Chapter 3: Setting Up Your Classroom

IN PROGRESS - WILL BE EDITED

The Classroom Walls

An almost-blank classroom wall space is advisable at the beginning of the year. This leaves room for what the class will create together. When students walk into a room full of posters and bulletin boards and decor that the teacher has selected, they get the message on an unconscious level that the teacher’s personality is the dominant one in the space. When they walk into a room with almost-blank walls, and plenty of room for them to create, they have room for their own work to take shape.

The visual clutter of walls papered with posters, maps, flags, and the like is distracting. We want to cultivate a sense of simplicity and unhurried calm, and the nearly-blank walls help to soothe us and our students. The reader is asked to trust that, if they follow this approach, their classroom walls will soon take on a feeling of student-driven ownership of the space.

All I have up on the wall in my classroom on day one is a calendar/weather station (discussed below), and my Classroom Rules (provided below) located somewhere where I can easily walk to and touch. I also have spaces designated for a class art gallery, to be added in the future (discussed later in this book). Later, I put each of my classes’ artwork into the gallery, but for now it is simply a blank space with a sign for each period that says “Period One” and “Artists,” but with nothing yet in those spaces, and no student artists’ names, since I have not yet assigned those jobs.

I also have a space on our whiteboard or a poster for listing the names of students who have jobs. Keeping that list current is up to the student “Human Resources Department” (discussed later in this chapter and in the Appendices).

The Rules Poster

The Classroom Rules that I use are listed below, but you are encouraged to think about your own wording and specific rules. However, please do not put TOO MANY rules, since they tend to get lost as so much background noise. I have found that three to five rules is sufficient without being overwhelming.

1. Understanding is the number-one goal. 2. One person speaks and the others listen. 3. Support the flow of language.

Please note that Rule One can apply not only to listening in class and understanding the language, but also to the “productive struggle” or “stick-to-it-iveness” in reading and not giving up when an unfamiliar word is encountered. The goal is mutual understanding and respect.

It is highly recommended that one of your rules, like Rule Two above, basically be a nice version of “Listen and don’t go having side conversations.” It is, by far, the number-one pointed-to rule during instruction. By far. In fact, if understanding were not such a Very Big Deal in comprehension-based, communicative language teaching, then maybe it would be Rule One!

I suggest displaying these rules where you can easily point to them, because you will point to them frequently in the first weeks. I also suggest that you write them in the class’s stronger shared language only, for all levels, so that there is absolutely no question in the students’ minds what you are conveying to the class when you point to these rules.

Question Words or No Question Words, That Is the, uh…Question

Some teachers like to hang up question word posters in the class’s stronger shared language (English, for me) so that they can say the question words in the course language (French or Spanish, for me) and point to the poster where students can read the meaning of the word in English as they hear you say it in the course language. The words are written in English so that students can establish the sound of the words before seeing them written, thus avoiding accent problems later. Other teachers, including myself, establish the meaning of the question words as they would any other word, in the moment that it is needed, by using gestures or sketching/writing on the board. The latter is my recommendation. Our brains encode knowledge more readily when it is “novel,” and writing out the question words in the moment they are needed is more “novel” than pointing to the same old, same old static, “been-there-since-August” question poster or graphic. After a while, those same old visual aids just fade into the background. Plus, you can get in some extra exposures to the names of the letters in your language, if you write the question words and spell as you write.

Calendar and Weather Station

The calendar and weather station figure extensively in the first few lessons of the year, and it is a useful routine to begin class, in any level, with two to four minutes of calendar check-in, because it builds community, settles the class into the Guided Oral Input for the day, and reinforces numbers, months, the date, and weather vocabulary, as well as school activities, sports, and other useful vocabulary.

I have found great success in having two calendars posted. One is a grid that I draw with my classes on a piece of chart paper. When I begin the year, there are no words, not even the name of the month on it, just a grid. I fill in all the lines, words, and numbers as I speak to the class. I can thus spell the words, and teach numbers through 31 in an authentic way, as we move through the month from date to date.

