Measures You Need to Take to Ensure Identity Safety in Your Classroom

The identity safe classrooms are ones wherein the teachers work hard to ensure the social identity of the students remain an asset rather than pose as a barrier to succeed. Though the teachers across the world strive hard sharing the goal of educating the students successfully, there are situations when the students face trouble owing to the gender, race or the income group they belong to.

The identity safe classrooms are ones that value diversity. It has nothing to do with identity theft. (Identity theft is defined as a fraudulent practice where the name as well as personal information of an individual is made use of for obtaining loans, credits, etc.)

You may be overwhelmed to learn that there are several instances when unconscious prejudices need to be addressed not only in the students but the educators as well. You may not be doing this very consciously, but there are several instances when you are biased. Don’t be afraid; there are solutions that address this problem.

Here are a few measures you can adopt to foster identity safety in your class.

Be All Ears to Your Students

Make sure that each student has a role to play in the class. All the students must be allowed to express their opinion thereby making a contribution to classroom life.

Allow each student a turn after you complete a lesson and ask them to express their opinion. If that takes too much of time, you can form a few groups of students. Allow one student from each group to express opinion. The spokesperson should be different every day. Make sure when one student is speaking, the others are listening.

You need not always stick to the lesson either. Engage in a discussion on diverse topics.

Develop a Caring Classroom Ambience

This concentrates on the physical and the emotional comfort level of the students. The conduct of the teacher has a significant role to play in helping the students feel physically as well as psychologically safe.

You can follow a teacher who used to ask her students about the ‘present emotional status’ where the students answered by raising fingers from one to ten. Then, she asked a few students the reason behind a given emotional condition. You can do the same. This will help to form an idea of the present mood of the students and find out whether anyone needs attention immediately.

Ensure All the Students are Comfortable in Class

You can introduce a few activities that help each student to know more about each other. Make sure everyone gets a turn. Proper classroom arrangement helps a lot in making the students comfortable as well as facilitates healthy discussion. Create a safe as well as intuitive classroom environment.

De-emphasize competition so that the students learn as well as help each other. All the students must collaborate with each other when classes are going on. For example, if you are taking a Physics class, you can divide the students into a few groups and ask them to measure the diameter of a thread using a vernier caliper. Make sure the experiment is carried out by a different student every time. The same student should not carry out the experiment again and again, but they can help each other.

Put Up the Work of All the Students on Wall

It may not be always possible to put up the work of all the students in the school magazine since that is not just circulated inside the school. You can use the walls of the classroom to showcase the work of each student.

Don’t reject the work of any student just because you don’t think it is perfect.

Encourage all the students to submit their work and put up each one of them without any consideration.

Encourage Diversity in Classroom

The prime goal of culturally responsive education is helping the students be respectful towards the different cultures as well as people they are coming across in the educational setting as well as outside it.

Here are a few ways you can promote diversity in classroom.

• Play dress up games
• Structure classroom activities to promote different types of perspective
• Select books that reflect a huge variety of experiences and language

Identity safety is an approach that not just works for children, but the educators and the society at large as well. It is not enough to stop at creating the identity safe classrooms but measures need to be taken to promote identity safe communities too as that would bring down harm as well as hurt in society.