I love this article because it mentioned many matters I am interested in, such as school cultures, classroom sizes, teacher-student relationships, and classroom emotional climate.
School cultures is an essential element for choosing a school. I think a school culture can reflect how this school looks like, whether it is diverse or not, can the school accept my culture? And the study atmosphere can be linked to the school culture as well. One of my previous First Grade class had over 16 different backgrounds students. 16 different cultural backgrounds students were siting in the same classroom and studying, how interesting! It was exciting and diverse to see how different cultures and people to solve the same problems.
As classroom size, I would like to say, as small as we can be better for students and teachers because having smaller size classroom would allow the teacher to build a better relationship with students. If the teacher has a large size classroom, then she might not be able to help every single child because the time and energy are limited. Having a small size classroom would also support building a happy classroom emotional climate, especially for a kindergarten class.
Parents also play a significant role in the process of their children’ studying. Sometimes, some kids are behinds other kids in class, these kids do not care about their study, and their parents do not care either no matter how many times the teacher talk to the parents. At the beginning, parents might not see it as a big deal because their children are too small or they are just in kindergarten level, however, the more kids learn, they more they are behind than others, gradually, these kids would lose their confidence to learn, they even do not want to go to school because they are not confident in studying and their scores on exams are always very low.

“The concept of the culture of the school and the fact that different schools, like different communities, vary in their interpersonal moral and academic cultures, have been central to our understanding of school effects on adolescent development ”(P229, Schools as developmental contexts during adolescence).

I love the adolescent development in interpersonal context because there are so many interesting points! My major is early childhood education, which seems has little to do with the adolescent, but this article reminds me about how important is the parent-child relationships, as it is always consistent in a longitude matter.

I have this boy in my classroom who comes from an Asian American family. He is doing excellent in so many aspects but meanwhile, he is super hard on himself. He always hesitated to do his work, and keep asking what should he do during math, literacy and arts center. I am concerning that he might have this issue because of his family but has no idea how to support him and his family. I myself is a Chinese, and I’ve been seeing this issue going on among Chinese community all these years, but not willing to give up this traditional relationship with their children–they are tending to model a normative behavior to the children and always give very limited autonomy to them. On the other hands, this article also shows that some minority ethnical group young people tend to be more willing to support and help their family, which also means potentially, they are more willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of family harmony. Then they would have even less chance to have autonomy. I am wondering as teachers, how can we support this type of children and their family.

“Theory and research recently have shifted toward the idea that emotional autonomy results from a progressive negotiation between adolescent and parents over issues related to the granting and exercise of adolescent autonomy” (Collins and Steinberg, 2008, p563)

My MVP for this week is a passage split in two because one part represents the cause and the other the effect of this type of behavior. The behavior I’m referring to goes into what we as educators may be subconsciously promoting in our classrooms. The sheer length of time we spent in school often times, as previously read and mentioned in class, affects our teaching style more than teacher preparation degree programs and that means that sometimes we might perpetuate ideas that aren’t so universally accepted anymore. This MVP specifically talks about how implicitly instilling in students the idea that success is based solely on academic achievement and then furthermore that intelligence is a “fixed entity rather than a modifiable skill”, we are setting up many students for failure. Yes, some students may thrive in this sort of setting and yes, maybe we could have been one of those students growing up, but that doesn’t make these ideas universally true. As educators we must strive to be as receptive as possible in our teaching styles to the many different ways in which students learn. If we place students in an education system that immediately rejects and belittles their type of intelligence, we rule our their input into the class and stunt their socioemotional and psychological growth in that setting. In order for students to develop, they must be given the space to do so.