My Classroom Climate

There are four factors should be considered in creating positive classroom atmosphere or climate i.e. order and safety, success, challenge and task comprehension.

Every class may have its own rule. It could be created based on the culture surrounding the class, students and teacher agreement, or other ways. The rule that is internalized in a class will become an order which keeps the class run in the right place and safely. There is also an order in SMA Labschool Kebayoran where I taught in order to fulfill my school experience program (SEP).

The simplest order that I could see at the first day I came there was the way students and teachers do greeting. They have a unique form of “salam” that made teachers and students became like a friend. Therefore, I did it when I meet them in class. Other orders were regulation of using gadget and time limitation if they want to go to toilet. Students are prohibited in using their gadget during classroom activity. They are also prohibited to go to toilet more than ten minutes. Moreover, if they are late to come to the class more than 15 minutes, they will be considered as abstain.

In short, I did not need to put more effort in creating order because the school has created good orders for its members. Thus, I just needed to keep the order internalized and did not break it. However, that was the big challenge for me since I was a newbie among them. It was hard to make them respected me like they respected their real teacher. My master teacher said that some of them disobeyed the rule because they did not see me as the part of this school.

Besides that, as a teacher I needed to design the lesson so that students’ opportunity to success is balance. Teachers should bear in students’ mind that they have opportunity to success in that class.

I explained the learning objective to them and give equal task for each of my students in order to give the same opportunity for them. Moreover, when a student did not answer my question correctly, I gave him more time to think about his answer again so that he could correct his own answer. However, in bigger class it was hard to control it. There were some students who seemed not care about their success in my class since I just taught them twice and it would not affect their score in English.

I did not really give the suitable challenge to my students because I did not sure their level before I taught them. My master teacher did not want to give me a clue in which level they were in. Thus, in the first teaching session I gave them too easy task since their English were very good.

For task comprehension, I thought I did it well once when I taught movie review and mind map. First, in the beginning of the class I built the students’ schema of a topic that was going to be discussed. It make the listening activities I would give them later became comprehensible. Then, I used PBL method to model a mind map so that it will be authentic and comprehensive. I also did join construction activity when my students and I were making a mind map together before they make it independently.

From SEP this semester, I became more realize that being a teacher is not easy. As we may know that teachers’ responsibility is very big.