Components of Healthy Learning Communities

Tomlinson offers several key components of healthy learning communities:

The content in a healthy classroom:

• Is relevant to students; it seems personal, familiar, connected to the world they know;
• Helps students understand themselves and their lives more fully now, and will continue to do so as they grow up;
• Is authentic, offering “real” history or math, not just exercises about the subject;
• Can be used immediately for something that matters to the students; and
• Makes student more powerful in the present as well as in the future

The teacher in a healthy classroom:

• Appreciates each child as an individual;
• Remembers to teach the whole child;
• Continues to develop expertise;
• Links students and ideas;
• Strives for joyful learning;
• Helps students make their own sense of ideas;
• Shares the teaching with students; and
• Uses positive energy and humor.

For such a teacher, “discipline” is more covert than overt.

The student in a healthy classroom:

• Is like all other and different from all others;
• Needs unconditional acceptance as a human being;
• Needs to believe he or she can become something better;
• Needs help in living up to personal dreams;
• Has to make sense of things individually;
• Needs power over his or her life and learning; and
• Needs help to develop that power and use it wisely.