Humanizing Classroom Management as a Core Practice for Teachers of Multilingual Students

Developing humanizing, culturally and linguistically responsive and justice-oriented classroom management practices require integrating robust theoretical principles with practice-based teaching experiences. Here, we explore how using Core Practices (CPs) as a foundation for reflecting on and enacting classroom management helped novice teachers (NTs) build humanizing pedagogies for organizing and managing classrooms populated by multilingual students. Using a participatory, dialogic research design, we draw on data from team meetings, teacher interviews, and classroom observations to describe how NTs reflected on and enacted the CP Building a Positive Learning Environment in their daily work and how it helped humanize their practice. Findings indicate that NTs positioned multilingual students as individuals with complex academic, social-emotional, linguistic, and behavioral strengths and needs; and enacted classroom management practices that were consistent, clear, culturally and linguistically responsive, and social-emotionally supportive. We discuss how CPs may help NTs attend to these aspects of classroom management for multilingual students and develop practices that are humanizing.

Automated summary

The study demonstrates that novice teachers successfully positioned multilingual students as individuals with complex needs and strengths through reflecting on and implementing Core Practices, and implemented a series of classroom management practices that were humanizing, culturally and linguistically responsive, and social-emotionally supportive.