Norms

My school just started a new semester last week, which means I have brand new students. I feel incredibly lucky; my students and groups are absolutely fantastic! Even though I've only been teaching them for a few days, I can tell we're going to have an excellent semester.

One of the activities I do with students at the beginning of the semester is have them create norms. Norms are agreed upon behaviors. We use that terms in our collaborative teaching teams, so I decided to use the same vocabulary with my students.

The first step of the activity is to have the students brainstorm norms for themselves. How do they want their class to act? What behaviors do they want to see? What behaviors do they NOT want to see? The students brainstormed in small groups, or independently, then we created a class brainstorm. Here's what they came up for their norms:

One aspect that makes this activity unique is that the students don't just create norms for themselves; they also create norms for me! I explained that I believed how a teacher acts directly influences the classroom climate. I had them brainstorm ideas for class activities, qualities of good teachers, and qualities of bad teachers. They were pretty surprised at the thought of making norms for me, but they came up with lots of ideas.

Tomorrow I'm going to share the finished lists with the students. We will refer to them for the rest of the semester.