A couple of years ago, we started our year in grade 8 Humanities by having the students create a user manual. It was good, but it missed the mark in a couple of ways, namely, the students didn't use them beyond the assignment. In an effort to more purposefully set students up for the work they would do throughout the year in Room to Breathe, we hacked it, and came up with From Safe to Brave.
The purposes of this beginning of the year task are:
We all learn more about the people in the room.
We can start to build trust in order to take creative risks. We want to become brave so we can do outrageously awesome things this year.
Students can hone in on the things that fascinate them, and their learning preferences, so they can make good decisions about what they want to read, write, speak, view, listen to, and represent about in Room to Breathe.
We know that establishing a culture of trust in a classroom is a prerequisite for creativity to flourish. Among one of the things my grade 8 team has done to establish a culture of trust at the beginning of the school year is to develop a set of grade 8 norms. We were inspired by a video we saw from Edutopia about a teacher in Maine who did something very similar with his students. We have developed a process that works well in working with our 100+ group of grade 8 students to create a list of ten norms that guide us through the year.
We explain norms to our students as what is "normal" in a given situation. Norms change based on the activity - what's normal in the stands of a major league hockey game is different from what's normal in a library. We explain that we want a set of norms that will serve us in whatever situations we might happen to be in.
We work with our students over the course of the first week to take them through a divergent and convergent process to guide them through the norm creation.
Day 1: Brainstorming
At our school, we teach in teams, with two teachers sharing two classes. We have one Humanities teacher and one Math/Science teacher for each of these two homerooms. We have four homerooms in grade 8, and thus, four teachers. However, we work very closely as a team, and so we like to make time during the first week of school for all the grade 8 students to meet all the grade 8 teachers. We have thus designed the brainstorming round to have students rotate through with each of the grade 8 teachers. This year, amidst COVID, we did this brainstorming outside so students could easily distance from each other and we could have the students move around.
We begin with our own homeroom, and then rotate classes through each teacher. Round 1 begins with this prompt:
Question 1: Think about your best school year. Describe how it:
Looked like
Sounded like
Felt like
We type the words and phrases the students suggest in a shared Google doc. We rotate the students to the next teacher, and then tackle the second question:
Question 2: Think of when your learning is at its best. Describe how your learning space:
Looks like
Sounds like
Feels like
The students rotate to the third teacher, and respond to the third question:
Question 3: Think of the relationships with the people who impact your learning in a positive way. Describe how they:
Look
Sound
Feel
The last question is the most open. The students rotate to the fourth teacher, answering this question:
Question 4: What are your hopes and dreams for this school year?
By the end of the brainstorming round, we have four classes' worth of ideas for each of these four questions.
Day 2: Summarizing with Adjectives and Adverbs
On Day 2, working with our own homeroom, we print a copy of all the brainstorming - enough for one copy for two students. We explain that the students will see a lot of things in common between the four classes. Their first job is to look through the brainstorming and pick out themes. Once they have the themes identified, their next task is to assign an adjective or adverb to the theme. For example, if students found "collaboration" as a common theme, they might choose the adjective "collaborative." If they found a theme of "focus," "focused" would be an appropriate adjective/adverb. One way we teach our students what an appropriate word would be is if we can say "We are ____." Some themes are harder than others to find adjectives and adverbs for, like "growth mindset."
The homeroom teacher then asks the groups to share their adjectives and adverbs, compiling them in another Google Doc full of the adjectives and adverb mindsets the students brainstormed.
Day 3: Live Draft to Converge
One fun thing we often do in grade 8 is a live draft. If we are doing research projects in science, for example, and we want only one group to cover a topic, we do a live draft, so students don't all select the same topic. We've used this concept for our norms, asking each homeroom to narrow their list of adjectives and adverbs to 20 mindset words, with no repeats allowed. By the end of this live draft, we have 80 great words.
Our teaching team then sits down, and from here, we select 20 words we'd be happy living with. We do this because we can take the time to contemplate the words, and the situations in which we would use them. Some words are often very similar, and we can discuss the nuance of each word, selecting the most generous one.
Then our team created a Google form with these 20 words in checkbox voting style.
Day 4: The Vote
Our students get this Google form and every student gets to vote for their top 10 words.
Our teaching team looks at the results, taking the top 10 words as our final set of grade 8 norms.
The result is an incredibly diverse, thoughtful, and purposeful list of norms. We make a poster with the norms and display them in prominent spots in our classrooms.
Here are the norms our students chose in 2020:
Here are the norms from 2019:
It's interesting to see which words are the same both years and which ones are different.
How We Use Them
Before beginning a task, we will ask our students, "What norms would be important for this task?" Students will suggest 2-3 norms we will keep in mind for the activity. One of my colleagues has remarked how much smoother a task runs when she remembers to ask for norms versus when she forgets.
These norms replace classroom rules, because, really, who needs that? If something goes awry, we can talk about it using these norms: "Were you being inclusive just now? How might you change things up to be more inclusive?"
