How to Help Students Fit In

Here is a brief excerpt from The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide about how you can help remove the barriers to peer acceptance in your classroom.

 

Although it is important for teachers to make it easy for their students to work together well, the undertaking requires diplomacy as well as dedicated efforts. Social inclusion is such a vital aspect of any student’s life, however, that the effort often results in beneficial dividends. Begin by identifying some of the barriers that could have a negative effect on your students.

          What are some of the most common barriers to social acceptance in school? Many students could feel excluded because they do not know their classmates. It is a mistake to assume that students know each other well. Even students who have attended school together for several years may not know much about their classmates.

          Another barrier is that your students may live in different neighborhoods. If you teach in a school where students may live at a distance or come from very diverse neighborhoods, it is likely that they have not had very many opportunities to interact with each outside of school.

          In addition, students who have not been taught how to behave courteously or who have not learned socially acceptable ways to resolve conflict often struggle to form appropriate relationships with their peers.

          Perhaps the greatest barrier that you will have to help your students overcome, however, is the perception that they may not have much in common with a classmate whom they do not know well. With effort and persistence, you can assist students in learning to recognize their commonalities so that your students can learn to accept and support each other. Use the tips in the list below to guide you as you work to help students remove the barriers to peer acceptance.

• Make sure that each student’s strengths are well-known to the rest of the class.
• If a student has an unpleasant history of failure or misbehavior, make it clear that it is time for a fresh start.
• Show your students the correct ways to interact with each other. They need plenty of models and monitoring until they have learned to cooperate productively.
• Let each student shine. Every student should believe that he or she is really your favorite.
• Be sensitive to the differences that divide your students and to the potential for conflicts that those differences can cause.
• Make it a point to recognize students who work well with others. Whenever possible, praise the entire class for its cooperative attitude.
• Provide opportunities for students to get to know each other. These do not have to take up a great deal of time, but can be done in brief activities scattered throughout the year.
• Plan enough work for your students to do so that they are focused on school and don’t have time to discover their classmates’ negative character traits.
• Promote tolerance and acceptance with a display of posters and encouraging mottoes.
• Encourage students to share experiences and personal information about their families, cultures, dreams, and goals while working together.
• Make it very easy for students to understand class routines and procedures and to follow directions well.
• Students who know what to do are less likely to make embarrassing mistakes for which they can be teased or excluded later.
• Be careful that you model appropriate behavior so that you encourage your students to do the same.
• Don’t give in to the temptation of eye rolling or losing your patience when a student blunders in front of classmates. Your actions could set that student up for social exclusion later.

 

 

How to Move Beyond “Please, Please Don’t Torture the Sub”

Missing school is harder for teachers than many other professionals because not only do we have to leave appropriate plans and information so that substitute teachers can manage our classes while we are out, but also because even the best of students tend to have the classic, “Oh boy! We have a sub!” reaction. Unless you have a top notch sub and have done everything possible to ensure that your students will still learn while you are out, you will return to deal with the unpleasant aftermath of a disaster.


Being able to miss school without worries about your students and all the things that are going wrong in your absence is possible with a bit of planning and preparation. First of all, very early in the school year, create a binder filled with helpful information that any substitute teacher can use. When you change seating charts, add or drop students, or when other significant changes occur, update your binder. Here are some items that you may want to include in your sub binder.

• Class rosters with helpful pronunciation clues
• A photo seating chart. Photograph your students sitting in their assigned seats. Print these and write the name of your students under their photos. Your sub will know where students are supposed to sit and will be able to match names to faces right away.
• Medical information for students with chronic illnesses such as asthma or diabetes
• Your daily class and duty schedule
• Classroom procedures for daily routines such as lunch, restroom requests, fire drills and other emergencies
• A list of several activities that students can do if they finish early. You can do this early in the year so that it is handy just in case you are rushed for time.
• A map of the school with exits and fire extinguishers marked
• Copies of all necessary forms such as lunch or attendance counts
• Names and room numbers of helpful teachers
• A phone number where you can be reached

Next, make sure to leave workable plans that even the most harried sub can follow.

• Your lesson plans for any day that you are going to miss should be specifically written for the sub.
• Provide plenty of directions and a suggested time length for each assignment.
• Do plan independent written work that will be collected and graded.
• Make sure to photocopy, label, and organize all handouts.
• Leave work that will occupy students, but that is not merely busy work.  
• Avoid computer use, videos, media center visits, and activities involving scissors or other sharp tools.

Finally, it’s important to involve students in a positive way in maintaining the order and routines of the class when you need to be absent. You may consider having students write out what they can do to help the sub so that things can run smoothly. Having students be aware of their specific responsibilities is a positive way to enlist their cooperation. Have them take a pledge of instructional cooperation. Assign tasks such as turning in attendance or passing out papers. Make cooperation fun. Make it an intriguing class challenge. Best of all, make it their responsibility. When students own a situation, they will more often than not rise to the occasion and exceed even our highest expectations.

 

If your students have misbehaved while you were out, however, don’t rush to punish. First, have students write out their version of the events of the class. Read these, and think about what you are going to do before you punish an entire class or even individual students based on what a substitute teacher has told you. If you then have to deal with misbehavior after you have gathered the facts from the sub and from your students, strive to be fair.