Why should I be interested my students creating classroom rules? That seems completely backwards! The teacher should make the rules, enforce the rules, and the students should obey the rules. I may have thought this at one time too, because I didn’t know a better alternative!
After being trained in Responsive Classroom circa 2014, my mindset shifted. When the teacher announces the rules on the first day of school, ” it does little to help children develop self-discipline, ethical thinking, or an understanding of how to be contributing members of society. At it’s worse it invites tension, blind obedience, or a constant battles of wills between adults and children in school.” – Mary Beth Forton
Now there is nothing wrong with rules. Kids NEED rules. They give students a sense of safety and security. So how do we help children have ultimate buy in in creating rules that they understand and want to follow?
Here is your step by step guide to facilitate this meaningful process.
Step 1: Record student ideas
Step 2: Reframe Negatives into Positives
Step 3: Condense the List
Step 4: Create “Super Rules”
Step 5: Display Them!
Step 1:Record student ideas
The rule creation exercise starts with looking at student’shopes and dreamsfor the upcoming school year. Soon after, teachers should ask one important question.
In the responsive classroom bookRules in School,authors Kathryn Brady, Mary Beth Forton, and Deborah Porter suggest teachers ask, “If these are our hopes and dreams, what rules will we need to help up make them come true?”
They further explain, “Thinking through this question helps students make the important connection between their personal hopes for the year and the classroom rules. It also helps them to see that everyone’s learning goals are important and that the rules are there to help everyone succeed. Without these understandings, the rules will hold little meaning.”
As with almost any lesson, I start with a read aloud. One of my faves for rules is What if Everybody Did That?, by Ellen Javernick. It gets the students thinking self control, positive choices, and boundaries. After that, the students simply brainstorm. I ask, “What rules do you think we will need so that everyone can learn in our classroom?” I just write down anything and everything they think should be a rule in our class.
Step 2:Reframe negatives into positives
In between each step I usually wait a few hours, or even wait until the following day. On day 2, we look back out our preliminary list of ideas. Kids wrote a lot of what they didn’t want people to do. You have to help them re-write these ideas into positives. For example, “Don’t hit” is often on the list. You might ask, if you don’t want me to hit, what do you want me to do instead?” Kids might say, “Keep your hands calm, or keep your hands to yourself.”
Forton explains, “By framing the rules in the positive, we shift the emphasis from rules that foster compliance to rules that foster self-control and a sense of responsibility to a group…They represent our community ideals.”
In the process of creating classroom rules, this is when their list actually starts to transform into rules that work.
Step 3:Condense the List
The next step in having your students creating classroom rules is to start condensing. Today is about categorizing! I tell students that I was re-reading our list of amazing positive rules, and it seemed that we could sort them out into 3 or 4 BIG categories. I noticed that lots of their ideas were about friends, lots were about safety, and lots were about learning. The responsive classroom authors suggest 3 to 5 general categories: taking care of ourselves, taking care of others, taking care of our classroom and materials, and taking care to do our best work.
You could do this in various ways. Since I had already written our list on chart paper with a marker, I chose to circle them with corresponding colors. I simply wrote the categories on three different colors of paper at the top, read out a rule, and then had the students tell me what it was mostly about- our learning, friends, or safety. I circled it with the corresponding color. This was actually a very quick process.
Another option would be to write that initial list from day 1 on post it notes. Today, write the 3 or 4 categories on the white board, and move the post it notes under the best area.
Step 4:Create “Super Rules”
I tell students that today we are going shorten our list a bit so that’s it’s not too overwhelming. Could you imagine the time it would take to say these each morning? Today, we create our “super rules”. (These are the global rules that encompass all the little specific ones.)
Forton says, “A long list of specific rules also becomes a prescriptive recipe. A short list of broad rules, on the other hand, fosters ethical thinking and the practice of self-regulation by giving children the opportunity to apply general behavior expectations to a range of situations.”
For instance, I pick one category. I have students close their eyes, and read only the rules that go under that topic. “What might be a way to sum up all of these ideas? What is a promise we can make to help our hopes and dreams come true? ”
During this fun conversation you will see leaders emerge but try and make sure everyone is heard. My favorite way to do this is through simply voting on something. For example, asking “Do you like the words We will be kind or Be Nice better?” We don’t want to get hyper focused on the nitty gritty, but for the littles this is an easy way to get everyone involved.
This is very similar to the process we used when we created our class vision. After doing this for several years in first grade, the rules usually look like this:
Step 5:Display Them!
Ok, the rule are written. What else do we really need to do? Display them, of course! These need to be in a prominent space, so that you can refer to them all year long. Step 5 takes about a week.
We unpack each rule over the course of a couple days, with some read alouds and accompanying activities. For example, with the kindness rule we talk about what being kind looks like and sounds like in the classroom. We read books about kindness, listen to the bucket filler song, and created a class kindness mini book. For We will Try our Best, I actually created a social story on Teachers Pay Teachers because I couldn’t find what I wanted out there! You get the idea.
Take your time unpacking each rule! I like to have some type of accompanying visual, whether that is student illustrated (index cards, anyone?), found online, or actual photographs of the students.
I hope this responsive classroom rule making process is as meaningful to your students as it has been to mine. Above all, I feel that students who take part in creating the rules have more ownership in the classroom community, and will be more apt to follow them.
Once you display your student created rules, please tag me on instagram- I would love to see and share!
