Group Goals and Guidelines

A powerful tool for helping a class to function more like a community of learners supporting each other is how guidelines and goals are established for an activity and then later revisited. This something that is good to do when an activity or task is done with the class the first time.

Establishing Shared Goals

A very general idea of one way to go about this would be to have an activity say, a math problem that requires students to work in pairs and then make posters and then share those posters. Before starting the activity the whole class can be asked what are some rules, guidelines, or norms (depending on your schools preferred lexicon) they think are important and they can share out and have them listed on the board. This should only take a few minutes. After that they can be asked how they can support and encourage each other and themselves in maintaining those rules.

During the Activity

After the guidelines are established they can work on the task. The teacher can observe how students are interacting with each other during the
task and the guidelines and rules that were established and use this as an opportunity to see how the students do and think of appropriate questions and prompts to ask later.

Re-visiting the Goals and Guidelines after the Activity

After the activity the class can read the norms they established and discuss how well the norms fit their activity. What did they do well? What do they need to work on? Are the rules and norms sufficient or do they need to be modified?

Before the next time this same type of activity or structure is used the rules or guidelines that were established can very briefly be brought up again.