Hi, Friends and Colleagues-- I prefer to share the responsilibity for structuring the classroom community/culture,
so I've adapted (perhaps unoriginally) the goals- and norm-setting elements of many
mediation trainings to my first-of-the-semester class meetings.
After introductions--I usually ask pairs to meet, greet, and then introduce each other
to the large group--I do a brief riff on adult learning, cooperative learning, and
democratic classrooms. Then either in small groups or individually I ask students to
recall an effective learning environment or experience, and to list some of the traits
or descriptors of that experience.
We compile these on the board and then shift to a discussion to identify specific
activities or behaviors that contributed to these effective learning experiences; after
putting these on the board, we turn to a discussion of our own group's norms.
This becomes a consensus-based decision process through which we arrive at a
set of guidelines for our "learning community" during the course.
As many of my courses employ journals, this provides ample fodder for reflection and
analysis, too.
I'd recommend a recent article in Teaching Sociology by J. Hollander, "Learning to
Discuss: Improving the Quality of Class Discussion" (July 2002), which outlines a similar
process.
