The most recent “toxic” behavior I’ve dealt with in my class has been students not paying attention to each other’s projects and trying to work on their classwork in class. When another pair of students is at the front of the room or I am at the front of the room and the pairs think they can work on their projects more instead of paying attention and giving their classmates respect. I draw attention to their disrespectful behavior, but they don’t seem to be phased by it. I think that this is mostly just something that is annoying or disruptive. In almost all other cases my students are on it. I also can’t help but feel like this behavior is, in part, because we work on their projects so much in class that now the students feel entitled to constant work time.

The other behavior I see that is annoying is that in many (if not most) of my groups, there’s usually one really passionate partner and one really less-interested partner. I’ve been checking in with students to see how they feel about their partners and most of them are fine. There’s one group that really hasn’t been good at communication with each other or with me. This is something that impacts them more than me, but when we were practicing presentations, there was usually a partner who was more excited than the others. Additionally, there are some students when presenting or talking about their research they also talk like it is their singular research rather than their partnered research which may be a simple language based slip up from not being as familiar with partner research. But from seeing the way their work is going, I still think there’s one partner doing more work in my more elaborate/intensive research projects.

I wouldn’t say there’s anything “toxic” happening in my classroom. I have the best students and they are mostly on it. I’m also familiar with being a student and I can see my own experiences as a student paralleled in their behaviors and experiences sometimes. There’s nothing super bad in my classroom or anything, but I do wish my students would be more open to communicating with me because I can’t go chasing after them or worrying more about things than they are. I can just keep saying, “Hey, don’t forget you can talk to me if something’s going negatively. This includes your grades not being where you want them to be.”