Student-Created Ground Rules: A Culture of Student Ownership
The goal of the continuous improvement classroom is to empower students to take responsibility, accountability and ownership for their own learning. One way to do that is to facilitate the process of students creating ground rules for the classroom in which they learn.
Establishing Ground Rules is one of the first activities the teacher can involve students in at the beginning of the school year. Ground rules are created by students (while facilitated by the teacher) in an atmosphere of open communication. These ground rules become the standard for expected behavior by which all agree to operate while in the classroom.
This process emphasizes the importance of listening to each other in an environment of respect and acceptance. Students can use several quality tools such as brainstorming, affinity diagram and nominal group technique to determine what expectations are necessary to accomplish classroom mission and goals.
When students actively participate in establishing ground rules and agree to them by signing their name, they are more likely to follow the rules they created. Students who have greater ownership for the rules they created are also more likely to enforce them among their peers saying "didn't we agree to this rule together?" In turn, this leads to a more conducive learning environment with fewer classroom disruptions.
Are you involving your students in creating classroom ground rules? What process have you used? What results did you see because of it?
