Rethinking the Three Rs: Rituals for Caring Classrooms

4/15/2024

Rethinking the Three Rs: Rituals for Caring Classrooms

Create and sustain a space in which students feel good about themselves and others.

COURTNEY BROWN
Senior Professional Development Advisor

This is the second installment in our Rethinking the Three Rs series

In the previous article in our Rethinking the Three Rs series, we discussed how to create clear and consistent routines that communicate classroom expectations to students. Here we explore rituals, offering some approaches to developing and implementing them in your classroom in order to support a positive and productive climate of collaboration, and fun.

How do rituals differ from and enhance routines? Daily routines often get you moving in the morning — you may have an alarm clock set, lunch made the night before and ready to grab, or even clothes laid out the night before. You may start the day by checking for messages from work to confirm the day’s schedule.

If I asked you about the rituals that make your days and weeks more positive and also productive, you may mention how you like your coffee in the morning, what you listen to on your way to work, weekly phone calls to relatives, text threads with friends, meals or drinks on Friday nights, shows you watch, special events, and holiday traditions.

Rituals make life a little more special and give us something to look forward to. They create and maintain connections and relationships.

In the classroom, rituals help to create and sustain community and support an inclusive culture where all students feel welcome, safe, and appreciated, supporting students’ mental health by helping them build relationships with each other and feel connected and acknowledged.

Rituals can help us all look forward to learning together.

Acknowledge and celebrate

Rituals may happen daily, such as greeting students as they enter class; weekly with a Friday game or special assignment; or intermittently as you introduce protocols for discussion or presentations.

Greeting students at the door is an old ritual, however, I believe that it can create important daily connections between teachers and each student. This greeting can include whatever style of ritual works best for you and your students — positive acknowledgements, personal connections, reminders, noting progress, a fist bump, handing out paper, or simply a smile and meeting a student’s eyes. Touching base with each student at the door also helps us to take the pulse of students’ moods and may offer them a chance to let you know something somewhat privately. Keep these interactions brief and make sure that you have a routine for students to immediately access once they enter the classroom. You can also say “goodbye” to students as they leave the room!

Rituals can also include silly and fun or sincere personalized responses to special events such or celebrating student progress. These rituals may be instilled as you start the year and can also develop authentically as you get to know your students. Events such as birthdays and holidays can be acknowledged or celebrated in a variety of ways — and students can be offered choices of how they would like their birthday to be acknowledged. I have witnessed some wonderful rituals where a student may make choices such as to sit in a special seat, wear a special crown, eat a snack during class, or choose a special treat.

Finishing a long unit of study or a long book, or making progress on key goals can also be reasons for rituals to sprout, with a special game or assignment that encourages connection. Perhaps students can be asked to acknowledge a classmate for helping them in some way or making the week or a lesson more positive. You may also encourage “shout outs” as a way to invite interactions, as frequently as makes sense for your students. They can be quiet conversations, posted on a board, or invitations to share out with the whole class.

To monitor and acknowledge progress toward the end of year Regents Exam, one teacher I work with creates groups that compete to gain points as they collectively improve their scores on components of the exam. They can choose prizes and eventually, each group does “win” something.

Acknowledgements in many forms can help create and sustain a space where students feel good about themselves and others.

Build connections across the classroom

The most simple everyday classroom rituals can help create connections between individual students and weave a web of interconnected experiences across the classroom .

Stop and Jot is one such deceptively simple ritual for letting students get to know each other through sharing and processing their learning. To help students interact with more than just their neighbors or “elbow partners”, you may want to ask students to turn to talk to students on the other side of them, or behind or in front of them.

You may also ask students to get up and move around the classroom to compare notes about a topic with a classmate who doesn’t sit near them. This can be done by asking students to find other students who “share a birthday month” or “have a pet.” These playful ways of encouraging students to interact with a variety of classmates can help create a connected classroom where students have interacted with a range of classmates.

Concentric Circles is a discussion protocol in which students stand in two lines, facing each other to discuss ideas and then rotate down the line to eventually meet with many classmates. (Students have often told me that this is one of their favorite ways of interacting in the classroom.)

Four Corners is a simple strategy where students are presented with a controversial statement or question. In each of the four corners of the classroom, an opinion or response is posted, and students move to the corner with the posted response that most matches their own. This structure encourages students to speak to a variety of classmates in a self-selecting process based on their opinions.

Finally, Rotating Chair is a simple way to offer students the opportunity to look across the room and call on a classmate. With this technique, students raise their hands to speak, and then the person speaking will call on the next speaker, etc. (aiming to call on a person who has not/has less frequently contributed). Whenever the next student is called on, they must first briefly restate/summarize what has been said before them, and then, develop the idea further.

Encourage group work and discussion

There are so many ways to approach group work; however, it always works best when students have roles and clear expectations for their collaboration and what they need to produce or demonstrate individually.

In her article, Getting Into Groups: Differentiation Through Strategic and Flexible Grouping, Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang offers an approach to groupings that prioritizes the strategic partnering of students. According to Dr. Kang, “Strategic grouping is a key feature in teaching effective collaboration skills, and in streamlining instruction to meet the needs of our diverse learners. Strategic — or purposeful — groups demonstrate that we’ve put some time, energy, and thought into who students should work with.”

While groupings can and should be changed based on student data, it is also helpful for students to stay in a group for up to 6-8 weeks so that they can get to know each other, develop working relationships, and have a “homebase” in the classroom. In an era when many educators feel that students are less comfortable speaking up or engaging in discussion, creating “comfort zones” is important.

Protocols, roles and responsibilities for group work
When students are assigned specialized roles in group activities, it supports the classroom community by helping them feel acknowledged, which is necessary to the functioning of the group and a part of a mini-community. These roles also encourage full participation and responsibility.

In groups, students’ roles and responsibilities may depend on the task — humanities teachers may be familiar with variations of literature circles, but STEM teachers can also identify roles whether they are for lab work or reading and discussing a text, or even reviewing multiple choice responses.

Here are some simple protocols for a variety of group work that you may want to explore and adapt for your purposes:

Code 10: Text-based annotations and 10-minute discussions
Save the Last Word: Simple protocol for all students to participate in a group discussion
Literature Circle Roles: Sample of roles for literature discussions in groups
Using Roles in Group Work: How identifying roles can improve group work in your class
Scaffolding Accountable Group Work: Break away from the "I did all the work, and they did nothing" refrain

Try creating your own classroom rituals! They may arise naturally in your classroom — maybe students will take the lead in suggesting or identifying productive and positive rituals for your class.

After we have established routines and expectations for managing and structuring our classroom, rituals are the moments and experiences that create a warm climate for relationships and positivity to flourish and grow in our classrooms.