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B2S I EDU Warm Demanders: Develop a Positive Class Culture to Help Students Thrive
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Warm Demanders:
Develop a Positive Class Culture to Help Students Thrive
Start here
One of the most important things an educator can do across all levels of education is to develop a positive class culture.
From kindergarten to college classes, class culture sets the tone students will take for
a class’s duration.
By the end of this presentation, you’ll feel empowered to create a warm and inviting classroom environment that nurtures a culture of growth, respect, and inclusivity through prosocial interactions.
Goal 1
Goal 1
Explore the essential elements
needed to foster prosocial interactions, dampen behavioral issues and awkward exchanges, and guide your students
to become their best selves.
Goal 2
Goal 2
Investigate the concept of the “warm demander” approach as an educator understanding its characteristics and benefits.
Goal 3
Goal 3
Offer practical strategies to help you build positive relationships, set clear expectations, promote prosocial behaviors, implement proactive classroom management techniques, and model positive behavior.
Educator types
Educator types
Active
Demanding
Who are you?
The Technocrat
Warm Demander
II
I
Personal
Warmth
Professional Distance
IV
III
The Elitist
The Sentimentalist
Often, the way we teach has been influenced by our own classroom experiences with different types of educators — which isn’t always a good thing. Take a look at these teacher types developed with influence from Lee Canter, an educational psychologist whose work became prominent in the 1970s.
Consider where you fall in this quadrant. Note that if you teach multiple courses, your personal approach may change as well.
Passive
Leniency
Educator types
The Technocrat
Provides effective support for independent learners, but may struggle with guiding dependent learners.
Despite potential distance, students perceive the teacher as likable due to their competence and enthusiasm for the subject matter.
Prioritizes subject matter enthusiasm over building rapport with students, lacking an explicit focus on developing relationships.
Sets rigorous standards and holds high expectations for student performance.
Demonstrates strong technical expertise in instructional methods and techniques.
Educator types
The Elitist
Neglects building rapport or trust with students, maintaining a professional distance.
Holds low expectations for dependent learners and provides limited support. Favors organizing instruction around independent learners and lacks scaffolding for others.
Misinterprets cultural differences as intellectual deficits in diverse students.
Students feel excluded from the classroom's intellectual life; teacher appears cold and uncaring.
Educator types
The Sentimentalist
Lacks appropriate challenge and scaffolding in instruction, hindering productive struggle.
Liked by students but viewed as a push-over, failing to establish firm boundaries.
Places explicit emphasis on building rapport, trust, and warmth through verbal and nonverbal communication.
Demonstrates genuine care, personal regard, and warmth towards students.
Holds lower expectations out of pity, seeking
to protect students from failure.
Educator types
The Warm Demander
Exhibits strong competence in instructional techniques and methods, fostering effective teaching.
Encourages productive struggle and challenges students while maintaining a caring and "tough love" stance.
Explicitly focuses on building rapport, trust, and conveying warmth through non-verbal cues.
Demonstrates personal regard for students by showing genuine interest in their lives and significant events.
Holds high standards while providing emotional support and instructional scaffolding to help dependent learners meet expectations.
What to expect…
Educator types
The Warm Demander is often noted as the type of educator that brings out the best in their students — academically and socially. Warm Demanders have students with:
Improved academic performance
Enhanced student engagement
Positive behavioral development
Better educator-student relationships
Strong self-efficacy
Educator types
Reflect
Reflect on the type of educator
you tend to be.
Has this changed over time?
Do you fall into more than one
category? Why? When?
Build positive relationships
Building positive relationships
with students is crucial across all educational levels. While the specific approaches should vary based on the age and maturity of students, here are some general strategies for building positive relationships.
Across all age groups:
Actively listen and show empathy
Treat students with dignity
Use student names and personal interests (regardless of class size)
Offer support and encouragement
Laugh and share joy with your students
Elementary
Elementary
How can you build positive relationships with your elementary students
?
Get to know your students and their
families individually
Co-construct a warm and welcoming environment with your students
Incorporate cooperative activities while setting up bumpers so they know what is inside and outside the scope of expected behaviors
Use positive reinforcement
Be approachable and accessible
Secondary
Secondary
How can you build positive relationships with your secondary students
?
