Rules

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Home : 2001 : September : 16

Rules
By Susan Edwards

I am doing Responsive Classroom (Responsiveclassroom.org) One of the key components of Responsive Classroom(RC)is "Rules and Logical Consequences". What we do is have the students generate a list of rules. They often suggest
things like: "no talking" and "No Hitting" etc. Responsive Classroom(RC) suggests staying away from these "swimming pool" type rules and trying to state the rule in a positive...such as; "be a caring friend", "take care of others' personal safety" etc. The teacher writes this long list of rules down and then points out that there are too many to remember. He/she then skillfully reduces

this long list to 3 basic rules that encompass all of them :
1. Respect yourself
2. Respect others
3. Respect the environment

Then, following the RC appraoch and using the specific RC language(which is very important), when someone breaks one of those rules you ask them to remind you what the class agreed that they would do (i.e. resect others etc.)This puts the responsibility on the child to be monitoring his/her own behavior and follow the agreed upon rules in order to be a member of the classroom community.