Cooperation + Coordination Works in Classrooms

FLORENCE C. BONIFACIO

Lately I’ve been playing around with the idea of a student-sufficient classroom. I feel like my goal in the classroom is for students to feel ownership over the room, their work, and their relationships with each other. If we want our students to feel invested in their learning, we don’t want them feeling like they’re visitors in the teacher’s classroom. Have you thought about this too? I have always made a point to say ‘our room’ instead of calling it ‘my room’, because even if my name is posted on the door, it is ours for an entire school year.

In my ideal classroom, students feel at home enough to do what they need to do without having to ask the teacher first. Obviously this means spending a lot of time at the beginning of the year setting expectations. In my (seemingly) perfect world, students would be able to thrive in an atmosphere where they feel in control. A little bonus to having this type of classroom is that the teacher does not have to deal with getting asked five million questions each day. Here are a few things I did that made my classroom more “student-sufficient”. 1) I make a list of supplies they need to bring on the first day of school so that they may have them when they’re needed (because it is sometimes a headache when they forget them during class activities). The students knew where all the supplies were in the room, and they are instructed to go get more whenever their group needed them.

I bring extras too, in case our supplies deplete faster than expected.

2) I had student “managers” (I pass on calling them ‘cleaners’– they don’t just clean, you know) every week who were responsible for the attendance count, passing back papers, etcetera.

3) Each student had a mailbox where the managers would stuff the graded papers into mailboxes and students would pick up their papers before they left for the day.

These are only some of the things I do to provide my students (and myself, of course!) the benefit of class coordination. At the end of the day, a teacher’s only goal is for the classroom to be organized and for the students to feel comfortable in it. I know these are not revolutionary ideas, but they helped me tremendously in my classroom. With a little help, we will be able to share this to other classrooms in our school and we will all enjoy the fruits of cooperation.

This one’s tried and tested: cooperation and coordination works in classrooms!