Episode 2 – In Defense of the Classroom Tea Party

In this episode, LCA World Lit teacher Danah Hashem explores classroom culture and ritual using tea parties.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to Prose and Context, a podcast about lifegiving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy.

(Intro Music)

Hello! This is Danah Hashem, and thanks for joining me for today’s episode of Prose and Context. I am going to talk about tea parties in the classroom! Which sounds frivolous, but hear me out! I recently wrote a blog post, I maintain an educational blog called Pencils and Patience at pencilsandpatience.wordpress.com, and I recently published a post discussing this idea that I’ve been referring as my “Defense of the Classroom Tea Party.” Because, as much as this idea began accidentally and as much as it seems tangential to my classroom work with my students, I’ve actually come to find some very real, pedagogical value to these classroom tea parties in which my students and I actually drink hot tea together as we work on our classwork. As a tea lover myself, I have been accused of just trying to find excuses to buy more tea, and this accusation is not entirely wrong, but I’ve actually found real value to fostering this tradition or this, this ritual in my classroom.

Now I understand 100% that we are really lucky here at LCA to have pretty small classes. My classes don’t usually go over 16-18 kids, and sometimes they’re really small, like 6 or 7 kids. So this is a pretty realistic possibility for me to maintain. But, even if you’re a teacher with larger classrooms, I think there’s a principle here that we can all consider. You know, this doesn’t have to be about tea. Ultimately this is more about the mindset and the kind of ethos that we create in our classrooms. I happened to accidentally create this ethos with tea parties, but I think there’s a lot of different ways as educators that we can think about creating spaces of sensitivity and confidence and places where our students feel really safe taking intellectual risks. I think we can always strive to be more intentional about fostering that kind of environment with our students.

So this whole tea party thing actually started completely unintentionally because I personally drink a lot of tea, especially in the winter, especially, you know, the school week gets long and that little boost of caffeine is very helpful. I usually brew the tea in bulk, and, so I pour myself the cup of tea, and there’s extra. So whatever students are there, I’ve got this pile of mugs, and they’ll say, “Oh, can I have the leftover?” and I’ll pour them a cup too. And then, over time, this sort of developed into this ritual where students now walk into my room and say things like, “Oooo, what’s today’s tea?” or “ughhh I’m so exhausted, I need the tea today.” And so now I’ve created this expectation that there’s going to be hot tea in my classroom. Um, I don’t hate it because, quite frankly, there almost always is hot tea in my classroom, so this makes sense. But what this has meant is that pretty much every class, particularly classes where we are reading together or individually or where we’re having a discussion, uh when students come in, we get out the mugs and we drink tea!

I again never intended this to be a piece in my classroom design; however, over time, I’ve really started to value and appreciate what this practice does for my time with my students. And I’d like to take just a little bit of time to talk more specifically about some of the really concrete reasons why I’ve found this to be super valuable.

So, in the interest of getting us thinking about that, I would like to share with you my list of, um, why this has become this really important piece of my classroom pedagogy.

And, again, this is much less about the tea than it is about being educators who spend our time thinking about different things that we can do in our classrooms, traditions, rituals, habits, that create spaces where our students trust us and trust one another and build community in ways that invite scholarly play and exploration. So I have chosen to tea help do this, but there are so many different ways to do that. So, in order to continue that train of thought around what we can do to promote these kinds of learning environments, I want to talk about some of the things that I’ve seen, and I’ve made a list, of things that the tea parties do for my classroom that I’ve come to really value. So I’ve got 4 things on that list.

The first one is the fact that when you have a classroom discussion, or when you ask students to read aloud, it can be really intimidating for certain students. Students with social anxiety or students who perhaps don’t have English as their first language find those classroom situations to be really overwhelming. Giving them a cup of tea actually lowers that barrier to participation for a variety of reasons. It steadies their hands. It gives them something to hold. If they’re fidgety, sometimes taking sips every so often can calm that down. And it even gives them a little bit of something to retreat behind if the intensity of the conversation gets to be a bit much for them. You know, they can sit back and take a sip. And so I’ve found that it sort of channels the energy of some students who have a really hard time participating in classroom conversations or contributing to the group dynamics, and it often helps them find it within themselves to venture a comment or to respond to a classmate.

The second item on my list is the fact that high school students at 8am are probably not their best selves. You know, they’re sleepy either because they didn’t eat breakfast, or they stayed up late doing homework the night before, or just physiologically where they’re at in their lives, getting up for an 8am class is just a real challenge. So giving them a beverage that they are intermittently sipping and that is lightly caffeinated helps keep them alert, engaged, tuned in to what is going on in a much more positive way than, you know, getting after them if you see them dozing off. It’s just this sort of way to help them help themselves in those early morning classes.

The third thing on my list is how much I love the way that tea and sharing tea together creates a culture. It creates a community of care and camaraderie and trust. It helps build connections between the students and between me and the students, and these are things that really promote better discussions, better group dynamics, better collaboration. It creates a sort of family environment that I find really useful in doing our work together.

The last thing that our classroom tea parties have inadvertently resulted in is that, you know, it doesn’t really take me that long to host the tea ritual. I make the tea up before class, not every class, but I try to have it for the classes I know are gonna need it most that day, it takes me maybe 3, 4 minutes at the beginning of class. You know, “Who wants tea?” Pour it in their cups. And then we get started, but the fact that we start with this wholesome act of caring and tending to one another, I think really sets the tone for the class. I think it communicates to my students that I care a lot about them and how they are and their process and their experience in the class. That, for me, it’s not about maximizing productivity and academic rigor, not that those things are bad. Those things are great. But I think that our students get a lot of that on a day to day basis anyways, so I like to take opportunities to communicate to them that, when they’re in my class, the priority is them and their experience and what they learn and are they developing positive associations and experiences tied to learning and collaboration and conversation? And I think when I start the class with this minor tea ritual or whatever it is that your classroom likes to do to set that tone, I think it really communicates to our students that it’s important for us that they like what’s happening and that they’re interested and that this is something that we’re all involved in together.

So again, the tea party, I realize, is not for everybody, but I think the idea behind it is. And I would love to see us as educators really digging deep into some ideas on how we can create rituals or practices in our classroom that don’t detract from the academic depth and intensity with which we approach our work, but that also communicate to our students that there’s a lot more to learning than just accomplishing a checklist or plowing through our tasks. That it’s about fun and community and exploration and relationships. And you know there’s all these silly things that happen with the tea parties. We spill the tea on the books and we break mugs, but honestly, that’s kind of part of the fun. And I think that’s really important for our classrooms to model messiness and discovery and fun and laughing all being part of the learning process.

And yeah, for me, that’s been tea parties, but for you, as an educator, that might be something different. So I just wanted to share my experiences with the classroom tea party, as I am now a huge supporter of them. And hopefully stir some ideas in your minds about your classrooms and how you might be able to initiate or maybe expand on some rituals with your students to create a real culture in your classroom of care and play, interest and community.

(Outro music)

So thanks so much for joining me today and for listening along with this episode of Prose and Context, the podcast for life-giving teaching by the English department at Lexington Christian Academy. Please subscribe to our podcast and check back again next week for our next episode!