Show interest in their lives — family,
extra curricular, and jobs
Create a warm and welcoming environment with your students
Incorporate student choice
Encourage student voice
Provide meaningful feedback and follow
ups as needed
Establish mentorship opportunities to build collegiality between grade levels
University
University
How can you build positive relationships with your university students
?
Learn students’ names and interests. In larger classrooms, still make an effort to learn student names (at least some of them) and show interest in their academic and career goals.
Create a supportive classroom community: Encourage collaborative learning, group discussion, projects and peer feedback to foster belonging and inclusivity.
Be available outside of class through office hours and collective sessions.
Connect course content to student interests using real-life examples and future aspirations.
Provide mentorship and guidance. Offer advice and support related to academic and career goals. Share resources and opportunities for professional development.
Reflect
Reflect
Consider how you build positive
relationships with your students.
Do you think you are good at it?
Are you most effective?
Where can you grow?
What advice might you share with others?
Set clear expectations
Treating class expectations as things to be practiced vs. things to be obeyed can greatly shift classroom dynamics — this is particularly true in K-12
and also at the university level.
Behavioral Frameworks
Behavioral Frameworks
Establish a positive behavior framework:
Design a set of core classroom values
and agreements.
Involve students in the values and agreement-making process — they are usually harder on themselves than you would be.
Revisit rules and values. Consider revising them collectively and take care to avoid sounding preachy.
Communicating Expectations
Communicating Expectations
Communicate expectations effectively:
Clearly explain rules and consequences
Provide visual cues and reminders
Model expected behaviors and mention them when students meet them
Remind students of the expectations with love and generosity in your voice
Reflect
Reflect
Whether you are a K-12 or university educator,
you are required to craft a set of expectations. This reduces the likelihood for confusion and frustration for you and your students.
How do you set up your expectations?
Are they co-constructed?
Do you revisit them?
Do you provide visual reminders of them?
Promote prosocial behaviors
Prosocial classrooms, regardless of age, address the social and emotional aspects of learning. Often deemed SEL (social-emotional learning), it can be applied to both children, youth, and adults.
Some, like Brené Brown, argue that adults particularly need SEL knowledge, too, since emotions and social exchanges play a huge role
in our success and wellbeing. SEL fosters a sense of belonging and trust.
If we don’t have emotional intelligence, we will suffer in our relationships — both personal and professional.
Implement SEL
Key components of social-emotional learning are:
Implement SEL
Self-management: The capacity to regulate and control one's emotions, impulses, and behaviors.
Self-awareness:
The ability to recognize and understand one's own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, and values.
Social-awareness:
The skill of understanding and empathizing with the emotions, perspectives, and experiences of others.
Responsible decision-making:
The capacity to make thoughtful and ethical choices by considering consequences and the well-being of oneself and others.
Relationship skills:
The ability to establish and maintain healthy and positive relationships.
Instead, it should be something that is integrated throughout the day and practiced.
SEL should not be treated like something to be checked off in 15-minute increments.
Encourage collaboration
Encourage collaboration
How do you encourage collaboration?
Assign projects where each student has a role to play and is accountable for that role.
Engage in cooperative learning.
Promote positive interdependence among students and highlight how that interdependence aids their learning.
Make repeated time for collaboration so students can plan, calibrate, take stock, and refine.
Foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity
Foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity
How do you foster a sense of belonging and inclusivity?
Embrace diversity and meaningful culture and linguistics sustainability practices.
This means shifting your view on students from what they can’t do to challenging them and believing that they can succeed.
Address bullying and foster a safe environment. Actively talk about kindness and treating all people with dignity.
Reflect
Reflect
How do you implement SEL? Does it
go far enough? If you don’t, why not?
How do you encourage collaboration?
If you don’t, why not and to what end?
How do you foster a sense of belonging
and inclusivity?
Embrace prosocial routines
Students like to socialize, and it’s through discourse that learning happens. Lecturing and reading is not enough. Consequently, it’s important to develop routines that help students succeed in the classroom. Doing so will keep you happy, too.
Everyone talks about the importance of routines and procedures. Here are some tips for each grade band
to help you incorporate them into your day.
Elementary
Here are some prosocial routines for elementary students:
Establish a hand signal system to help communicate and reduce chatter.
Set a routine and process for lining up and set a timer for transitions.
Provide “Bell ringers” — things to do when the bell rings — and craft a routine around them.
Be clear about tech usage and parameters of conversation.
