A teacher can demonstrate his/her/their understanding of InTASC Standard #3, Learning Environments, by collaborating with peers and students to create an environment that supports learning in individual and collaborative settings, and that encourages positive social interactions, active learning, and self-motivation. A teacher must know how to help learners work productively and how to respect learner diversity in the classroom.
I demonstrate my understanding of the Learning Environments standard by maximizing productive instructional time, using group roles, and discussion sentence starters to foster a productive and respectful learning environment.
Classroom Management Plan
One demonstration of my understanding of the Learning Environments standards is how I maximize instructional time in the classroom through the use of clearly communicated and practiced procedures and routines. As discussed in my Classroom Management Plan, procedures such as how to ask to leave the room and how to transition from one activity to the next minimize disruptions in my classroom and maximize instructional time.
Group Roles
A second way I create a positive and effective learning environment in my classroom is through the use of group roles to help learners work productively during collaborative activities. By giving each group member a specific task for which they’re responsible, the students are able to focus fully on the activity and practice their collaboration skills.
Sentence Stems
I further create a positive learning environment by providing my learners with sentence stems for discussions, so that they can communicate clearly and respectfully with each other even while disagreeing. These sentence stems contribute to the environment of respect that I aim to create in my classroom. I provide these sentence stems as examples for framing discussions during the collaboration and group discussion portion of my Adaptations Presentation lesson plan.
