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The mission of Tolerance.org is to help teachers and schools educate children and youth to be active participants in a diverse democracy.
Jeff wrote for Tolerance.org for 7 years and, during this time at The Southern Poverty Law Center, Tolerance.org won The Webby for Best Activist Site on the Internet.
Back to School, Back to Community
August 14, 2009- Welcome back to community-building at school with these strategies.
By Jeff Sapp | Curriculum Specialist/Writer, Tolerance.org
Community is important, particularly at this time of year.
If you can establish an engaged learning community in the first weeks of school, chances are your students will end the school year smarter, more mature and more emotionally healthy. If you can’t build a classroom community in those critical first weeks, you may never get the chance.
As the school year begins, we’re offering two lesson plans to help you start building a classroom community on democratic principles. One is an icebreaker that allows students to share some information about their backgrounds - without making anyone in class feel like a “have-not.” Another is an introduction to democratic rule making, which will leave your class with rules they’ll want to follow - because they came from the students themselves.
If we build a community dedicated to talking about our different backgrounds - and their relation to classroom instruction - we can all emerge as wiser, more open-minded, more effective educators.
Place as a Mirror of Self and Community
Students will understand difference and community by exploring a special place in their lives.
OBJECTIVES:
Materials:
Framework:
We all come from somewhere. Place is prominent in all of our lives, whether it’s the place we sleep, the home we reside in, the street we live on, the section of the city we are from, the state we call our own or the country of our grandparents. In this lesson, students will share an important place in their lives as a way to bond with their peers.
Procedures:
It is often best for teachers to model what they require students to do, especially in these first days of school when the classroom community is just getting to know each other.
In this lesson, the teacher takes the first risk by sharing several stories of places that are important to him/her. This is most effective if the teacher takes the time to write these stories out and read them. Understanding that children come from various socio-economic situations and that some students are homeless, vary your examples so that they include places in nature, buildings, schools, cities, states, geographic areas or countries.
Inform students that they’re going to identify several places that hold prominence in their lives or their families’ lives. Give each student a copy of the Special Places Handout and have him or her fill out the top half silently. Walk around the room, guiding students who might have difficulty.
As students finish the top part of the handout, have them identify one place that feels the most important to them. Ask them to fill out the bottom half of the Special Places Handout.
Have students share their special place in small groups of four. Then have students switch partners and form a new group of four to do a second share. These smaller groups will feel less risky for students opening up to their fellow students in the beginning days of class. Do these small groups as many times as you like, or until students begin to lose interes/focus.
Extension Activty:
Get a local and/or world map so that students can put a stickpin on the location of their special place. Have students look at this visual representation and reflect on what it might tell the class about itself. Encourage students to bring in photographs of themselves and/or their family in this special place and put them around the map. This will develop a sense that your classroom is a special place as well.
Speaking Kindness in Democratic Classrooms
Students will develop a framework for speaking with kindness and respect toward each other.
OBJECTIVES:
Materials:
Framework:
For educators who hope to create a democratic classroom, one of the first steps is to co-create classroom rules with students. This lesson invites students to reflect on student-to-student verbal interactions and develop a set of guidelines for speaking to each other with kindness and respect.
Procedures:
Classroom rules are part of a democratic classroom. There are ways that democratic citizens are to speak with each other even in times when they disagree. This lesson takes a common classroom principle – that of speaking to each other with kindness and respect – and helps students delve deeper into communication skills necessary for respectful citizenry.
Inform students that they’re going to make a list of ways they like to be interacted with and spoken to.
Put students into groups of three or four. Give each student a packet of Post-It notes and ask students to discuss the ways they like to be addressed. When someone makes a statement to this effect, that student should write the statement on one of the Post-It notes. At the end, they’ll have a stack of Post-Its on their desks. If you want to model this for your students, simply use 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheets of paper and write statements on one each and tape them to the front board.
To take a positive approach, ask students to identify ways they like to be addressed. (It’s often counter-productive to start students dialoguing about the ways that others speak to them offensively.) This positive approach sets the right tone in your classroom.
It may at first be difficult for students to frame their responses positively. The examples below may help. When students falter, just ask them if they can reframe their statements using positive language. Answers will vary, but these examples will give you enough to get students primed:
After students feel they’ve exhausted their list, have them begin to group statements that seem to go together. You can begin by showing them what to do on the front board with the 8-and-a-half-by-11 sheets of paper. For instance, you may notice that several of the students’ statements have to do
with non-verbal communication; you can put those in one row. When students know what to do, have them group their statements into rows by simply rearranging their Post-Its.
When they have their statements in rows, ask students to name each row. For instance, as in the example above, a row might be labeled “Non-Verbal Communication.”
Have students make positive action statements that address the concerns mentioned in each row of Post-It notes. For instance, on the “Non-Verbal Communication” row, students might say, “We will be careful that our faces and bodies match the kind words we want to hear from each other.” Write students’ action statements on the board.
After their summaries, let each group take one action statement and make a poster of it to hang in the classroom.
Extension Activty:
Once students have identified and postered these positive principles of speaking with each other, why not have them make it contractual? Have each student come up and sign the posters with their names, agreeing that they are making a contract with others to abide by these rules of speaking with good intent.
As all educators know, ways of speaking to each other in classrooms need to be revisited often. As an extension activity, have students reflect on whether they are abiding by the principles they’ve listed. Why or why not? What seems difficult about it?
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