The second calendar is a pocket chart (these are commercially available for a modest price, a piece of heavy-duty fabric with clear plastic pockets for inserting words to display to the class) on which you can assemble sentences such as:

“Today it is __ the __ of __.” “The weather is ___.” “In my opinion the weather is__ (good/bad).”

Into the pocket chart, we insert laminated cards with words like “hot” or “cold”. These words are written in such a way as to make the meaning visible, as shown here. For example, the word “cold” is light blue and has a scarf on it and “hot” is red and orange and has a thermometer with flames coming out of it.

Less Really Is More, or Go Simple to Go Big

In past years, you may have displayed lots of posters and decorations in your classroom, like posters of travel destinations or other pretty yet not essential classroom décor. My strong recommendation is that you take most of them, if not all of them, down, or maybe move them to the hallway bulletin boards. Limiting the amount of visual information on the walls allows us to use the walls to display personalized, class-created images and information, which is far more important than having things up that the kids can’t relate to. Information that was created by the class is always more interesting and meaningful to the students. Students more easily retain information that was created with their input, by them, in front of their eyes. It all “sticks” in the brain more easily.

Additionally, when students enter your room in the first days of school and it is a blank canvas ready for them to co-create the environment with you that year, we send them a message by not even saying a word. In effect, we are communicating to them that there is space for them to be co-owners of the “look” of the environment. We show in a concrete way, as we fill the space with our students, that we are serious about inviting their voices and uniqueness into the classroom and curriculum. It is a powerful message, and I hope you will seriously consider redecorating your room by un-decorating it this year.

The Deskless Debate

Many proficiency-based teachers have moved to a deskless setup in their classrooms. Students sit on chairs with no desks. For writing time, students use clipboards or perhaps flip around to desks that are lined up along the walls of the classroom. Deskless teachers tend to report that this setup minimizes distractions such as cell phones and fosters community and engagement. However, the goal of communicative language

teaching is to communicate and whether or not you have desks is not going to make it or break it. I have tried both ways, and honestly, the jury in my mind is still out on this question.

My Classroom Setup

Supplies

Finding the money for supplies is always tough. I have had success with Donors Choose, a website where public school teachers can submit projects for funding. I have also had success asking the principal or PTA. Sadly, I have also spent a great deal of my own money on my classrooms. I comfort myself with the fact that if I purchase something, it is mine forever, even if I change schools.

In the summer, I scan secondhand shops and garage sales for furniture. I talk to the custodian, the secretary, and the administration, and sometimes the school can round up the supplies I need. And, if all else fails, I make do. Again, supplies are not going to make or break your language teaching. The quality of your communication skills is the most important aspect. And that is the main purpose of this book. Here are some classroom setup considerations that I would prioritize, to make that communication more comprehensible and interesting.

Artists’ Work Area: Having class artists is such an incredible boon to a teacher that it is my number-one recommendation for investment in your supplies this year. Student artwork can really take the pressure off of you to be the main source of entertainment and fun.

The artists’ work surface might be a table or (ideally) an easel. You can use any easel, from cheap kiddie easels up through teacher easels with all the bells and whistles that cost hundreds of dollars. The basic requirements are that the easel needs to be able to hold large pieces of paper, either pads of chart paper or rolls of butcher Page 26

paper. You won’t regret investing in a good quality easel.

Your artists will need a good supply of thick black markers, colored pencils, crayons and colored markers. Colored pencils and crayons make the best art, and this is no small point in the overall pedagogical approach described in this book. I also provide the artists with white paper, scissors, and tape, so that they can cut white paper to cover up any mistakes, tape it down, and re-draw over it.

