Classroom Culture

Debunking the great myth of incentive-based education.

​Too often, teachers, administrators, and staff developers focus on the smallest and least significant aspect of the  classroom: the lesson. Sometimes they aim even smaller: the question, the questioning techniques, the single-sentence goal written on the front board. To engage in meaningful learning as a teacher, you need to slowly move towards looking at education, and your classroom practice as a progressively bigger picture into which all the smaller, less significant pieces fall into their perfect place, with the correct emphasis.

​Classroom Culture: the Biggest Picture That Matters the Most

If I could restructure the way education is taught, and the way that professional development is conducted in one major way, it would be to de-emphasize teaching technique, and to emphasize classroom culture. When you refine your classroom culture upwards through the phases below, you will naturally find that your classroom becomes a place in which your teaching techniques will improve. Once you hit the final phase: "Learning for Learning's Sake" your  classroom becomes a place where weak methodology gets recognized immediately by both the students and the teacher, and because all parties involved are learning for learning's sake, making adjustments becomes incredibly intuitive.

Phase 1: Learning for Pizza's Sake

While this is the most basic level of classroom culture, it is by far the most widely accepted and taught. The basic tenet of "Learning for Pizza's Sake" as a classroom culture is that learning is by nature an undesirable act, and to get students to engage in the learning, you must reward the learning with pizza, candy, pencils, etc. While there is a place for rewards in a classroom, I have found that emphasizing them is counter productive to creating a mutually shared, zen learning environment.

Phase 2: Learning for Teacher's Sake

"Learning for Teacher's Sake" can take on many guises, but the basic tenet that you'll see in all classroom cultures of this phase is that students learn because of their teacher. Usually, the emphasis in classrooms like this is the importance of building relationships between teacher and students. I'd argue that teachers who have compliant students because they are Level 1: Screamers and have scared their students into submission would fall into the same classroom culture phase as teachers who emphasize relationships as the primary goal of classroom culture. In this phase, students learn because the teacher expects them to learn, convinces them to learn, or forces them to learn. ​

Phase 3: Learning for Students' Sake

As you continue refining your classroom culture, you realize that emphasizing yourself, or emphasizing Skittles is not the most conducive to learning. It creates you, or your reward system, as an information bottleneck in your classroom. This is not ideal, because ideally, students can and should learn on their own. The third phase of classroom culture emphasizes how students can create an optimal culture for themselves. Making the jump from Phase 2, to Phase 3 is the big leap, because it means you have to partially let go of all that control of your classroom that you've developed in the first two phases. Students engage in reflection about how they learn best, and the classroom culture evolves so that students can learn the material together.

Phase 4: Learning for Learning's Sake

Once students are learning for each other, and behaving well because they'd rather not let each other down, you can move on to the final phase of classroom culture: Learning for Learning's Sake. Once I made this leap, my classroom became a place that was wonderful for both my students and I to learn together. We're still clear that we're learning different things, and serve different roles, but we work together to help me reflect upon and improve my education practice, while students reflect upon and improve their reading and writing practice. All of a sudden, learning is not an undesirable inconvenience that needs to be incentivized by pizza and candy, learning has become the reward in and of itself. This is the phase during which you no longer notice the full moons, or the day before spring break, because the learning is what the students want to do in your classroom. ​

​How should I progress through the Four Phases of Classroom Culture?

I know that when I started teaching, I would have wanted to jump to Phase 4 immediately, so I would have skipped all the reading on the first three pages. Each phase has its own advantages, and its own inherent learning and refinement attached to it. I'd recommend reading all four phases first, doing some honest self reflection, realizing what phase your classroom is in right now, and then slowly refining your techniques to emphasize the next step in succession. Don't try to jump from Phase 2 to Phase 4 without trying out some of the techniques practiced and learned in Phase 3. ​