Setting Class Norms

 Week 1 is done and oh my goodness, I have so much that I need to blog about!

During the first two days, I do a lot of non-curricular tasks where we focus on group work and setting our class norms.

I ask the students before each task to keep these two questions in mind while they are working:

- Think about what good Group Work looks like / sounds like...

- How do you know if you are being a good Group Member.

Toward the end of the day on Friday, after we had been working on the big whiteboards, I asked the students again to reflect on those two questions.  I told them that we needed to come up with a set of norms that we could all abide by in order to make sure our class works smoothly this year.  I asked them to think about the activities we had done (the Pentomino task above, an Open Middle problem, and a whiteboard problem for "The Answers Are").  I asked them to work with their tables to brainstorm ideas to fill in this chart, then to go back and decide the one or two most important things on each side and put a star by it.

As a class, we had a discussion about the things they had starred and came to a class consensus on the most important ideas.  Every class pretty much had the same big ideas listed and starred, but I brought all of the papers home to compile them.  (Note: I was really surprised how many mentioned that they didn't want arguing in our class) 

In the past, I've hand-written a poster board with their responses, but this time I decided to try something different!

After compiling the responses from all of the classes, I had a pretty hefty list, so I decided to type it up in Word.  I then saved it as a PDF and printed it as a poster that I can piece together to paste onto my poster board.  

I'm so pleased with how this idea turned out that I had to share! Hopefully I'll update this post tomorrow with the poster on my wall. :)