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Check out this great article and video about Rob Stephenson, Michigan Teacher of the Year and a nominee for National Teacher of the Year.  http://bit.ly/d5sYiP

Every classroom has its own feel and its own patterns. In some rooms they are not overtly stated; in most classrooms, however, they are the result of specific efforts by teachers to make students aware of “the way we do things here.”

As I visit classrooms, it appears that most teachers plan and enact various activities to establish rules, procedures or norms of behavior.  I have noticed three general approaches, though surely there are others. I am going to give each a name, merely to simplify discussion: announcing rules, eliciting rules from students , and exploring rules.

What are the strengths or implications of each approach?

Announcing rules – On the positive side, this method is fast and appears efficient. The teacher chooses rules, communicates them and tells students to follow them.  Consequences are also announced and, presumably, doled out fairly.  With this approach, the teacher is the final, perhaps the only enforcer.

The challenge is that enforcement can be time consuming and may leave students passive or quietly resistant.  Perhaps the greatest difficulty lies in definitions.  If the rule is “Pay attention,” what does paying attention look like? Does that mean eyes on teacher, or can a student doodle if they cause no trouble? If teacher and students have different ideas of what compliance looks like, disagreements result. I would like to have a method for collecting all the classroom time spent accusing and defending; it would lengthen the school year dramatically.

Eliciting rules – In my experience, this approach usually starts with a one-time discussion held during the first week of school.  Teachers have the students themselves offer suggested rules which are then listed on paper and posted on the wall permanently.    The idea is that student ownership increases if they participate in establishing norms of behavior.

A difficulty is that students’ suggestions are unpredictable. They may offer too few, too many or rules that are too specific or too general. A second problem is that secondary teachers have five separate sets of rules to administer. Since this is too confusing, the rules may devolve into mere suggestions that are rarely referred to.

Exploring rules – This is a layered process beginning with a discussion or brainstorming session to develop a list of possible behaviors or rules and the implications of each. After the exploration, the main ideas can be summarized or even boiled down to one central idea. Teachers may ask students to list what behaviors by themselves or others have contributed to their learning or hindered their success.

Then students are asked to look carefully at each suggestion, to offer examples, exceptions and reactions. At the end, specific rules can be distilled, or a general statement or philosophy can be developed, similar to a mission statement.  This takes some time, but has the advantage of having students consider the reason for rules and how they contribute to the general good. It also insures that students have, at least once, thought about the reasons for and applications of rules in specific situations and that all share an understanding of what each rule looks like in practice.

In his book Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire, Rafe Esquith described using an approach similar to exploring rules. He taught his fifth graders the stages of moral development and challenged them to put them in to action, leading to an occasion in which a student helped someoneand specifically did not identify herself, feeling it was better to do right even if no one ever knew. Rafe only deduced her actions by the fact that she alone did not make eye contact when a reward was offered, and no one stepped up to claim it.  I believe that this level of personal accountability is what we all hope for in the end—students who do what is right simply because it is right. Exploring rules, I feel, is the best way to achieve this.