New Rules

[franceslievens]

Every classroom has them hanging somewhere. Usually they're entitled "our class rules", as if the children had any say in the set of rules their teacher imposed on them. Still their names adorn the piece of paper taped to the blackboard, for they all understand there will be punishment if they don't abide by these rules.

I have them too, those rules. Ten generic sentences about good behaviour are read, explained, and questioned at the start of every school year. The children put them in their folders. I tape them to the wall. And then no-one bothers to look at them again. The only moment the kids even read these rules, is when they're copying them as punishment for their bad behaviour. I wonder if they ever understand which rule they didn't follow.

Thinking up rules is a tricky juggling act between being too generic and making a list that's too long. I have never been happy with the ten phrases I put up there – partly because the kids had no say in it whatsoever, and partly because I couldn't get my pupils to understand the meaning behind the rules. When I asked for respect and order, I meant for them to broaden the range of the rule, to understand this is more than sitting still and pretending to listen.

Today I sat down to rewrite my rules with the motto: new rules or no rules at all. Checking my previous ones, I concluded it's important to leave general rules of behaviour implicit. Kids should know how to behave in school. What they don't know, is what you expect from them in the environment of your classroom. What do I want them to do specifically in my classroom? So instead of asking for general respect and order, I decided to remind them of good behaviour they should have in a class environment: silence when someone else speaks, asking permission to speak, putting pencils and crayons back where they belong... I don't want them to be real rules, but more guidelines that keep classes fun for everyone involved. The school rules and regulations should be enough to cover all the other possibilities.

Comments

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

We've got our big set of school rules and then we also have class/form rules. Especially with the younger kids we actually try to decide on them together - this of course only works because the forms have their own classrooms and the form teachers have a lot of lessons with their group (in our case it's about 15 lessons!).

To our shame I've got to admit we haven't got round to it yet, but it's something my colleague will probably do in the next weeks in one of her social studies lessons. There is usually some structured cooperative activity on what good rules are and then the group decides on their set of rules. Like your new rules, they usually turn out to be very specific, like: "We listen to the person who is speaking." or "At the beginning of the lesson, we get all the material we need for this lesson." or "We don't call each other names." Then the students write them on a big poster and sign them.

Still, even with this involvement from the kids, they're quite often forgotten..

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

That's the thing with my set of rules: the kids are only two hours a week in my classroom. After three years of teaching them I found it easier to make up some guidelines for myself and just remind them orally of what I expect every time they enter the classroom. After a while they remember how to behave in my class. So this year I'm going to make some large prints of a couple of these things they need to do: stay in your seat, raise your hand to speak, be quiet when you listen, stand in line at the end of class, put pencils and crayons back. I hope this'll work better, because I know I sometimes forget to remind them, and end up cleaning the class room myself.

I'd love to make up rules with the kids, but this'll mean 12 different sets of rules for me. ;-) Sometimes I try to do it as an activity, so they can think about what would happen if we don't have rules.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I get so annoyed that I don't have my own classroom and have to run around to see my students, especially as we've got two buildings, but on the other hand it does have its advantages that the Year 5 to Year 10 groups mostly stay in their own rooms: I can just point to their rules, the ones they've agreed on, when there's a problem.

(This, of course, only works in theory, as the Year 10 group I'm currently teaching has three lessons per week in two different rooms, one of which is a Year 7 classroom.)

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Having my own classroom comes with the job description.

In secondary school I had to share it with another morality teacher, which meant I had to teach one afternoon in a maths classroom – also pretty weird.

Whether the students have a room, or the teachers depends on the school. We always had our own room in secondary school, but this is a feature of catholic schools. In public schools it's the teacher who has a room and the students who change rooms every hour.