Establish reading groups with roles with specific tasks. Practice these groups to make them successful.
Put up table toppers or posters with conversation stems to help them practice productive conversations.
What are others you use?
Secondary
Here are some prosocial routines for secondary students:
Check and connect
Make time at the beginning of class to check and connect with your students. This helps them reset emotionally and puts them in a safe space mentally where you listen.
Group work
Secondary –
Group work
Define and nurture your brand of group work. For instance, students might assume roles during reading circles or reciprocal peer reading.
When setting up roles:
What does each role do?
Are there protocols that need to be followed?
What are the expectations?
What modeling might you do to illustrate how the group should function?
Secondary – Classroom roles
Classroom management roles
Establish a rotating set of roles for students in each class that can help them carry out classroom routines — from attendance, to handouts, to sharing music during work time.
When students feel like they are part of something, they become more invested and gain ownership of behaviors and their work.
Secondary – Instructional routines
Instructional routines
Craft a set of instructional “go to’s” that become signatures of your classroom. By having a set of instructional strategies you will save time and build your repertoire. Here are a few favorites:
“My Favorite No” — embrace error as part of learning.
Collect student problem solving and, without naming students, illustrate their thinking on the board. Unpack whether it is a correct solution.
Socratic Seminar — create an inner and outer circle. The inner circle crafts a set of questions to be discussed about a topic. Discussion occurs in the inner circle. The outer circle listens and then discusses the discussion.
Secondary –
Classroom closure
Closure
Develop a classroom closure routine where students process their learning, think about how their thinking has changed, or elevate students for certain behaviors or growth.
It’s also nice for students to give “shout outs” to fellow classmates at the end of class.
This can be for doing something helpful, demonstrating good character, etc.
Secondary - Reflect
What other prosocial routines might you use?
University
University faculty can also benefit from establishing routines and procedures.
Besides putting expectations in your syllabus, challenge yourself and students to engage in prosocial routines. The list below focuses on instructional routines as opposed to course
rules and operations.
University -
Protocols
Heuristics and protocols
Use heuristics and protocols that are utilized repeatedly to unpack a topic.
This helps center the conversation and often nurtures a respectful learning environment that fosters diversity of thought and voice while aiding analysis.
University -
Relevancy
Relevant connections
Call out relevant connections between what students are learning and what happens in the world or specific fields.
To stress this point, elevate this connection either through discussion or direct communication in every class.
University - Collaborations
Collaborations
Facilitate collaborative learning in class and suggest norms for collaborative learning outside of class. Create a template with milestones for group work, check-ins, and time in class for them to regroup.
University –
Community of Learners
Community of learners
Nurture a community of learners by setting up ways for students to share, provide feedback, and collectively puzzle through “artifacts” they produce.
Reflection
What others might
you use?
Encourage positive behavior
Mindsets
Approach your students with the mindset that they can reach goals beyond themselves. Your belief will manifest in them, but you need to be patient and clear about what you want to see and what you believe about them.
Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford, believes that nurturing a “growth mindset” vs “fixed mindset” in students can greatly impact their growth. The former suggests that students can grow and learn to be competent and skilled, while the latter suggests that students can’t.
Which type of learning situation would you
want to be in?
?
Reinforcement
Reinforce
Throughout this presentation, reinforcement has been mentioned.
But what is it specifically?
It means:
Offering specific and genuine praise
Providing students with opportunities for leadership and responsibility
This last point involves trust. With scaffolding you can build the proper trust with your students. Acknowledge that there will be mistakes and that
they are opportunities to learn.
Role Modeling
The adoption of a warm demander identity also means:
Being a positive role model — try to be your best, most patient, most generous, and most grateful self in front of your students. It will be infectious, especially when you ask the same of your students.
Demonstrating desired behaviors and values and purposefully calling out that you are doing so.
Reflecting on personal actions and choices — be a little vulnerable. Admit mistake.
Reflect
How do you model the behaviors
you want in your students?
Do you think it’s part of your role
as a teacher?
Why or why not?
What sort of opportunities will you give students to demonstrate leadership
and responsibility?
Close
?
Being a warm demander is no easy task. Some people have personalities that more readily lead to this disposition. But all of us can learn how to take on that identity with practice.
How does a growth mindset come out in your teaching practice?
How can you share your beliefs about your students with your students?