Creating Class Climates That Reduce Student Defensiveness

In collecting data for a new study on kindness in high school, this quotation from a student emerged as especially insightful. It illustrates the link between a student's perception of the classroom climate and their subsequent behavior—building walls to feel safe.

A high school student describes putting up walls to feel safe.

Source: J.T. Binfet / used with permission

Students who feel safe in a classroom engage differently than students who feel psychologically unsafe. They engage with content (e.g., lift their hand in class to ask questions or contribute), interact with peers, and allow teacher-student rapport to be established. Let's encourage teachers to reflect on their investment in fostering class climate to reduce the "walls" that students put up.

“Classrooms constitute the most important psychosocial environment of educational settings for young people in terms of the learning climate, cooperation, competition, student participation, and engagement, but also in terms of shared beliefs, emotions, habits, and peer pressure, also having an impact on school-age children’s well-being in both positive and negative ways (Eccles & Roeser, 2011).” —Rathman et al., 2018

Benefits for Teachers

Often, in the discussion of classroom climate, the focus is on the social and emotional as well as academic benefits for students, and it's important to recognize that teachers, too, profit from fostering class climates that are nurturing, supportive, and low-stress. In many ways, when teachers emphasize fostering positive classroom climates, they are creating healthy work environments that help thwart stress that can lead to professional disengagement and burnout.

Engaging and nurturing classroom climates help reduce incivility and help foster positive peer-to-peer and student-to-teacher rapport. Collectively, these factors create daily work conditions that reduce stress and strife for teachers.

Fostering a Positive Classroom Climate

In a recent systematic review and meta-analysis by Wang and colleagues, three key dimensions of classroom climate were identified:

1. Instructional Support: Here, the teacher promotes cognitive development and higher-level thinking through class discussions, presenting challenges to students, building on prior knowledge to engage students, and providing thoughtful and constructive feedback to students. Teachers might, for example, employ Socratic questioning to engage and challenge students.

2. Classroom Organization and Management: Here, teachers make use of proactive strategies to engage students, including reassuring students through established routines (i.e., the sequence of events is known to students.), providing behavior support where needed, and preventing misbehavior as a way of avoiding enacting the use of punitive measures (e.g., crafting lessons that allow students to share with peers, move about the classroom, or collaboratively solve challenges). Teachers might consider using low-cost/high-yield strategies as a way of economizing their energy and maximizing student engagement and investment.

3. Social and Emotional Support: Teachers can build classroom climates that engage students by nurturing their emotional well-being. This includes teachers being responsive to and respectful of the varied emotional needs of students, infusing social and emotional content into their lessons (e.g., mindfulness, perspective-taking activities), and providing opportunities for students to practice the social and emotional skills we know lead to optimal behavior, interactions with others, and overall well-being.

Teachers might also include explicit social and emotional instruction (social and emotional learning (SEL) at the Collaborative for Academic and Social and Emotional Learning). One dimension of SEL that receives ample attention is having students develop and practice self-management or self-regulation.

Addressing these three dimensions of classroom climate collectively contributes to the creation of a classroom climate where students feel psychologically safe, where the learning environment encourages the sharing of ideas and questions, and where interactions take into consideration the broader classroom community (versus uniquely self-interest).

Education Essential Reads

The Bad News About Teen Sex Education Reflects Good Trends

The Rise of Homeschooling: The Confessions of an Educator

Above and beyond the benefits for students of this nurturing classroom climate, teachers who invest in creating psychologically safe learning spaces for students are ultimately investing in creating a healthy and reduced-stress work environment for themselves.