Actors’ Stools: I highly suggest stools for your actors. I learned this from Ben Slavic, and it really transformed my relationship with my actors, whom I had previously allowed to wander about the classroom, which often meant that they stole the show, as free-range actors tend to do, being natural hams and entertainers, as the best student actors are. Sitting the actors on stools keeps them at a good height and “anchors” them so they are less likely to become distractions. What you want is actors sitting above their peers during a story, but below you.

Big Paper: You will need a good supply of large-format paper. Chart paper like the kind you use to make presentations is ideal. However, some chart paper is quite expensive. Amazon sells packs of four 50-sheet pads (200 sheets total) for around $50.00. The brand is TOPS Standard Easel Pads. This paper is not very thick and your artists will need to use a sheet behind the paper as a blotter, but it is the most economical chart paper I have found. Rolls of butcher paper from the school bulletin board cart can also be used, and are perhaps best in terms of value. You will use this paper to make calendars for each class and for the class artists to draw the class’s characters and illustrate their stories for the day.

Your Classroom Library

You will, in most cases, not begin free-choice reading until later in the year. With students who have not done independent reading in previous years, you might not begin free-choice reading for several months, but you can begin working on your classroom library now. Below, you will find some ideas for sources of reading material to provision your shelves.

The most personalized and comprehensible, and certainly the least expensive, way to build a class library is to collect the written versions of the stories you create with your students during the Shared Writing portion of the daily lesson framework, explained in detail later in this book. Doing this quickly builds a collection of easy-reading texts that are very familiar, as students wrote them with you. You can include photos of the artists’ work alongside the text to support student comprehension, and/or have your students illustrate the texts.

Towards the end of the year, you can collect all of the stories that you have created

Kaitlin Leppert with a collection of Write & Discuss.

over the course of the year in one book. It can be a fun project (that also happens to provide a lot of comprehensible input) to have students illustrate the stories for future classes to read.

Another free source of reading material is the texts from the end-of-the-year Story Book Project, described in End of Year Option 3. If you have upper-level classes, they could go ahead and start stocking your library with books to prepare for your first-year students’ free choice reading, which tends to begin in December, or January. If you want to enlist your advanced students’ help, you are advised to read the explanation of this project earlier in the term.

Here are some other sources of reading material, some free and some not.

A book project

(1) E-Lit App (About $250) Full disclosure. I made this app. But it is, quite honestly, the most visually-scaffolded, compelling reading collection, especially for beginners, that I have ever seen. It is comprised of the types of leveled texts I wish had existed when I was teaching Reading Intervention. In my intervention classes, many of my students who needed reading material that was three to five grade levels below their chronological ages were bored stiff by the “baby books” that I could find for them. This app was a long time coming, and it is the fruit of many, many reading conferences with students who just cannot ever seem to find a text they like, because they have experienced such limited success with reading so far in their schooling. Supporting teachers to build a love of reading is the purpose in setting up this app. It’s been a lot of work, but when I hear back from students who are enjoying the texts, it’s worth it.

(2) Reading A to Z (About $120) This is a subscription that allows you to print short leveled readers (in French and Spanish) that go from A to Z. At first, I use levels A to D and put out higher levels as the year goes on.

(3) Comprehensible Periodicals (Prices vary from FREE to around $50 per term, on Teachers Pay Teachers) Mundo en Tus Manos by Martina Bex or Le Petit Journal Francophone by Cécile Lainé offer subscriptions to digital newsletters on current events, written for language learners. Martina Bex also produces a free literary magazine of student writing, Revista Literal, which you can print from her website.

(4) Class-Created Comics (Free) Making comics from previous stories and discussions is an excellent sub lesson plan, if your guest teacher does not speak your language. See the Appendices for a template.

(5) One-Page Wonders (Free) Jonathan Elliot, aka Profe Elote, has created a database of over 75 short nonfiction articles, in various languages, created by teachers to respond to their students’ interests. You can easily find his blog, by Googling “Profe Elote.”

