RESPONSIVE CLASSROOM: Rules in School

Responsive Classroom is used throughout our school. It's such a positive thing to have the entire school on the same page. It shows consistency for the students, and students are aware of the consequences (although those may vary slightly from room to room...) are the same throughout the school. One thing that we do at the very first day/week of school is determine our hopes and dreams for that school year.

We color in our little people to show that we are all different but we can all work together to achieve our dreams. For my class, this past year, we put our hopes and dreams on hot air balloons, then drew ourselves in the basket. Then each student shared their H&D to the class. A

s they presented, I wrote down their dreams on a piece of poster paper as an easy reference guide.

 I did this Hopes and Dreams project with my Drama Club. The poster read "Our Hopes and Dreams for Becoming Stars in Drama Club!" Each student drew themselves in the box and wrote their dreams for Drama Club on the lines below.

After students have decided on their goals for the year, we present our hopes and dreams to the class. Now we discuss, "How can we all achieve these hopes and dreams? Will we do it alone? Etc.."
What we get from that are rules that we all must abide by if we want to achieve our dreams and help others achieve theirs.

When the class started veering from their normally great behavior, we would look at the rules and talk about why we chose them. Usually after a class discussion, things would get better.  If things got really out of hand, we took the time and went back through all of their hopes and dreams, checked if they had  achieved them yet, checked if continuing with the current (bad) behaviors would help them achieve their dreams, or not... and then took it from there. At one point, it must have already been March or April, most of the students had in fact achieved their hopes, so we created new goals to try and reach by the end of the year. I kept up their old ones and added their new ones to it.

It's a great tool and reference to be able to turn to and it gives the kids a feeling of ownership over their class as well as a sense of purpose and direction to start the year off.

Do you have a classroom management plan that you swear by? I would love to hear it. Often times, we take a little from here and a little from there to achieve the perfect... well, the perfect ANYTHING! So share your ideas, and perhaps, we will create the most perfect classroom management plan!