New teachers face novel challenges. Anxieties abound: What if I can’t remember all the students’ names? What if they laugh at me? What if they don’t? What if they simply don’t like me? I always tell new teachers that the first days of a new school year are hard.
Like any new situation that provokes anxiety, there is no one perfect answer, no silver bullet.
Fortunately, there are strategies for classroom connection that can help build trust, connect with students, and create a welcoming classroom environment where students thrive from the first (however anxious) day. This article offers some professional learning strategies to address new teacher challenges. Use them to affirm student identities, to build respect in the classroom and to create a welcoming classroom environment during the first week of school that will become the foundation for your entire classroom community, all year long.
Build Relationships from Day One
For every classroom and every teacher, there is an essential component to help ease your anxious teacher-mind—a key ingredient to ensure your class is a place where kids grow, where mutual respect is shared, and where all students feel welcome and affirmed. It’s the ingredient and advice teachers are given constantly without a whole lot of explanation as to how to make it happen: Relationships!
A new building, the start of student teaching, or even starting an academic year as a veteran teacher can cause you to return to the same new teacher challenges. Take a breath, and remember, you know how to build connections even if creating a welcoming classroom environment is a new kind of social situation. In doing so, you will lay the foundation for strong connections among everyone in your classroom community.
Use Interest Surveys
Learn what students know and what they want to know. Interest surveys are a fun and efficient way to affirm student identities and connect with students.
Choose a Focus
Surveys must have a clear aim and purpose. Begin by choosing a focus. You might focus on what types of books your students prefer, or what home-based resources are available to your students. You can decide if you want to provide a more open-ended survey that invites students to share their ideal learning environment or more about their expectations.
Design Your Survey
Once you decide on the survey focus, you need to construct (or adapt) the survey. You are well positioned to flex your creativity and design your own survey. Think about including a mix of response options, whether multiple choice, open ended, smile scales (happy face through sad face), ranking items, and so on.
Get Feedback to Avoid Pitfalls
Invite feedback on your survey from a colleague or mentor to check for readability, length, and especially to ensure that survey questions are not inappropriate. Avoid overly personal questions and topics (including religion, sexual orientation, or family history) that could be distressing for children. For example, asking students about their parents’ occupations could distress students whose parents are jobless or unemployed. Since we are focused on affirming student identities and building respect in the classroom at the beginning of the year, these types of personal questions can be viewed as highly intrusive.
Share Responses
Give students an opportunity to share their responses with each other. If you used a digital survey, consider using tables, graphs, or other pictorial (i.e., word-clouds) representations of survey responses to share the whole class. Students might also share their survey responses in small groups or aloud with the class.
Regardless of the method you use to share responses, the goal is that students start to see connections between and among their responses to celebrate both commonalities and differences to create a welcoming classroom environment.
It can also be useful, if the topic makes sense, to take the survey yourself and to share your own responses with your students. Flattening the hierarchy of whose voice matters in the classroom is always a helpful strategy for classroom connection and building respect in the classroom.
Assign Identity-Focused Projects
Positive identity projects are another fabulous way to affirm student identities and build connections in your classroom. I recommend saving these projects for after you’ve built a baseline of trust and rapport (perhaps after the first two weeks of school). With an identity-focused project, you are asking students to be a bit vulnerable and share aspects of themselves that are both visible (I’m white) and those that are invisible (I’m Jewish).
Customize the Project
Choose a project that suits your classroom and students. One activity that seems to work well across grades is the All About Me visual image in which you create a blank space that students can fill with aspects of their identity that are important to them and that they want to share publicly. Younger kids might receive a printout of a blank gingerbread person. Older students may lay down on butcher block paper while their classmate traces their body. Students can write words, draw, cut images from magazines, or even use AI image generators to fill in their blank bodies.
Model for Students
For an identity-focused project, it is useful to model for your students. Complete and share your own identity images with your students. Talk about what is visible and invisible about your identity and how being a teacher has shaped your identity. You might consider sharing aspects of your identity that helped you determine teaching as a career path. While you’re modeling a completed activity, be sure to explain that some students may wish to keep aspects of their identity private. Encourage students to share what they are comfortable sharing and nothing beyond.
Share Projects
Finally, give students an opportunity to share their completed projects with each other. You might create a gallery wall where students can roam around and view each other’s identity projects. One great way to ensure positive interactions during the gallery walk is to equip each student with ten sticky notes. They can use the notes to share feedback and comments for their classmates. Encourage students to share comments about something in common, or something that they found surprising, for each project.
Interview a Treasured Adult
Another connection-building project is assigning your students the task of interviewing a treasured adult. Not only are you providing your students with an authentic academic task (connecting the classroom to home life), but you are also able to gather rich and helpful information about your students’ lived experiences with their families and the other trusted adults in their lives. Take a look at this classroom connection strategy from When You’re the New Teacher: 28 Strategies to Align Your Good Intentions with Your Teaching Practices.
Learn from Students
When students interview a treasured adult about their expectations for the students’ success in school, the teacher can benefit, too. Learning about your students’ familial expectations and goals for the school year can help shape your own instructional approaches and curricula material selection.
Adapt the Focus
You can also change the focus on the interview. Students might want to craft interview questions around a particular topic that you are studying in class. They might want to learn more about their adult’s own early schooling experiences, or they might want to see if the adult has any skills or special interests that they could share with the class as a future guest visitor. Regardless of the focus, having your students regularly interact with and interview trusted adults builds communication skills while also providing you with nuanced information that impacts your students’ everyday lives.
Establish a Journaling and Letter Writing Routine
A fabulous way to continue building connections with your students throughout the school year is to set up a journaling or letter writing routine. Here students can communicate privately one on one with you. In addition to inviting students to write open-ended streams of consciousness, you can assign daily or weekly prompts to your students such as, “Tell me about a time this week when you wish you had contributed to classroom discussion, but you didn’t. What do you wish you had said?”
Respond
After reading your students’ entries, you’ll need to respond. Depending on the time you have for this type of activity, you might write a very brief response for each entry, or respond to a few students’ entries each time, ensuring that you’ve responded to everyone at least once by the month’s end. Another time-saver is to share your responses orally with the whole class. For example, you could say something like, “I noticed a lot of you wrote about the fight in the cafeteria that happened yesterday. Like you, I was surprised by this event. Would anyone like to share their thoughts?”
Correspond
You can also invite students to write you individual letters. The frequency and topic could be up to the students, but you might set a minimum of one letter per every two weeks. Letters can be collected using a secure letterbox housed on your desk. Be sure you do your best to respond to students, especially if they seem like they need some additional emotional or academic support. For more urgent issues, be sure you follow your school’s protocol for reporting and lean on your school counselor’s office to help you address any student needs that may arise.
Overcome new teacher challenges with professional learning and strategies for classroom connection. The first days of teaching can feel like a big social experiment, but the truth is: you already know how to connect with people. You’ve done it before! Building relationships may take time, but with the right strategies, you'll connect with students and create a welcoming classroom environment where everyone feels valued, heard, and ready to learn.
