Student-Created Ground Rules

When students actively participate in establishing ground rules, they are more likely to follow the rules. Also, when students have greater ownership of the rules, they are more likely to enforce them among their peers. This can lead to a more productive learning environment with fewer student disruptions.

The goal of a continuous improvement classroom is to empower students to take responsibility and ownership for their own learning. One way to begin the process of expanding students’ lines of ownership is to help students create the ground rules for the classroom in which they learn.

The teacher’s role is to facilitate as students create the classroom ground rules. The teacher should emphasize the importance of listening to each other in an environment of respect and acceptance. These ground rules become the standard for expected student behavior while in the classroom.

The teacher can use quality tools such as brainstorming, to quickly develop a comprehensive list of expected behaviors and the affinity diagram, to reduce the list to 3 to 5 effective ground rules necessary to accomplish the classroom mission.

Source: Dr. Doug Miller, NESS Program Facilitator