Professional Practice
Standard 4

Provision of a safe and productive learning environment is vital for effective classrooms and has a significant impact on maximising students’ learning potential. Groundwater-Smith, Ewing & Le Cornu (2015, p.110) describes the safe and supportive environment as ‘enabling’ context for learning and CESE (2020, p.5) defines it as a positive environment, conducive to learning and pro-social. A safe and supportive environment is not confined to the physical environment organised with co-created rules, procedures and clear expectations for students which is no doubt a vital component of a safe and supportive learning environment. However, It encompasses other important aspects of the social-emotional environment like provision of student participation opportunities that develop emotional wellbeing of all students(CESE 2020), particularly significant for students with challenging behaviours perhaps for a surge in family problems, depression and bullying more. Perhaps reorganise the above sentence as it is too long and needs to be broken into two parts. Therefore an effort to provide an environment offering frequent opportunities of development in self-esteem and sense of accomplishment through gradual progression towards an outcome, with scalable tasks aligned to needs and strengths of students is indispensable to a safe and supportive learning environment.

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 Lastly provision of safe and supportive environment entails a well-defined approach to identify and handle safety issues relative to context as suggested by Trump and Kenneth (2011)e.g. thoroughly researched safety network of friends and family, rules around the safe and ethical use of ICT and limiting bullying behaviour. These acquired skills facilitate them to stay safe within the school community and outside.  This is also too long for one sentence and needs to be supported.

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To achieve an enabling environment that motivates students to learn maximises learning time, minimise disruptions and is prosocial, a combination of preventative and responsive strategies will be required, with a greater focus on preventative strategies if applied effectively than responding to negative behaviours, whose incidence of occurrence will decrease but not diminish (Garette, 2014; CESE 2020; Terada 2019).

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I will emphasise on fostering relationships with students and their families to include students’ voice to provide a safe and supportive environment conducive to learning. This strategy is predominant of all preventative strategies (physical layout, rules and procedures, relationships, Implementing and managing engaging instructions) for the reason that it provides valuable information from students’ point of view about their backgrounds to align classroom climate to student’s needs. This facilitates higher engagement of students in classroom activities, manage challenging behaviours better, provide inclusive, culturally responsive opportunities of learning, devise rules and procedures through the democratic procedure, hence provide a safe and supportive environment.  To facilitate my relationships with students my focus would be on solutions rather than problems and practice being non-judgemental by giving behaviour specific praise (Garrett 2014).