Building Community in the Classroom is Essential for 21st Century Education

Students working together with one another in the same classroom must not be taken for granted as the skill must be developed. Even the process of assigning new seating and planning team assignments can create conflict. Because many classroom activities are designed for student engagement, students often have opinions about who they sit next to.  Being adamant about sitting next to a particular classmate may become quite common if community has not been developed. Students are quick to express that they do not get along with certain students and therefore, a teacher should not ignore student requests; however, the teacher can seek to remedy the problem. Solving student relationship problems must be a school-wide endeavor or once students leave one class, they will take a different behavior to the next class. Principals and climate workers must work together to build community among students and teachers.

As students are raised in diverse contexts, how conflicts among relationships within the home are resolved will certainly affect the way a child responds to his classmates when conflict arises. Children learn what they see. Relationship deficiencies become apparent when conflict occurs among peers and peaceful resolutions are not practiced. While disagreements should not lead to an argument, unfortunately, the only response to a disagreement may result in a dispute or strife because strife is most familiar to a particular student. If one will build community inside a classroom, one will need to proactively lead to build relationships (Burke, 2011).

Building community is an integral part of instruction as although the common core standards do not specify how they should be taught, as they rather provide grade level goals; however, they represent a synthesis of components of the best student work from across countries and states (Common Core Standards Initiative, 2014).  Good learning demands that instruction be differentiated to accommodate all students, student-centered, and that students remain engaged in learning, as they collaborate with peers, and community. The challenge arises when students do not possess the interpersonal skills, community, and team-building skills to achieve classroom goals.

While most administrators hold teachers responsible for academic rigor, measurable results from student testing, and building strong networks among stakeholders; administrators must realize that they play an integral part in student outcomes. To avoid blaming and tensions among administrators and teachers, a revolutionary idea with three components include community building, contextualized learning, and selecting a capstone project is recommended particularly for the CTE classroom (Burke, 2011). Although this model is originally developed for a 21^st century CTE with Common Core Standards in Math, I believe that the ideas are replaceable for other subjects. The teambuilding needed for completing projects is said to help improve relationships, to lessen disciplinary problems, heighten student engaging, and to increase student attendance (Burke, 2011).