Silent Witness

The present study traces campus climate at Virginia Tech, site of the deadliest school massacre in modern U.S. history, from 2003 to 2017. Using the unobtrusive method of content analysis as a measure of campus climate, data in the form of desktop graffiti—student-authored graffiti on classroom desktops—is analyzed according to amount and content. A total of 1,443 desks are studied, resulting in 8,172 pieces of intelligible graffiti analyzed. Data collected prior to the massacre is compared to data collected one semester, one year, and one decade following the massacre. From this emerges an unobtrusively painted picture of campus climate at Virginia Tech over the course of 14 years, spanning before and after tragic events. The present study adds to the literature on classroom culture post-campus violence and speaks to the subtler, often obscured, impacts of school shootings.

Creating an Inclusive Classroom Culture

The chapter discusses creating an inclusive classroom through a language socialization perspective. The authors suggest that to create an inclusive culture in a multicultural and multilingual classroom, language educators should engage in explicit language socialization practices that promote development of critical cultural consciousness and language awareness. They propose that in the process of creating an inclusive classroom, educators need to attend to affective, individual, and interpersonal domains. Specific practices for use in a language (including ESOL) classroom and a teacher preparation program are provided.

OVERCOMING CHALLENGES IN VIRTUAL CLASSROOM TO MAINTAIN EFFECTIVE CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT AND CLASSROOM CULTURE: A CASE STUDY AT ONE VOCATIONAL SCHOOL

Effective classroom management supports the teacher classroom teaching profoundly. During Pandemic COVID 19 most classroom teachings are conducted in virtual classroom that have been greatly affected the way how teacher manage his or her own classroom. This causes some challenges for teachers in managing his or her virtual classroom. This study was conducted in the form of a case study in one vocational school in West Bandung region, West Java, Indonesia in which one English teacher was purposively selected as the participant of the research and one class consisted of 27 students. The objectives of this study are: (1) to find out the challenges of teacher in classroom management in virtual classroom (2) to find out what classroom management the teacher used in her virtual classroom. The researchers employed a qualitative case study which used classroom observation and teacher interview as main instrument. Data from classroom observation and interview transcript were analyzed according to the themes, coding and categorizing to answer the research questions. The results indicate that the teacher experienced many challenges in the virtual classroom, such as the students’ unreadiness to join the virtual class, internet connection problem, restricted time so that the teacher immediately taught the core material, students turned off the camera and sound, students learnt unattentively, less interaction and inappropriate class control. Some suggestions are given to the challenges occurred in their virtual classroom such as, by a) joining the virtual classroom earlier; b) checking the students’ attendance first; c) optimizing the teacher-students interaction during whilst- learning and post learning activity; and d) giving quizzes at the end of the lesson to make the students are more enthusiastic in learning. In this study, it is found that the teacher employed a combination of democratic and leisurely classroom management style. This finding leads to the point where a new style for virtual classroom management called Maye’s Conceptualization Model is proposed.

Teacher Mindsets Help Explain Where a Growth-Mindset Intervention Does and Doesn’t Work

A growth-mindset intervention teaches the belief that intellectual abilities can be developed. Where does the intervention work best? Prior research examined school-level moderators using data from the National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM), which delivered a short growth-mindset intervention during the first year of high school. In the present research, we used data from the NSLM to examine moderation by teachers’ mindsets and answer a new question: Can students independently implement their growth mindsets in virtually any classroom culture, or must students’ growth mindsets be supported by their teacher’s own growth mindsets (i.e., the mindset-plus-supportive-context hypothesis)? The present analysis (9,167 student records matched with 223 math teachers) supported the latter hypothesis. This result stood up to potentially confounding teacher factors and to a conservative Bayesian analysis. Thus, sustaining growth-mindset effects may require contextual supports that allow the proffered beliefs to take root and flourish.

