Building Supportive Culture in Classrooms

Our education system has long been a site of celebration of “merit”, where from the pre-primary stage to the highest degree, we pit students against each other in standardized competitive examinations that judge and decide who gets in and who remains outside the system. There is not much that can be done – for to do that, a systemic change is needed that is outside the purview of teachers who are struggling to juggle between playing the role of the ‘perfect teacher’ and the ‘perfect employee’. What can be done, rather, is bring about a small change in the classrooms, where alongside the unavoidable standardized tests that the institution or system demands, a more supportive as opposed to a competitive culture can be built. Teachers can create a classroom environment where every student feels valued, irrespective of the marks or grade they are awarded by the institution. Surely teachers have heard this before, albeit in theory, and no one knows it better than them how difficult a feat this could be, especially in this pandemic ridden world. But what if you were told that there is a way this could be achieved by giving agency to your students to figure out things for themselves? Before you ask, this is not a way to shirk away from your duties but an opportunity for you to bond with your students, having them bond with each other and for them to connect with the subject you are teaching.

Many of our boards and their syllabus makers have come up with measures to achieve just that, a case in point being the allocation of marks to projects. It is however easy to lose sight of the intentions behind such policies, and often, in the process of translation in a real classroom situation, the intentions are lost in implementation or worse, converted to yet another routine task. What if we paused for a moment to think of the purpose of such initiatives? Can they help us build a more supportive classroom environment? It can be argued that this is indeed possible if we rescued project work from being a site of aesthetic judgement and treated them more as a collaborative tool of learning. This is not a new method and those of you who teach in pre-primary or primary levels are surely aware of the perks of group activity. Unfortunately, by the time our students enter middle school and start engaging with subject-specific knowledge, the competitive system pushes them to become increasingly reclusive and result-oriented. In other words, exams become the holy grail of judging their merit. It is not a new sight in classrooms where many students are seen to employ all possible trickery to prevent any classmate from looking into their work during tests. Is it simply to prevent cheating? One must agree, it also has its root in a competitive culture where students begin to care less and less about learning and more on achieving the top score in class. We often see students making this a habit even outside the examination scenario, thus pointing to a behavioural change that continues well into their college days as well as workplaces where they find it difficult to work as a team player.

It would be interesting to investigate the reasons for such behaviours. Peter Elbow in his seminal work on assessments, Ranking, Evaluating, Liking, has pointed out the pitfalls of “constant evaluation”.

He says: Students fall into a kind of defensive or on-guard stance toward the teacher: a desire to hide what they don’t understand and try to impress. This stance gets in the way of learning. (Elbow 1994: 9)

The culture of evaluation that we build in our classrooms—where students feel monitored and judged for every action, where not only are aberrations punished but conformity is widely recognized and celebrated—produces this “on-guard stance” born out of the desire to “impress” the teacher. As Elbow rightly points out, this often leads to a situation where a student tries to hide what they have not understood by resorting to rote learning, rather than accepting their inability. Elbow further points out that such an atmosphere “makes students reluctant to take the risks that are needed for good learning—to try out hunches and trust their own judgment.” Thus, a competitive classroom culture, apart from the mental stress and anxiety it invariably produces, also creates two immediate problems that could have long term effects: first, it hinders the process of learning by not encouraging students to acknowledge their weakness. Second, it breeds a culture of extreme conformity where the students do not learn to take risks and make decisions for themselves. The solution to both these problems lies in awarding agency to learners through the production of a supportive classroom culture.

Such a supportive classroom culture encourages students to learn to support one another and acquire new knowledge together, rather than looking up to the teacher to hand out ready-made solutions. As a step away from the competitive environment that usually pervades our classrooms, this would help inculcate in students the much-needed problem-solving skills as well as breed a sense of responsibility towards the self as well as others. The first step towards producing a supportive classroom culture is to produce an environment where students feel confident to own up to their mistakes and inabilities, and to enable the teacher to intervene as required. Exercises that help students learn to collaborate with each other and engage with a text together, rather than in isolation is the next step. It would not only improve the quality of learning, but also address issues such as the importance of mental wellbeing and the act of care, which are otherwise ignored.

There are two simultaneous ways in which such an environment can be produced. On one hand, by bringing about a proactive change in the teachinglearning methodology, and on the other, challenging the widely recognized “good behaviour” and the definition of a “good student”.

For instance, the first chapter from Landmark (Book 7), “When, Where and How” (pp. 13-21) aims to introduce students to the sources for writing history. A commendable effort from the authors as this helps students to recognize the difference between mythical narratives and history early on in their lives, learning the importance of evidence in history writing. One common way a © Oxford University Press teacher might teach this section is to make students read from the text and later hold a quiz to recognize those who have managed to memorize it all! This, unfortunately, defeats the purpose of the section and does not in any way help students make any connection with their real lives. In a supportive classroom, a chapter like this could be divided up among groups of students with separate worksheets to engage with the different sections. For example, the section “court chronicles” under literary sources, could have three to four students research on the various examples given under the section to prepare a chart (or a Jamboard ^[1] if working online) with little snippets from these texts (all available online), and if and when available, images of the kings and kingdoms. The last part of this section points out to two problems about using court chronicles as sources: they tend to glorify the patron kings and do not provide any insight to the lives of the common people of the times. It could be interesting to now have the team reflect on how the media today reflects the government and the people. The teacher could point out that today’s media documents are testimony to today’s times and would possibly be sources for history writing about the present in the future. This reflection exercise could be in the form of an in-class team discussion, an asynchronous exercise for students to talk, record, and share on a common classroom portal, or even a writing exercise. Similarly, the rest of the sections could be divided up among various teams, with the commonality of producing a chart and having a reflection exercise, the topics of which would vary depending on the section being assigned.