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Classroom Management

Creating a Learning Environment Where All Kids Feel Valued

A five-step exercise on identity and belonging helps middle school students appreciate differences鈥攊n themselves and in their peers. 

October 9, 2019

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At a聽bare minimum, my job as a teacher is to create a learning environment where all kids feel valued, safe, and eager to learn from everyone in the room. Often, though, as teachers, we get too distracted with getting through curriculum or testing to give enough attention to our classroom culture.

But the importance of ensuring that all students feel they can be themselves at school cannot be underestimated. Every day, our students are inundated with messages that magnify and expose the levels of hatred and injustice in our society. For marginalized students in particular, these dehumanizing behaviors make them feel 鈥渙thered鈥 or like outcasts. A good teacher makes an authentic connection with every student who walks through the door and makes them feel they belong.

This school year, I鈥檝e been very purposeful about聽making sure that all of my middle school students feel safe and welcomed in my classroom. I bought extra posters and stickers that recognized and supported marginalized identities, so that all students would feel recognized. Normally, I do the usual icebreaker games to get to know my students, but this year I felt I had to do something more substantial. I started the school year by taking some time to get to know each student personally. I asked how they were feeling about the upcoming year, the world, our society, and any positive experiences or joy they had found during the summer.

But still, this didn鈥檛 seem enough. I felt I needed to dedicate sufficient classroom time to help my students explore their own identities and those of their classmates. So instead of doing my typical Introduction to Health lesson this year, I developed a new one that encouraged students to examine how identity affects our place in society and how society affects how we express our identity.

A Five-Step Lesson Plan

What Is Identity?聽We started with the basic definition of identity, which I classified as characteristics or identifiers that make us unique or known, or that we are grouped by. These could include race, ethnicity, gender, disability, or sexual orientation, for example. We continued talking about how identity characteristics can be both visible and invisible, and repeated this quote aloud as a class twice: 鈥淏e proud of your personal identity, but always recognize and respect the personal identity characteristics of others.鈥 As a class, we discussed how we could live out the meaning of that quote. I shared, for example, that one of my identity characteristics is being a Christian聽but that I recognize and respect others with different religious or spiritual beliefs.

Probing Deeper: We then discussed the most common identity characteristics, including gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, birthplace, and spoken languages. I explained that these groupings can go deeper than surface level. We talked about the difference between race and ethnicity, for example, and that gender is not always binary. It was amazing to see kids鈥 eyes light up when they felt free to comfortably engage in an all-class conversation.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen: Next, I decided to stretch their thinking. With the permission of several of my friends, I had students complete a 鈥淪top, Collaborate, and Listen鈥 exercise to determine the identity characteristics of other people. I placed pictures of six of my friends on the board and paired off students. Together, they had to come to an agreement on the identity characteristics of the adults in the pictures.

They asked themselves:

  • What visible identity characteristics do we agree this person has?
  • What possible invisible characteristics do we agree this person has?
  • Why do we think these are this person鈥檚 visible/invisible characteristics?

Similar to a Think, Pair, Share,聽the Stop, Collaborate, and Listen聽activity required kids to use eye contact and confidence to introduce themselves to their partners. Often, with a partner or in group activities, certain students monopolize speaking time, but with this method, each student is required to both share and listen.

After groups made their guesses, we debriefed as a class, and I informed students of my friends鈥 true identity characteristics. We repeated this process six times鈥攐nce for each friend鈥攁nd then came back together. I proceeded to share my own personal identity characteristics to be authentic with my students.

How Is Identity Formed?聽As we continued the identity lesson, we worked on two major tasks: building a better understanding of how society affects identity and completing personal identity portraits. We used to have kids better understand privilege and bias, and how society affects people with different identity characteristics.

Students explored how particular challenges such as access to clean drinking water or bullying have greater or lesser impacts on specific groups of people. The organizer also asked students, 鈥淗ow can you help fix, stay safe, or be an ally for this issue?鈥

Identity Portraits:聽After completing their graphic organizers, students started on their final project, an identity portrait of themselves. I asked them聽to draw a picture of their face. One half of the face was supposed to look like them, and the other half displayed the visible and invisible identity characteristics they were proud of and/or comfortable sharing. This could be sexual orientation, nonbinary gender, nationality, or ethnicity.

These portraits were powerful, and I was grateful to see the level of confidence that many of my students expressed in their drawings. We then created a 鈥淲ho We Are鈥 wall with the pictures聽so that my students all know who they are and that they are all valued and safe in my classroom.

A wall of identity portraits in Shana White's classroom.
Courtesy of Shana White
Identity portraits hang on the wall in Shana White's classroom.

鈥淒iversity is our strength鈥 cannot really be true unless individuals with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences are earnestly valued, humanized, and respected. This lesson showed me that students are willing to empathize with others but sometimes need assistance from teachers to understand who they are, how they are unique, and how they can understand and support people who are different from themselves.

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Filed Under

  • Classroom Management
  • Social & Emotional Learning (SEL)

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