They do wonders to establish a culture where everyone agrees about what's normal in a given situation and help each other behave in expected ways.
Middle schoolers can sometimes be mean. When someone is different from them, they sometimes react by excluding them even further.
But. I also know these young people to be extremely compassionate, infuriated by injustice, and endlessly kind. It was my desire to bring this side of my grade 7 students to the forefront of the fabric of our classroom this year.
Instead of dictating a series of classroom expectations or guidelines, I decided to leave this up to my students this year. To do this, I turned to design thinking. During my visit to IDEO last year, something an IDEOer said stood out to me:
You can't design culture. But you can design things that impact culture.
An IDEOer who is a systems designer showed us this video:
So I wondered: what is the milk in our classroom that will get our Scotties, or our students, moving together?
I started by loading us all up with inspiration. I looked for examples of workplaces and classrooms with vibrant, collaborative cultures. I looked for inspiration where wonder, curiosity, and character were at the forefront.
Here's what we did:
We did a close reading of an article about the Hive Society, an innovative classroom in Austin, Texas, and took note of clues in the article that told us about the culture of this classroom.
We watched the short film 30,000 Days, and used their accompanying character cards to have discussions about our own character strengths. We watched last year's video, and a perennial favourite of mine, The Adaptable Mind.
We went outside and sat under a big golden poplar tree, and read parts of Keri Smith's wonderful book, How to Be an Explorer of the World. Then, we approached our schoolyard with wonder, noticing with our five senses.
We did Interviews for Empathy with our classmates, to learn more about what their needs are in a classroom.
After we'd saturated our brains with all this inspiration, we use the Innovator's Compass to make sense of everything we'd learned to design an experiment we could try.
At this point, I introduced a How Might We question. Eventually, my students will be the ones coming up with the HMW question, but this early in the school year, I scaffolded this step for them. Our question was:
How might we design a classroom culture where everyone belongs?
We used the Innovator's Compass to identify what was already happening in our classroom culture (Discover Observations) and then understand what we need next in order to create a culture of belonging (Design Principles).
Sidenote: At this point, I ran my own design experiment. For a couple of days, we renamed our classroom "Quoogle" (Quinn + Google). We used our observations from the article we read about Google to organize our classroom: students could choose the order in which they wanted to do their tasks, students could monitor their bodies to decide when they needed to take a quick body break, and there was a high level of trust and a high level of accountability in getting work done. Students came to work with me in small groups (they decided when, of course) at the Innovator's Compass. After a couple of days, I sought the students' feedback about how the experiment went, using my own observations as data points, too. They loved being able to choose the order in which they did their tasks, but didn't like that I wasn't available to answer questions or support them in independent tasks because I was working with small groups at the Innovator's Compass. They decided that Quoogle would be a good way to work when students were doing independent work, but not small group or whole class projects.
Apologies for the laminator glare.
From there, students got into groups of three. They chose one Post-it from the Design Principles section of the Compass. These were things like, "We need to communicate" or "Everyone needs to feel valued" or "We need to really know one another." Then, they Dreamed Ideas. They came up with lots and lots of ideas about how we could make this need become a reality. They used these Brainstorming Rules to help them here. They drew from the inspiration we gained through the Discovery/Empathy phase of the design process to give them ideas. They diverged as they dreamed big and let wild and crazy ideas be okay.
Then, they narrowed their ideas, by refocusing on the Post-it they chose from Design Principles. They selected one idea that met this need, and got to work Designing an Experiment they could try in our classroom. They also designed a way to get feedback: was the prototype successful in doing what they intended?
Every few days, we're trying another experiment.
One group came up with a plan to get students to know one another by sitting next to a different student each day and learning three new things about them.
A chart to keep track of who each student has sat beside and what they learned about them.
Another group wanted to make positivity the main mode of being in our room. They created a "Positivi-tree," where students can attach positive statements and compliments about one another.
Another group developed a process that students can use to help one another if they are stuck.
One group, inspired by Google's cafes, wanted us to eat together. Most days, students disperse in a lunchroom and eat with friends from other classes. One day last week, this group of students booked a conference room, and we sat around a big table, eating our lunches and chatting with one another about things unrelated to learning. They wanted us to have a chance to get to know one another as people, rather than as learners. They sought feedback from their classmates, and learned that most students really liked the opportunity to break bread together, and thought it would be a good idea if we did this once a month.
Whether these experiments are working or whether I've just got a group of really kind students, anecdotally, my classroom is becoming a place where kindness is the way to be. They have been so supportive of one another. When one student in my other class won first place at a cross country running meet, my other class decided she needed to be celebrated, and we all snuck over to the other classroom to give her a standing ovation.
What I'm learning is that my students absolutely can be trusted to make collective decisions about the way our classroom works. When students feel like they have agency over the way we work and learn together, they are more likely to be respectful of the norms they create. This is such an obvious realization that it seems almost silly for me to write it, but it's so absolutely not the case in many classrooms. But if we just let our students be our teachers, we will learn so much.
Erin Quinn
