I took a leap of faith today and turned the rules and procedures part of my syllabus over to my learners. I want them to be vested in the class. My goal is that they not only have total buy-in for how the class operates, but more importantly, they "own it." And if I am being totally honest, I wanted to eliminate the arguing over participation and such. It's a big risk The learners were surprised when I told them what we were doing today. I usually wait until late into the first week of school before going over rules and policies. Doing this today is not out of character, but getting their input and complete agreement was. I asked, and none of my students could remember a teacher ever asking for input, much less letting them write it. Here's what we did and how it came out. I started the conversation by giving a few guiding parameters. First, keep to the philosophy of respect each other and respect the lab. Second, keep to our manifesto. I put it on the screen and we talked about it for a few minutes. Finally, we must have 100% agreement between all students and myself. All students means just that. All students in all classes must agree to them. That was it, no other guidelines or rules. I simply facilitated the conversation since no one had ever done anything like this. We were all in new territory. I opened the floor for suggestions and overwhelmingly, the class wanted to cover participation. They eventually settled on the statement, "Actively participate, physically and intellectually, to help the team." We talked about what that meant. I diverted for a minute to explain teenage brain development. The learners are not aware of it or how it impacts them. We talked about the underdevelopment of the frontal lobe and higher order thinking. Then we talked about how the amygdala takes over this role for now and the trouble with letting your "Fight or Flight" center make all the decisions. I finished with how teenagers tend act in a Ready, Fire, Aim sequence. They are going to get distracted and mess up. They are going to make mistakes. The goal here is not to find ways to get people in trouble, but instead to find ways to help pick each other up when they trip. I fully expect that they will get distracted and want to check their phone or have a conversation. Those small things are easily taken care of with a simple reminder. No problem. Problems come up when a student opens a game on their iPad or decide to take a nap. Additionally, this includes not getting their task or assignment for the team done on time. We now worked on the consequences. They settled on having a warning from me for the first time. They all agreed 100%. Now we talked about how long this first offense should be considered before moving to a second level consequence. The class wanted the "clock" to reset on this every two weeks. I am fine with this. It gives students a chance to mess up and a chance to clean the slate. Both are pedagogically sound to teach discipline. The class then moved on to the second level. If a student fails to do what they need to again within the two-week window, the student will be removed from the Fabrication Lab next door for 3 weeks and a parent conference will be held. We came to agreement on each part individually with everyone agreeing before moving on. The class felt that if a student didn't do their work twice in a couple of weeks, they were not messing up, they were repeating the same behaviors. by restricting their movement between labs kept them under closer supervision and would hopefully change their behavior through proximity. Also, the students reasoned that they were already having to pick up the slack, so it would be easier to get back on track by narrowing their focus. Finally, they set on this being on their record for 4 weeks before resetting. Again, I was fine with all of it. For a third offense in a short period of time, the class was open about being concerned that a student who reached this point was hurting the team badly and was making no attempt to get on board. They wanted the person removed from the team. I added a piece here to what they wanted. I will make the student still complete the project. They are still responsible for the learning. No one objected. There was a debate on if the student should get a detention or an office referral. Most wanted a detention. I taught them about the concept of "Disagree but commit". Everyone agreed to that. They might disagree with the detention instead of a harsher penalty, but agreed to commit to accepting what we went with. They finished this with a provision that for the next project, the second level of consequences would be bypassed for the subsequent project. Warnings every 2 weeks are still acceptable, but the student needs more dire consequences sooner. We finished with an office referral for a 4th time in that project. The next 20 minutes were spent talking about strategies for avoiding as many of the consequences in the first place. No one wanted a punitive and "gotcha" system. Everyone was on board with the concept of this being to help each other be better teammates. How cool is that? The rest of the policies went the same way. We talked about part and got full approval before moving on. Here is what they came up with: Actively participate, physically and intellectually, to help the team:
Respect yours and others projects:
Respect the lab:
Academic Integrity is covered under school policy so we didn't cover it. We also talked about late work and reassessment. The consensus was that work done on time and attempted to be done correctly could be redone until it was right. Learning is the key, not the calendar. Work that is late must be done still. If it is within 4 days, there is no grade penalty, but there might be discipline penalties if it impacts the team. After 4 days, there is a grade of 0, but they must still do the work. All of the rest of my classes fully agreed to all of it. It's pretty cool to see them take charge of their class and work to help each other be trustworthy team members. I'm excited to see how it works this year.
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About me & this blogThis blog is for things related to my class, PL, coaching, or just teaching in general. You can follow me on Twitter @myakSTEM Archives
June 2021
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