Throughout my experiences with my education courses and student teaching, creating personal connections within the classroom has been noted as one of the most important factors in creating a successful learning environment. By creating connections with children, you are manufacturing a welcoming and comfortable environment. That environment should allow students to feel like they can be vulnerable, ask questions, and voice their opinions in the classroom. Building a community within your classroom fosters a trusting and respectful space that is needed for the success of everyone within. Therefore, developing personal connections with students is vital for teaching and learning.

 

In EDEL 305, Professor Chaplin showed us that we can build those connections through the Morning Meeting. In the “Morning Meeting Book” by Roxann Kriete, Morning Meetings invite students into the classroom each morning and sets a trusting and respectful tone while also promoting academic growth and positive behavior. By starting each morning with a Morning Meeting, we merged social, emotional, and intellectual learning. Professor Chaplin had us create our own Morning Meeting project to present to our fellow classmates. Through this, we learned about one another and created a space where we all felt comfortable to express our thoughts and opinions. The elements within the Morning Meeting allows teachers to generate relationships with their students. Some of the elements of a Morning Meeting include but are not limited to a greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message/news and announcements. Each of these elements serve an important purpose that help with community building in the classroom. Greetings can help students learn each other’s names and provides a sense of belonging. Sharing allows students to practice communication skills and can create connections between students. Group activities can be fun ways to encourage students to actively participate and cooperate. Lastly, the morning message/news and announcements gives teachers a way to ease into the school day by getting children excited about the day.

 

At my internship at Chapin Elementary School, I engaged in a group activity called “2 Truths and 1 Fib” during the Morning Meeting on the first day of school. In this activity, I shared many fun facts about myself and then students guessed which ones were true. After, the students were given the opportunity to share fun facts about themselves. Through this activity, I was able to start building personal connections with my students. These connections are going to foster a successful learning environment by making students feel safe and comfortable with me as their teacher.

 

Throughout my experiences in student teaching, both of my coaching teachers have started the school day with a Morning Meeting. In the Spring of 2021, I was in a 3rd grade classroom at New Providence Elementary School. The district itself developed a “Social Emotional Learning (SEL)” that teachers were instructed to include in their Morning Meetings each day. These SEL lessons were created in order to teach students important life skills that they can use at school and at home. Each week, the SEL lessons had different topics: responsibility, feelings and emotions, organization, friendship, and teamwork. Students would participate in different conversations, activities, and tasks each day based on the topic of the week. During my student teaching at New Providence, I was in charge of teaching the SEL lesson each morning. I found fun activities, videos, and read-alouds for the students to engage in that connected back to the topic of the week. For instance, during the teamwork SEL lesson, I created a tangram puzzle that students had to solve by working with their table groups. By having students engage with a tangram puzzle, not only were they practicing teamwork, but they were also introduced to a math tool. For another lesson based on self-control, I shared a read-aloud with my students called “My Mouth is a Volcano” by Julia Cook. The SEL part of the morning meeting taught students how to be active citizens within their community in school and outside of school. It also contributed to community building and creating connections within the classroom because both students and teachers were encouraged to practice their SEL topic throughout the week.

 

The Morning Meeting is just one strategy that teachers can use to create connections within the classroom. Bringing elements that feel like home into the classroom is a technique that my coaching teacher at Chapin Elementary School uses. In her classroom, she has a photo wall with the words “We Are Family” in the middle. Students were asked to bring pictures of their families to hang on the wall in order to represent that we are a family as a class just like your family outside of school. She also has a “refrigerator wall” where students can hang up any worksheets, drawings, or projects they are proud of, just like you would do on the refrigerator at home. These are just two of many other strategies that teachers can use to generate personal connections with their students. Personal connections help students feel comfortable in their classrooms and allow them to become trusting of their teacher and their classmates. These connections are necessary to build an environment that fosters successful learning for both the students and the teacher.