PSTC/ISTC in TEFL + TKT

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ISTC Features of Classroom Culture

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  1. INTERACTIVE.
    Verbal nd non-verbal- on continuum from ritual/predictable to dynamic/umpredictable. Interaction is motivated by the assumption that people can learn in a group, but it is likely that interaction is made sense of in different ways by different individuals.
  2. DIFFERENTIATED.
    The classroom is an amalgam of many different social realities. Everything that happens is therefore open to different interpretations. Classroom culture is a compromise between the conflicting internal realities of individuals and continually adjusted to external reality.
  3. COLLECTIVE.
    Groups have their own psyches (values, meanings, wishes), created by the tensions between the worlds of the individuals and the social group. The collective world of the group has to be able to support chance and learning, and individual change is related to group psychological forces.
  4. HIGHLY NORMATIVE.
    Membership of a culture implies that behavior will be judged against certain norms and conventions. Learners assume they will be judged as learners in classrooms. Classroom cultures establish overt and covert criteria for judgement both of people supposed to learn and to teach.
  5. ASYMMETRICAL.
    Teachers are assumed to know what learners don’t. Relationships in classrooms are thus inherently asymmetrical. The duties and rights of teacher and student are different. Societies generally assume asymmetry of this type. The relative degree of asymmetry is established by a group.
  6. INHERENTLY CONSERVATIVE.
    Classroom groups seek rapid establishment of social and emotional equilibrium; they resist attempts to disturb ‘order’, even if order inhibits learning. Members seek security and harmony in cultures, and tend to resist attempts to change these.
  7. JOINTLY CONSTRUCTED.
    Classroom groups evolve new content and also jointly construct lessons or the social procedures of teaching and learning.
  8. IMMEDIATELY SIGNIFICANT
    What is significant for participants is how individual priorities (T and L definitions of what, why and how) can give social space here and now. All this is worked out under the surface.

    After Breen (2001)
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