(6) Scholastic magazines (About $80 for 10 subscriptions) Scholastic magazines are visually appealing and available in German, French, and Spanish. You can build up a nice collection of back issues over the years.

(7) Online Comic Library (Free) Mike Peto has assembled a printable library of student-created comics which you can find on his blog, by Googling his name and “comic library.” This example is by Brett Chonko.

Assembling a Varied Collection

My suggestion for how many texts to include in your collection, to begin free-choice reading, is to have at least three to five titles per student, so that everyone can have a good selection. So, if your largest class is 34 students, you will want at least 34 x 3, or 102 titles. These do not all need to cost you any funds. In fact, by following the suggestions above, you should be able to acquire quite a bit of reading material for the price of printing them and binding them in folders.

You will want to assemble material from the widest variety of sources as possible, about as many topics as possible. You will want a mix of genres: fiction, nonfiction, graphics, current events, poetry, etc. You will also want to offer high, medium, and low reading levels, to differentiate and provide your students with varying levels of challenge. You might also mix in culturally-authentic texts, such as children’s books, infographics, magazine articles, maps, menus, brochures, and other realia.

As you begin to provision your classroom with reading material, you will discover many sources of material created by teacher-authors writing short, leveled texts for language learners. Some are available for free download, and others are available for purchase. Among the growing selection of texts, created by proficiency-oriented language teachers, you are sure to find some titles that will delight and captivate you and your students.

A Note on Anti-Bias, Anti-Racist Reading

The texts that we place on our shelves speak volumes to our students about what we value, and so it is important to be intentional when developing your classroom library, and choose texts that communicate the values you want to uphold and uplift, and eliminate texts that communicate harmful, damaging, or erroneous messages. We want to be sure that our collections represent voices from diverse authors, about diverse characters, and that they portray these cultures, places, and people in a diversity of ways: positive, strong, joyful, committed, uplifting, inspiring, outraged, passionate…and, above all, real and human and true.

For this reason, I urge you to seek out, to the maximum extent possible, authors writing about their own lived experience, and not authors who are imagining how it would be to live a different person’s experience.

It bears special consideration to examine books written by authors about characters and groups whose identities they do not share. You will want to give a close eye to how “outsider authors” portray people and groups whose identities have been (and, in all likelihood, still are) negatively racialized and/or who have been harmed, marginalized, and/or exploited by the dominant culture.

This work is of high importance, as all students - no matter who they are, where they come from, whom they love, or how they identify themselves, benefit from the empathy that reading so readily develops. And, of course, it is absolutely critical that our students whose identities are too often missing or misrepresented in the dominant culture have more encounters with texts that reflect their identities back in a real, true, affirming way.

You are encouraged to check out the “Reading Diversity Lite” Checklist, available for free use and distribution from Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance).

Another excellent resource is the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board, or LLLAB, whose mission, according to Esmeralda Mora, a Founding Director, is to “provide well rounded feedback to help you evaluate possible materials for your classroom library as it pertains to race, ethnicity, cultures, social class, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, religion, family structure, neurodiversity, abilities, and experiences.” The board is composed of a group of diverse members who are well advanced in their fields, and whose personal and Page 30

career backgrounds comprise experiences that enrich their work with a wide array of perspectives. The LLAB can provide you with trustworthy information to help dismantle social inequalities by developing and curating culturally-sustaining reading material. They are committed to (un)learning and welcome feedback and suggestions for honoring and validating everyone’s identities, experiences, and realities.

Setting Up the Classroom to Support Student Jobs

The Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, lists student jobs that can support your students in working as “class employees.” I do not pay the students who take on jobs with candy or other commonly accepted forms of classroom currency. This can hinder their internal motivation and can upset the overall well-being of the community. You want the students to take the jobs for the pleasure of their peers’ recognition and for the satisfaction of serving their community. This helps to ensure that you have the right student in the right job - a student who is motivated by the execution of the job’s duties and the desire to serve.

