This simple shared-writing activity can establish a foundation for ongoing community-building in the classroom. It engages students in thinking about the process of learning and the behavioral and community needs which support a productive classroom environment. At the beginning of the school year, students are led through a discussion designed to establish goals and needs for the classroom. Students first respond to the prompt: "Why are we here?" After listing and discussing their ideas, they respond to the prompt: "What do we need?" Students refer back to their first list of reasons in order to what they need to meet those goals. This activity encourages students to become contributing, consensus-building members of their classrooms.
Books about Friends, Relationships, Community: Use books from this booklist to reinforce the idea of community and friendship in the classroom.
In his article "Building Community through Poetry: A Role for Imagination in the Classroom", Chapman Hood Frazier states: "good teaching involves creating an environment that supports students and allows them to explore, discover, and question their assumptions about the class, the content, the world, and their perceptions in a situation of mutual support." Giving students the opportunity to provide input on classroom goals and expectations helps them become productive participants in community building and may help increase their intellectual as well as social development. In Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community, Alfie Kohn contrasts the idea of controlling students' behavior with an approach where students work together to create caring classroom communities. The underlying premise is that complying with someone else's expectations for how to act fails to help students develop socially or morally.
Further Reading
This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.
This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.
