Whole Schooling
The Journey Towards Schools
Where Diverse Students Learn Together Well

CHAPTER 9

Build a Community for Learning

Learning tools. Tools for analysis, discussion, and planning you may use in class, professional development, and in your own practice as a teacher.

• Seeing community in a classroom. Activity Tool 9-2 allows respondent to consider behaviors regarding the presence, or lack, of community in a classroom and discuss implications for teaching students with special needs.
• Community building ideas for the classroom. Activity Tool 9-3 lists categories of strategies for community building and asks respondents devise a plan to strengthen community and discuss how these strategies might impact on children.
• Classroom Strategies For Building Community & Dealing With Problem Behaviors. Use Activity Tool 9-4 to discuss and identify strategies for both building community and responding to problematic behaviors in the classroom in ways that help meet the Five Needs identified by Glasser.
• School-Wide Strategies For Building Community & Dealing With Problem Behaviors. Use Activity Tool 9-5 to discuss and identify strategies for both building community and responding to problematic behaviors in the school as a whole in ways that help meet the Five Needs identified by Glasser.
• Frames of relationship. Participants may use Activity Tool 9-6 to evaluate the social place of two students with special needs in a class based on the concept of frames of relationship discussed in chapter 11 and discuss what they might do to encourage relationships to deepen among students.
• Case studies—challenge to community in the classroom. Use the case studies provided with Activity Tool 9-7 a-c. Have students read the case study situation and answer the following question: “How can we build support and community around this student?”