Brendan Barry

ED 327

4/5/2023

Classroom Management Paper #2

In this paper on classroom management, I will discuss my role as an educator

through three different lenses of culturally responsive teaching. First, I will discuss my

role as a warm demander. Second, I will discuss how I plan on establishing rapport with

students. And lastly, I will discuss how I will promote mutual respect. While looking at all

three of these aspects within the culturally responsive and classroom management

umbrella, I will keep in mind the field experiences I have had during my time at

Zionsville West as well as use the book, “These Kids Are Out of Control” as a reference.

In order to run a classroom in which all students feel comfortable and welcome, I

must make sure that I am planning culturally responsive lessons as well as being a

warm demander. Being a warm demander to me means that I try to create a genuine

bond with my students by being open with them, gaining their trust, finding ways to

connect with them, and bringing a positive attitude to the classroom. While all of these

things on their own sound like good things, when you pair them together with culturally

responsive teaching the students will benefit greatly from it. The book, “These Kids Are

Out of Control” makes many interesting points on culturally responsive teaching that can

apply to being a warm demander. It talks about how we as teachers must pay attention

to the student's social, emotional, and political learning by using cultural resources to

teach knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. This approach paired with being a warm

defender pushes students to excel and allows them to succeed more often. Another
aspect of the book that applies here is the four elements of effective instruction for

classroom management. The four elements are critical reflective practices, high student

engagement in content, building class community, and positive framing. When we as

teachers engage in these four elements we are able to understand the student's

feelings, experiences, and understand them as a person better.

The next point I want to focus on is how important establishing rapport with

students through the culturally responsive lens is. Reading about how traumatic

experiences affect students on page 39 of the textbook was eye-opening to me. I knew

that traumatic experiences affect students in a negative way, but the statistics that the

book uses shocked me. “Students who were exposed to two or more traumatic

experiences were almost three times as likely to have to repeat a grade, more likely to

miss at least two weeks of school, and far less likely to be engaged in school.” This

goes to show that helping students cope with trauma is a very important part of our job.

In order to do so, we must have built rapport with the students so that they can trust us

with their issues. Chapter four of the book is all about building relationships with your

students and gives many great points. The first thing that it says we as educators

should do is be persistent from the first day of school to try and get to know the students

and establish meaningful relationships. Some ways in which we can do this is by

interviewing students about their interests, assigning things that allow students to

creatively share their experiences, encouraging classroom discussion that is student-

focused, attending extracurricular activities that my students participate in, and

immersing myself in their community.

 Lastly, looking at promoting mutual respect for both students and myself is very

important. Often people talk about how students should respect their teachers, but don’t

talk about how teachers should respect their students. Having mutual respect is vital in

order to manage a culturally responsive classroom. This quote from the book is

something that I have learned about at Butler and believe is extremely important,

“Despite the negative outcomes associated with student race and class, issues of race

and poverty are often overlooked in teacher training and professional development.

These are explicit skills that can help teachers better meet the needs of their students.” I

have noticed in my experiences at Zionsville West that mutual respect comes up more

often than I would have thought. One instance that comes to mind is when a student

came up to my cooperating teacher and asked why she was so upset with him. She

didn’t realize that she was raising her voice at him, because she does it when he isn’t

on task. She quickly apologized and asked if there was anything she could do to make it

up to him. This is an example of strengthening the mutual respect, because now she is

aware and tries not to raise her voice.

The three examples of being a warm demander, establishing rapport with the

students, and promoting mutual respect in the classroom are all equally important for us

as educators to maintain in order to manage a classroom effectively. All of these fall

under the culturally responsive category which is something that my classes here at

Butler have taught me so much about. Being a trustworthy, open, positive teacher who

makes an effort to build a relationship with my students and provide them with

opportunities to express themselves all while maintaining mutual respect is not an easy

task, but one that I must strive to achieve each and every day that I am a teacher.