Creating Norms for Our Classroom Community

Today we spent almost all day working on classroom norms. Norms are basically expectations of the community. We looked at rules from school board policy to my own classroom rules. The norms they came up with deal directly with with how a learning community should look. We spent a lot of time trying to come up with positive statements about what we should do.

Here is a link to the 10 norms the students identified.

 At the end of the day the students identified two they support and had to write why they should be norms. Tomorrow the students will debate the norms (using what they wrote today) and will then vote. A simple majority is all that is necessary to accept them. The students will also devise a mechanism to revisit the norms so they can add to them or get rid of ones they no longer want.