A welcoming classroom has physical, psychological and emotional layers and has to be maintained all year. Five cheap routines: daily check-ins, deliberate teacher mistakes for students to find, visible respect for cultures, low-stress design, and doing the task alongside students.
Routines
- Daily check-in on how students feel (she does it walking to class).
- Model imperfection: make a deliberate written mistake and have students find it.
- Respect students’ cultures, names and appearance explicitly.
- Low-cost design choices (soft background music).
- Do the assignment with them to model expectations and thinking.
Limits
Unreferenced; general; nothing on teens or exam pressure.
Research link (Claude)
Dewaele & MacIntyre’s foreign language enjoyment/anxiety work and Horwitz’s FLCAS: anxiety is driven largely by fear of negative evaluation, which is exactly what modelled mistakes and no-ridicule norms target.
Connections
Connect first, correct later · Reduce speaking anxiety with anonymous dialogical feedback · Agree how mistakes will be treated before correcting