Teachers set and maintain collective expectations and establish classroom environments that ensure a safe and productive classroom community. They distinguish between the helpful use of boundaries to provide structure and the use of power to control. They develop specific approaches and routines to establish, maintain, and respond to these expectations and behaviors in ways that build a classroom community that supports students’ learning and flourishing. Choosing and using expectations and agreements requires explicit care to avoid reinforcing values and patterns of control and behavior that privilege dominant ways of being related to race, class, and gender.
Teachers’ perceptions of students’ behavior, understanding, effort, and engagement are shaped by assumptions related to students’ social identities. Because of the close relationship between dominant norms and the culture of schooling, teachers’ interactions with children, as well as the classroom environment itself, can limit opportunities for students who do not share these norms. In contrast, this practice calls on teachers to manage the classroom environment in ways that do not exclude students, that make positive, significant differences for children, and that disrupt inequitable patterns that reflect broader sociocultural patterns. Central to this practice is a teacher’s high level of regard for students as full humans and an unwavering respect for their rights. It is interwoven with the work of building strong relationships with students as individuals and as a community. It differs from traditional notions of “classroom management,” which have been associated with ideas and systems related to compliance, control, and exclusion.