Classroom Culture Quotes

Children learn and remember at least as much from the context of the classroom as from the content of the coursework.

Where I grew up, learning was a collective activity. But when I got to school and tried to share learning with other students that was called cheating. The curriculum sent the clear message to me that learning was a highly individualistic, almost secretive, endeavor. My working class experience...was disparaged.

I don't believe a mistake-free learning environment exists.

Proper history teaching is being crushed under the weight of play-based pedagogy which infantilises children, teachers and our culture.

The Chinese are brought up to believe that you should be silent in class. The teacher speaks, and you just listen and absorb what they say.

A child's learning is a function more of the characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher.

In schools with a history of chaos, the teacher who can keep the classroom calm becomes virtually indispensable.

You know how to tell if the teacher is hung over? Movie Day.

The Compassionate Classroom is a fabulous book! If teachers will read it, they can transform their classrooms.

When you are in my classroom, you get everything from me. But you bloody well better give everything too.

There's nothing in the world like getting up in front of a high-school classroom in New York City. They won't give you a break if you don't hold them. There's no escape.

In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth.

It's hard to get an education when teachers spend 70 percent of their time trying to discipline students.

At Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet Academy, I studied under a brilliant and fiery teacher. This tiny, stuttering old man flew into a rage if his students' white socks failed to reach mid-calf level. Nor could he tolerate floppy hair. We wore hairnets to class - an athletic brigade of short order cooks.

I'd like to say a few words about one of the most popular concepts in the modern education--show and tell. Show and Tell is a device created by grammar schools to communicate family secrets to 32 other families before 9:15 am in the morning.

The teachers are trying to build the same culture in the classroom as we're building in the organization.

Teachers themselves know if there's a colleague who can't keep control or keep the interest of their class, it affects the whole school.

If you have a class of 35 children, and they're all smiling, and there's one little bastard, and he's just staring at you as if to say 'Show me', then he's the one you think about going home on the train.

The teaching fellow establishes the atmosphere of a class in the first few meetings. I have found that students appreciate having the ground rules clearly defined from the start.

A classroom setting for me was an audience.

Schools should be places to learn, not to teach.

I was the class innuendist.