Community Guidelines Building

In this activity, you will work with students to determine what a safe classroom looks, sounds, and feels like. Then, you will turn those concepts of safety into community guidelines. You will decide what rules or classroom systems must be in place for everyone to experience a supportive learning environment. Then, as a class, you will draft the responses or consequences that will occur if someone does not follow the agreed-upon guidelines. After discussing accountability, students will turn to a scenario activity, where they compare the actions in the scenarios against their safe classroom ideas, proposed guidelines, and potential consequences. 

New Class vs. Intervention

New class: This activity is a great way to shape classroom culture from day/week one! The biggest driver for this activity is the teacher’s enthusiasm to build a classroom in partnership with the students. 

Intervention: If this is a class or cohort you have been working with for a week or more and you have noticed some behaviors are starting to form that harm community/learning, you can approach this activity with language in the community guidelines lesson plan.

The New Year Teacher Toolkit is a collection of resources for teachers looking to build intentional school culture and classroom routines with their students as partners.