Philosophy for All Children: enhancing knowledge

<p>Building students’ critical thinking has been a focus in Education around the world in recent years. The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) is no exception, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking in its vision statement. However, no advice is offered on how to teach critical thinking. This study uses a qualitative case study approach to explore how teachers teach critical thinking through Philosophy for Children (P4C) and offers some guidance on this for teachers. One of the contributions of this thesis is the claim that the P4C approach enhances social justice by supporting diverse learners – children who need support to achieve at school – to develop critical thinking and language capability. The theoretical framework underpinning my research draws on Bernstein’s (2000) ‘democratic pedagogic rights’ to enhancement, inclusion, and participation, and Wheelahan’s (2007), Young’s (2009) and Young and Muller’s (2013) conceptions of powerful knowledge. While much attention has been given to the theory of powerful knowledge in tertiary and secondary education contexts, to date, very little research has explored what powerful knowledge might look like, in practice, at primary school. Therefore this study makes an original contribution by investigating this unexplored area. Participants in this research included 104 primary school students aged between 8 and 11 years old and their teachers (n = 4) from four diverse primary schools in New Zealand. The research data is drawn from four main sources: audio recordings of classroom discussions, semi-structured focus group interviews with sample students, open-ended interviews with teachers, and student thinking journals. Over a period of 6 months, classes held weekly hour-long P4C dialogues with a focus on both philosophical content and developing critical thinking language and skills. Students were encouraged to evaluate their philosophical and critical thinking both verbally and in written form. The methodological approach incorporates sociocultural perspectives highlighting the key role of language as a mediator and tool for thinking (Mercer, 2000; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). Transcripts of classroom discussions were analysed both inductively and deductively, using Hennessy et al.’s (2016) coding system for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts and Daniel et al.’s (2005) matrix outlining the development of the dialogical critical thinking process. Observation of students’ everyday learning in the classroom, together with their and their teachers’ reflections, revealed that teachers played a significant role in shaping students’ language and critical thinking through modelling, facilitating dialogue, establishing a democratic classroom culture, making thinking visible, and innovating and personalising teaching according to their students’ particular needs. Both students and teachers developed a range of capabilities through participating in (or, in the case of the teachers, leading) P4C dialogue: resilience, receptivity, intersubjectivity. This thesis presents one of the first investigations into the practice of teaching powerful knowledge in primary schools and suggests that explicit teaching of disciplinary language enhances students’ critical thinking capability and constitutes powerful knowledge. A new conception of powerful knowledge is advanced, termed enhancing knowledge, which emphasises how disciplinary knowledge enhances and is complementary to other knowledges, such as social or cultural knowledge, without devaluing their importance. This term also seeks to avoid the potential dominant connotations of the word ‘powerful’. The findings of this study suggest that P4C can offer diverse learners access to enhancing knowledge which has the potential to improve equity in education and enhance social justice.</p>

Philosophy for All Children: enhancing knowledge

<p>Building students’ critical thinking has been a focus in Education around the world in recent years. The New Zealand Curriculum (2007) is no exception, with an emphasis on critical and creative thinking in its vision statement. However, no advice is offered on how to teach critical thinking. This study uses a qualitative case study approach to explore how teachers teach critical thinking through Philosophy for Children (P4C) and offers some guidance on this for teachers. One of the contributions of this thesis is the claim that the P4C approach enhances social justice by supporting diverse learners – children who need support to achieve at school – to develop critical thinking and language capability. The theoretical framework underpinning my research draws on Bernstein’s (2000) ‘democratic pedagogic rights’ to enhancement, inclusion, and participation, and Wheelahan’s (2007), Young’s (2009) and Young and Muller’s (2013) conceptions of powerful knowledge. While much attention has been given to the theory of powerful knowledge in tertiary and secondary education contexts, to date, very little research has explored what powerful knowledge might look like, in practice, at primary school. Therefore this study makes an original contribution by investigating this unexplored area. Participants in this research included 104 primary school students aged between 8 and 11 years old and their teachers (n = 4) from four diverse primary schools in New Zealand. The research data is drawn from four main sources: audio recordings of classroom discussions, semi-structured focus group interviews with sample students, open-ended interviews with teachers, and student thinking journals. Over a period of 6 months, classes held weekly hour-long P4C dialogues with a focus on both philosophical content and developing critical thinking language and skills. Students were encouraged to evaluate their philosophical and critical thinking both verbally and in written form. The methodological approach incorporates sociocultural perspectives highlighting the key role of language as a mediator and tool for thinking (Mercer, 2000; Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). Transcripts of classroom discussions were analysed both inductively and deductively, using Hennessy et al.’s (2016) coding system for analysing classroom dialogue across educational contexts and Daniel et al.’s (2005) matrix outlining the development of the dialogical critical thinking process. Observation of students’ everyday learning in the classroom, together with their and their teachers’ reflections, revealed that teachers played a significant role in shaping students’ language and critical thinking through modelling, facilitating dialogue, establishing a democratic classroom culture, making thinking visible, and innovating and personalising teaching according to their students’ particular needs. Both students and teachers developed a range of capabilities through participating in (or, in the case of the teachers, leading) P4C dialogue: resilience, receptivity, intersubjectivity. This thesis presents one of the first investigations into the practice of teaching powerful knowledge in primary schools and suggests that explicit teaching of disciplinary language enhances students’ critical thinking capability and constitutes powerful knowledge. A new conception of powerful knowledge is advanced, termed enhancing knowledge, which emphasises how disciplinary knowledge enhances and is complementary to other knowledges, such as social or cultural knowledge, without devaluing their importance. This term also seeks to avoid the potential dominant connotations of the word ‘powerful’. The findings of this study suggest that P4C can offer diverse learners access to enhancing knowledge which has the potential to improve equity in education and enhance social justice.</p>