The student jobs can support your instruction with tasks such as creating visual aids and readings, and working in general to assure the smooth functioning of your instruction on a mechanical level. They can also support the day-to-day functioning of your classroom, performing such tasks as passing out pencil and paper for quizzes, welcoming visitors, and monitoring hall passes. They are your classroom support team. Ideally, everyone has some small part to play in the class on either of these job teams. Basically, the more students that are employed in some way to support the class, the better for you.

I strongly suggest that you set up the jobs so that students keep their jobs for the entire year, until they resign or get fired. The Human Resources Department - two responsible, kind student leaders - does the hiring, training, re-training, issuing warnings, firing, and replacing the student employees. I also highly recommend that you do not try to fill positions all at once, but add them as needed, as happens in the business world. If you assign a huge batch of random jobs willy-nilly before the job is needed, and before you know you students well enough to place them in jobs that they are naturally well-suited for, personality-wise, you do not allow time to reflect on which students would best perform at a certain job before filling that position, you will find that later on you wish you had done so.

Every student, no matter what their personality or level of maturity and selfcontrol, is suited for some kind of useful employment that can empower them to hold a valued responsibility for the smooth operation of class. However, in some cases, we cannot see our students’ talents when we first meet them. Therefore, when we hold off on assigning the jobs, we get into a stance of looking for students’ talents, even if they are hidden under attitudes or behaviors that we might not immediately see as assets. In the Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, you will find detailed job descriptions and training guidelines for each student job. Below are some recommendations for setting up the classroom to support some key jobs.

Student Jobs List

The Videographer

The videographer helps you create a collection of class videos, which can be very useful for sub plans, makeup work for absent students, assessment material, and to create a class Film Festival as an end-of-the-year project/celebration. The videos of class can also be extremely useful for your own development, as you will periodically be asked in this book to review some videos of yourself teaching. I know it is scary; that’s why there is a big old pep talk for you later in the book, to get you excited about watching yourself on video. For now, just please consider very seriously how useful it is to have a student Videographer, and plan your setup accordingly.

To set up the work space, you will need to provide the Videographer with a seat and perhaps a tripod directly in front of your teaching area. It is important that the videographer be lined up with your line of sight and directly in front of you. You might also choose to hire a shy student for an optional job, the Assistant to the Videographer, a low-stress job that appeals to many shyer kids who want to contribute to class. If so, they will also need a seat in this area.

The Videographer’s Seat

Actors and “Profe 2” (The “Second Teacher”)

As you set up your classroom, you might want to make space for a comfy chair for your “Profe 2” and you will certainly want a prominent place for the two actors’ stools. For me, the two stools are a total non-negotiable piece of classroom equipment. You want stools that are of the height so that the actors will be above their peers but still below your head, if at all possible. This creates a nice line of sight and reinforces the “chain of command,” with you in charge.

I like to position the stools to the side of the room, so that when I move into the part of class when I am using the actors, I can physically move to the side as I call them to the stools. This “freshens up” the lesson by changing the direction in which students are facing, and also sends a nonverbal, physical signal that I am moving from directly instructing the class to being out there “among the people” in the room, moving into more student-led instruction, and sharing the locus of power with the class.

The stools come in handy for other uses, too!

Human Resources

Some student workers are not “on stage” like the Artists, Videographer, and Actors. They do not need any special classroom setup as they help with the day-to-day running of your classroom, but their jobs are still essential, in my view, to a well-managed class.

I have found it helpful to first hire a Human Resources Team. Bryce Hedstrom of brycehedstrom.com had the great idea to hire a Human Resources Manager, which inspired me to try it. It made a big difference in how well the classroom jobs function. I suggest an HR team consisting of two students: (1) a Human Resources

Director and (2) a Training Manager. The HR team has proven invaluable to me, and these students will take on a major leadership role. They will - once they themselves are trained - interview others who are interested in taking a job, deciding who is best qualified. They hire and train the new employees, working with the teacher in this task. If there are concerns about any student’s job performance, they retrain them, issue warnings, and potentially fire them and hire a replacement.

