in). Or they work to avoid being seen as wrong, incompetent, or different.
If a learning environment acquires its character from the norms and values that members collectively hold, is it really possible to fashion a culture in the same way that a carpenter frames a structure to match a particular design?
Lumber vs. children
During summer breaks, I rejuvenate by working on home-repair projects for neighbors in my community. As much as I enjoy the spontaneity and originality of children, carpentry refreshes me because the materials are passive—they don’t push back. But what if lumber had a mind of its own? Imagine my distress if freshly installed joists or railings suddenly began to rearrange themselves!
Here’s the deal: we teachers work with human beings, not planks and sheetrock. The children who occupy our learning spaces say things and do things. They hold personal opinions about school work and initiate classroom interactions. For these reasons, the notion of classroom culture as a building project can set us up for disappointment.
Don’t get me wrong: our creative efforts do make a difference. We should work at inviting students to value learning, and we should insist that they treat each other kindly. But we can’t presume to fasten learners in place the same way builders secure lumber with screws and nails.
Collective contributions
What is more, children’s opinions have ways of spreading, especially when those sentiments are held by prominent figures in the social network. It seems that both teachers and students contribute to classroom culture. As Farmer and colleagues state,
When students are aggregated together within a social unit, such as a classroom, their interpersonal activities and social behavior tend to be guided by two distinct processes (Farmer, Xie, Cairns & Hutchins, 2007). On one hand, behavioral expectations and opportunities are directed by adults within the classroom and school. On the other hand, within the boundaries of school rules, children and adolescents must also coordinate their actions and activities with each other. In so doing, they establish their own norms, processes, and structures to guide their interactions with peers (Cairns & Cairns, 1994). P. 248.
In seasons when I feel like I have succeeded at creating a wholesome learning environment (when class members gel with each other and immerse themselves in learning), I must admit that my achievement owes something to kind-hearted student leaders who are pulling in the same direction as I am. Along those same lines, when my efforts at building classroom culture fizzle, I often sense that prominent children in the group are repositioning my foundations and walls.
All in all, the idea of creating classroom culture serves as a useful starting point for setting tone and establishing behavior norms: teachers are called to take the lead in the way learning communities function. At the same time, because we work with people (not concrete or lumber), a posture of healing may serve us better when learning environments fall into poor health. The remainder of this series explores a healing approach to classroom culture.
Alan Bandstra’s book, Solutions That Heal: Responding to Infectious Behavior in Learning Spaces, released in February of 2025. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