Social Networking Platforms and Classroom Culture

This article investigates how social networks affect classroom culture in secondary schools. It combines personal reflections from us as professionals, who have worked in schools and in universities in a range of different countries and contexts, with the use of research written over the last decade into this area. Stylistically this article is a conceptual article – it has a strong reflective element and its purpose within the wider academic and professional community is to generate discussion among professionals rather than to find definitive conclusions. Classroom culture is commonly divided into four dimensions: group attitudes and behaviours toward learning, group attitudes and behaviours towards interaction with peers, teacher attitudes and behaviours towards students and instruction, and parental behaviours towards children and the teacher. This framework underpins this article. Even though social networks play an important part in young students’ lives globally, most studies into the usage of social networks for education have been conducted at the level of higher education and only a few studies focus on school level. This paper therefore focuses on school level usage and possibilities. The paper concludes that whatever our views on social media, the reality is that Facebook and its many counterparts are part of current culture and are already being used by many teachers globally as learning tools. Given that they can have both negative and positive impacts on classroom culture and are becoming an inevitable part of many young students’ lives, schools have limited options. The first one is to ban social networks to make sure that there are no consequences, and this is the case in a wide range of systems and jurisdictions. However, other approaches, which can be a frequently found globally, include a managed approach to Facebook – with course, class or even teacher pages – often entirely separate to the individual teacher’s personal page.

"I'm Not the Only Writer in The Room": A Framework for Co-Creating Confident Writing Classrooms

This study is rooted in social cognitive theory, specifically Bandura's work on self-and collective efficacy. The authors explore self reported confidence levels with writing instruction from secondary teachers across subjects in Canada and the United States by pairing a self-efficacy scale developed by Locke and Johnston (2016) with semi-structured interviews conducted via Skype. 60 teachers participated in the survey, with 25 from Canada and 35 from the United States. Although teachers report relatively strong levels of self efficacy in writing instruction, the responses of participants regarding collective efficacy are more mixed. Based on these results, coupled with six interviews (split evenly between teachers in Canada and the United States), the authors propose a framework to help teachers of all subject areas increase their confidence in writing instruction while also helping students develop their own confidence as writers. This three-pronged framework of identity, context, and authority, relies on co-creating community with students. The potential of this framework is creative, offering teachers (and students) multiple ways into a conversation about writing that will not only enhance confidence, but will create a classroom culture in which diverse writing strategies and perspectives are valued.

The Role of Classroom Culture and Psychological Safety in EFL Students' Engagement

Language learning is a complex phenomenon that is the outcome of an interplay of numerous inter/intra-personal variables. Out of these factors, emotions play a critical role in the whole process of learning. Research approves that positive emotions lead to positive outcomes. This is only obtainable in a positive classroom culture where students feel psychologically safe. If so, they actively engage in the classroom activities for a longer period. However, the macro-effect of classroom culture in EFL/ESL contexts has been limitedly explored. Against this shortcoming, the present article provides a brief account of the definition and conceptualization of classroom culture and its impact on two learner psychology variables (i.e., psychological safety, engagement). Moreover, the dimensions and factors influencing these variables are discussed. Finally, the study offers some implications for different stakeholders in EFL/ESL contexts and enumerates a number of research gaps and future directions for future scholars in this line of inquiry.