Students’ self-esteem and resilience increase when they feel at home in a safe space with close, caring, and supportive relationship with fellow students and with teachers who have “got their back” (Goodman, 2018, pg. 132).
Throughout the entire course of understanding and learning about the adolescents, teachers have to consider many different aspects about students to engage their learning in this inclusive classroom. We don’t exactly know what is(are) the thing(s) happen to our students when they enter the classroom with various emotional expressions, or attitudes. Sometimes, we also might neglect them how they feeling about the day since we are so busy to focus on planning curriculum and instruction. In other words, we are not building a constant relationship with our students, just because our job is to teach them academically; such as an excuse. In order to make students engage in our classroom, I believe we need to touch with them initiative. Consider about different characteristics of our students, student won’t speak to us if they are introverted, conservative, or inactive. Hence, for those type of students, we probably want to try different strategies which make them open their hearts willing to share their concerns with us. For instance, as Martens mentioned, students might feel engaged and supportive when we add something that relevant to students such as, hobby, favorite food, anything upon students’ interests. Making the connection with my teaching area, I would like to create math problems with the interests of my specific students who need more cares and attention. Personally, the big advantage of this lesson plan strategy is to build positive interdependence with the whole class, including ourselves. This way students feel everyone in this room willing to understand his/her personality, which comfortable to speak out loud either to his/her classmates or to us. Therefore, such an opportunity will increase the conversations with our students into more personally regard to their lives from outside of school. In addition, we probably want to visit our students’ community (even resident place) to recognize how well they living. Is the community that our students living to foster their learning? Is that safe? Any issues that influence how students perform in our classroom? I believe these questions might be answered when we push ourselves to get closer and understand our student individually. So as an educator, I agree this is another expectation for us to understand our students comprehensively. Or just even give them a warm simile when they come into our class!