A pile of post-its on construction paper is a result of our class meeting on Monday.
We started with ten minutes of thinking of all the positive we have noticed. Some things were mentioned more than once. For example:
We have friendly children in our class
We help each other
It is positive when we read and write silently
We push ourselves in learning
We think in math
Then everyone had a chance to write some issues that may bother and need a solution.
Here again some things were mentioned more than others and we ended up grouping the problems into two main concerns. One is about playing tag outside and the other is about distracting others during learning.
This week we tackled the first problem (took us three days).
We began with figuring out why the problems occurred on the play ground, why people quit, or get hurt, or don't follow rules, what were the intentions behind the actions. We realized that everyone wants to participate and everyone wants to have fun but they may still make poor choices. We decided to answer the questions:
How do you know who is the tagger?
How do you make sure that people take turns so not only one is a tagger all the time and some never get to be taggers?
How we can make sure that people don't quit randomly and then suddenly return to the game?
How can we avoid getting hurt?
Initially the students wanted to start with a list of "Don't.." but we realized that it wouldn't be helpful, we still wouldn't know what to do. They went back to generating suggestions.
We shared these and restrained from giving objections to ideas or justifications for the addressed behavior. We avoided pointing fingers and focused on solutions that would help everyone.
When we had our list of ideas, the children felt positive. We also discussed that problems may still happen but then instead of getting upset with each other we can return to the class meeting for further problem solving. And sometimes we might as well forgive mistakes and just play on.
We wrote our essential agreements:
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