Event Details

To develop engaged and empowered learners, we need to change not only the curriculum and our instruction, but also the culture of our schools. In this course, learn about why classroom culture matters deeply to what and how students learn, and analyze the culture of your own classroom, school, or learning context. Explore the cultural force of “language” and its power to shape students’ learning and thinking.

The constantly changing world in which we live requires us to rethink what a quality education means. It is no longer enough to develop compliant (and too often complacent) learners merely making their way through school. Today we seek to develop engaged and empowered learners ready to act thoughtfully and effectively in the world. To accomplish this, we need to change more than the curriculum and our instruction–we need to change the culture of our schools. But why does classroom culture matter so much to our students' learning? And how can we begin to change the culture of our classrooms and schools to more effectively support student learning and thinking? This course demystifies the creation of classroom and school culture through an examination of the process of enculturation. We do this by looking carefully at the various “stories of learning” that schools perpetuate. We then look at the “new story of learning” we want to make for our students and consider how the eight cultural forces can help us to enact that story. We conclude the course by examining one of those eight cultural forces - “language” - and how our use of language shapes in deep and subtle ways the culture of the learning environment that surrounds our learners.

Designer & Co-Instructor: Ron Ritchhart Senior Researcher at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education (1994 to 2021)