Why Community Matters in the Classroom — and How to Build It

Nāu te rourou, nāku te rourou, ka ora ai te iwi is a whakatauki or Māori proverb that means with your basket and my basket, the people will thrive, signalling the importance of shared responsibility and collective well-being. It refers to the role of collaboration in community, suggesting that everyone has something to offer and that through collective effort, we can all flourish. This should resonate with teachers at any level of education. We know that as educators, we have a responsibility to shape the culture of our classrooms and ensure that they are spaces that build community and recognize the strengths of every learner.

Cultivating a collaborative community is at the heart of effective pedagogy because it can help to establish belonging and alleviate fears of isolation for students. This focus on relationality is likely to encourage more active participation and lead to deeper engagement with the content of a lesson.

9 Strategies for Cultivating a Supportive Learning Community

Here, I offer nine ideas on how to cultivate a supportive learning community in your classroom. While I feel these are particularly suited to higher education contexts, many of these can be adapted to contexts at other levels.

1. Learn student names. Use multiple strategies to learn student names. I like to use the class roster, which sometimes has students’ photo IDs. I also always ask students what their preferred name is, and how to spell and pronounce it. Make the effort to learn and use names in the first few classes.
   
   
2. Pre–first day survey. Prior to the first day of class, set the tone for the learning space you will create by sending out a survey for students to fill in. Ask them about things such as preferred names, pronouns, caregiver responsibilities, and cultural/ethnic identity. With postgrad students, finding out their work status is also useful.
   
   
3. Goal-setting task. On the first day of class, I bring in printed cards or set up pictures on the digital learning platform that have photos of a range of different objects. These could include things like barbed wire, tangled rope, a rainbow, seedlings, open or shut doors, and traffic signals. I place the cards on a large desk and invite students to gather around. They need to each select one card that resonates with them in some way and use that as a prompt to write a short reflection on their state of mind and their goals for the course. This is an opportunity for students to voice concerns and establish achievable targets for themselves. I usually ask a few people to share their reflections in class, and I ask everyone to upload their reflections onto the learning platform at the end of the day.
   
   
4. Ice breaker activities. At the start of a new course or new academic year, there will be new students who may not know others in the class. To encourage positive peer relationships, it is always helpful to include a few ice breaker activities that will help people to introduce themselves to as many people as possible and make early connections. (Here are some options for younger learners, and here are some using Padlet.)
   
   
5. Learning buddies. Students new to university often become overwhelmed when they realise the amount of independent study involved. Courses typically expect weekly readings to be completed prior to class. Facilitating some form of collaborative system can be helpful. Even in my postgrad classes, I invite students to find at least one buddy before the end of the first day and agree on how they will work together. Many students have commented on how helpful this is as they are often reluctant to initiate this conversation with a peer. By building this into a classroom activity, it encourages everyone to be part of a collaborative group.
   
   
6. Keep learning from your students. Being the teacher in the classroom means that the power is often tilted in your favour. However, this does not mean that there is no room for learning for the teacher. In Māori culture, the concept of Ako refers to the shared practice of learning. For Ako to take place and redress the power imbalance in the classroom, both the teacher and the student are engaged in processes of learning and teaching and collaboratively learn and teach one another. Invite students to share different perspectives and worldviews on a topic or to share familial and cultural ways of doing. Enrich your lesson with these student-provided forms of input.
   
   
7. Invite students to teach back. As a form of review, invite students to teach back key concepts to the class. This could be done at the end of a lesson, inviting a volunteer to briefly summarise a key concept of the day. Alternatively, this could be scheduled into the lesson more formally by preplanning who will do the “teach back” each day. In some of my courses, students sign up for this on the first day, selecting a reading that they will briefly summarise and critically reflect on. This ensures that each day, one or two students will take the responsibility for providing some essential input.
   
   
8. Brain breaks. To promote self-care and optimize learning, students (and teachers!) need short breaks to refocus their minds and readjust their bodies. For optimal classroom focus and engagement, aim for brain breaks every 20–30 minutes, lasting 3–5 minutes for older students. Younger students may need breaks more frequently as their attention span is likely to be shorter. This could be an opportunity to just take a bathroom break, stretch, talk to someone else, or do a completely unrelated fun activity. A colleague of mine likes to get her students to get up and do a few guided stretches or sing for a few minutes before continuing with the lesson.
   
   
9. Provide supportive feedback. The most useful feedback is arguably provided during the process of learning, rather than after the completion of an assignment. Build in multiple forms of feedback into every assignment. For example, in one of my postgraduate teacher education courses, an assignment requires students to submit a recorded presentation. The presentation focuses on identifying an issue of relevance to multilingual learners in their school and suggesting ways of addressing the issue by a change in policy and/or practice. There are three points in which students receive feedback.
   
   1. 1. First, they can discuss with me one-on-one whether the issue they have chosen is appropriate.
      2. Second, they prepare the presentation and share it in small groups in class, seeking peer feedback.
      3. Third, they discuss the ideas for addressing the issue they have selected with a work colleague.

By the time they are ready to submit their assignment, students have received feedback from three different sources and at three different times, giving them a greater confidence in their learning.

Reflect and Learn

In closing, I invite you to reflect on your own experiences aided by the following prompts:

• Think back to your experiences of being a student (at any level of education). What factors contributed to your sense of belonging (or not belonging) in the classroom? How did your teacher(s) help to establish trust and respect within the classroom? Which of those strategies have you built into your own classroom now?
• In caring for others, we often forget to care for our selves. How do you build in self-care as part of your everyday practices? What could you do better?