Using students to manage their peers makes class more equitable while preparing them for the realities of life after graduation. I refer to myself as the “CEO” of the classroom, but the day-to-day functioning of the jobs is in students’ hands. Of course, you have to first interview and train the HR Department - the HR director and the training manager. I suggest doing this sometime in the first days of school, in the class’s stronger shared language, which for me is English. The time spent in English will come back to you, with interest, as these students will be invaluable in maintaining a focused class environment in which students can focus on the input, all year long.

What is the process? First, I describe the HR jobs to the class. Refer to the job description provided in the HR Manual, in the Appendices, for those descriptions. Next, I ask interested students to stand, and I formally interview them using questions from the HR manual. It provides all the details you will need to know for these interviews. These are the first interviews of the year. This models for the HR department and the whole class what the hiring process will look like for the rest of the jobs, though, once your HR team is trained to use the manual, it may not be a public process like this one.

I recommend that you print out a list of the HR Manual with its job descriptions and the interview questions for your HR department. I like to have a separate HR Binder for each class, printed out for the HR department to use throughout the year to keep track of who has which job. Later, when you come to an instructional session that requires you to fill a job, you will need only have the HR director use the job description and interview questions to select a student to fill it. I write their name on the class’s Jobs Chart for that class period. This is simply a growing, changing list of students’ names and jobs, which you or the HR department can maintain as jobs are assigned and perhaps re-assigned throughout the year. I then work with the training director to train the new hires using the training points from the manual.

The Concierge

A job that can really help support your classroom management is the Concierge. The job is so important that it is worth thinking about here at the very beginning, as you are setting up your classroom. This student ostensibly has the role of escorting anyone who needs support, to go to the office or counseling or wherever. This is certainly a useful role. But the real reason that hiring your class Concierge is such an important decision is because they will be important in your classroom management, as explained in detail later in the chapter on management. When you need to send the first student to the hall for a private conversation, and that student is reluctant to comply, you will be glad that you chose the right student for this key position, to support their peers if they need help to move into the hall.

You explain it to the students as if the concierge is simply there to help their peers when they are ill or upset, to walk them down the hall. They are there for that, of course, but they are also there to support you when you need to remove a student from your class for a private conversation, and the student is resistant. For that Page 33

reason, it helps if the child chosen for this job be (a) a confident, easygoing person with a certain physical “presence” and (b) kind and (c) respected by their peers.

The concierge thus functions at times like a bouncer who can get their peers to leave the room to wait for you to follow up with them in the hall, without your having to get to the rarely-used classroom management level of calling the office to remove the student. This job is of the highest importance, and that is why it requires a student who is well-liked, positive, supportive, yet firm. The concierge is a great support and ally for you throughout the year.

Because this job is of such importance, you will hire the concierge yourself right away at the beginning of the year. This is done ideally just after you hire your HR department. In the class’s stronger shared language (English for me), describe the concierge job to the class using the job description in the HR Manual. Ask interested students to stand, and help the HR department interview them using the questions from the manual. Then, working with HR, select your concierge.

The Power of Student Jobs

Your eventual goal is to employ as many students as possible. There is a long list of possible jobs in the HR Manual. Other common jobs that we assign as needed are: Floor Checker, Birthday Fairy, Paper and Pencil People, Class Secretary, Class Starter, Calendar Helpers, Question Words Kids, Door Knocker/Bell Ringer, Sound Effects Coordinator, Propmaster, Countdown Kid, Class Librarians, etc. You might not use all the jobs in a given class, and that is fine. The jobs outlined above are key, but others are just “nice to have.” Choose the jobs and students that fill them well, and your school year will be much more smooth functioning. Administrators using checklists for student involvement, routines and procedures, can also fill in your evaluation with a high level of student ownership of the learning environment.