How it looks:

• The classroom environment should be an environment designed primarily for students with traditional teacher items kept to a minimum. Large desks, chairs, personal mementos are best kept in an office or other space.
• The environment is clean and aesthetically pleasing, free from unnecessary visual distractions and clutter.
• The teachers and children move around the classroom slowly and quietly with a sense of purpose.
• The teachers meet the children at eye level in order to communicate.
• Communication is open and authentic; body language is consistent with verbal messages.
• Teachers are seen as supportive of success and constructive in their assessments.
• Teachers frequently take time to observe the class as a whole and to reflect on their observations in order to personalize the curriculum for individual learners’ skills and learning styles and offer the right amount of challenge.
• As a result of their observations, teachers are able to anticipate problems and intervene before disruption occurs. At the same time, teachers do not intervene if students can solve their own problems.
• Students do not spend their time waiting unproductively.

How it sounds:

• Teachers and students go up to people they are addressing and speak softly in a natural way.
• Teachers and students speak positively and with respect to one another.
• Encouragement is highly valued because it gives positive feedback to progress at any level.
• Choices and alternatives are offered within acceptable limits.
• Problems are solved more by listening rather than by talking. There is a structured method of problem solving.
• Personal silence is valued as a way to concentrate, reflect, and develop the “inner voice” necessary for metacognition. At the same time, dialogue with peers and teachers is a valuable learning tool. Small group and individual lessons are done quietly and at the students’ eye level.
• Interruptions are kept to an absolute minimum.

What it feels like:

• Learning is joyful and self-calming.
• The teachers and students feel socially, emotionally, and physically safe.
• With the introduction of new information, teachers learn to value their own and their students’ disequilibria when it precedes valuable growth and learning.
• There is a mutual trust built into the community based on commitment to consistency in the ideas that everyone belongs, no one is excluded.
• The teachers and students know that choices are available and that poor choices result in consequences. Choices can be in the form of multiple intelligence, learning styles, content, order, and timing. Students are encouraged to make choices that are acceptable to the larger community.