Reflection Three: Brandy Meyer

This semester, I am spending my classroom hours in Ms. Gartz’s fourth grade classroom at Underwood Elementary school. Underwood is an academically gifted magnet school, located in the Five Points area of Raleigh. With only about 450 students currently enrolled, Underwood is a relatively small school. This has helped them in building a sense of school community. Within the school walls, students are treated equally across grade level. They are given the same behavioral expectations and presented with the same moral code which encourages students to respect each other and the school. With these common expectations, students move around the school knowing how the act as part of the school’s community. For instance, when all of the school’s children switch classes to go to their elective courses, the students know to walk on the right side of the hallway quietly while keeping their hands to themselves. They simply know what how to act in order to make the community function smoothly and efficiently. They know how to work together.
Another way in which Underwood encourages community is by providing common symbols for the students and common means of group communication. Among the symbols the students associate with are the school mascots, the Unicorn and super-heroes. Throughout the halls are posters representing these symbols. The school tee-shirts have these images on them. By providing students with these common images, students have something as a group to identify with. They are not only kindergarteners or fifth graders. Students know that they are all the Unicorns and that learning is super important. The daily media communication helps to further support this idea of the school as one community. Each morning, teachers turn their T.V.’s on to channel three where the video announcements begin to play. Special daily news is presented, the lunch menu is reviewed, birthdays are celebrated, and classroom achievements are honored. All students are given this opportunity to be informed, regardless of age or diverse needs. Each student is included in the community’s meeting and thus made to feel like a crucial member of the school society.
Underwood further builds community by encouraging parent partnerships. Several times a year, the school sponsors family activities, such as the Unicorn Trot, a sponsored two and a half hour walk around the schools track in order to raise money for school improvement. Underwood also asks parents to volunteer, eat lunch with their children, and share their unique knowledge with the classes. By promoting parent involvement, Underwood helps to bridge the school and home communities for its students. This not only helps students to feel comfortable and safe while at school, but it helps students to relate what is learned to home life and community. This extends the school community off of school grounds and into surrounding neighborhoods and cities. Underwood works to support a continually growing school connection.
Within this school wide community, Ms. Gartz has worked to build a community for her own twenty-two students. Much like the school, she encourages her parents to participate by sharing their cultures with the class, volunteering, and chaperoning on field trips. This widens her classroom scope drastically. Within her class, she builds community in several ways. First, she starts each day by greeting each student with a smile and a personal welcome as he or she comes through the door. This helps her to set a positive tone for the day. After giving the students time to adjust to the room, she conducts a morning meeting with the students in which they go over the days schedule, share what is new in their lives, stretch, and greet each other in other languages or silly voices. Immediately after, the students go to elective. This morning meeting is thus crucial in order to connect the students to one another and the classroom before they part ways. During the remainder of the day, Ms. Gartz builds community by encouraging group work and discussion, sitting her students at groups of desks, providing her students with equally high expectations, and treating her students with respect. These activities have helped Ms. Gartz to build a cohesive classroom made of teammates, as opposed to a class made of individual students. The students want to help each other, want to learn from each other. This increases the effectiveness of instructional time.
Overall, Ms. Gartz and the rest of Underwood have succeeded in their goal of building school and classroom community. By simply walking down the school’s halls, you can tell the students are connected and ready to learn. I plan to take what I have seen at Underwood and incorporate it as I one day try to build my own classroom community. To build community is to grow your learners.