Proposed Agreements

I am wondering how many of you have instituted some semblance of the proposed agreements with your faculty? At State College High School, we have proposed such agreements but failed to impose the last agreement, which consisted of reminding and giving gentle reminders. We introduced our agreements to the faculty only once at the beginning of the school year and failed to return to them in any capacity throughout the school year. I feel that this might have been the reasoning for some of the uncivil comments made by a few of our faculty members during our faculty meetings.

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Permalink Reply by Daniel Ceballos on July 8, 2008 at 11:45pm: We have utilized community agreements. With community agreeements the full staff needs to come up with the agreements. All members must agree to follow the agreements. Each meeting the agreements are posted and you may want to ask if periodically if they are still able to follow the agreements or if someone would like to add or delete one. If you have any questions feel free to come by or send me a posting.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Curtis Johnson on July 9, 2008 at 6:48am: Thanks for replying to my soapbox. I am interested in hearing more about what we talked about during the break. I would also be interested in seeing the proposed agreements that you and your staff came up with.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ken Dunlap on July 9, 2008 at 1:17am: I think that educators are responsible for teaching appropriate behavior just we are responsbile for correcting misbehavior. One obvious way to do this is to reteach appropriate behaviors at the opening of every meeting and ask a teacher to give an example of a poor behavior that happened in his/hers classroom and how did you and especially the class feel about the student that misbehaved.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Curtis Johnson on July 9, 2008 at 6:44am: I also think that teachers should be responsible for teaching and exhibiting appropriate behavior but in a few cases this isn't the case. So, I guess I am more interested in how to change a school climate where some vocal teachers feel at liberty to attack other teachers/administrators verbally for their comments during a faculty meeting without having to pull/single them out individually. In the cases, where we have pulled/singled out teachers, they have complained to the staff that they aren't allowed to say anything in the meetings (or passionately disagree) without being called into the office. This is why I am extremely interested in the proposed agreements.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by David Scott on July 9, 2008 at 7:13am: An alternative approach to this might be to create Constitutions for your classrooms and schools. A Constitution would include the rights and responsibilities of all community members. The Constitution is empowering to all voices and also serves as a reminder to use our voice responsibly. I have seen student generated Constitutions work effectively at all levels, including the primary grades. Students come up with simple principles for their classrooms like be kind, be safe, work hard, listen respectfully, help others. Instead of rules which can be authoritative, Constitutions are empowering and reflect our democratic values. The Constitution serves as a tool to remind everyone in the school community (even if it is just a Constitution for a single classroom) of their rights and responsibilities in that setting.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kim Klepcyk on July 15, 2008 at 8:34pm: Another way to establish norms or agreements that I have used in the past is to have folks respond to two prompts--First, think of a time when you experienced a truly powerful and productive collaborative meeting. I had the group organize themselves into pairs, and they shared their answers to this prompt with their partners. I asked a few folks who felt they had remarkable stories to share their experiences with the group. Then I asked the pairs to brainstorm the conditions that existed in that meeting that made that possible. We charted these things as the beginning of our norms. Then, secondly, I asked the pairs to think of a time when they had experienced a meeting that was not powerful nor productive and may possibly even have been counterproductive--a few remarkable negative stories were then shared. Again, they shared and discussed the conditions that may have lead to the negative result. As a group, we then charted conditions that made for negative or non-productive meetings. Finally, using the negative factors as a base, we considered other norms or agreements that we might add to our list to counteract the possible negative outcome.

This has always worked effectively for me in groups when the original two prompts brought out powerful stories. In those cases, the group had the shared knowledge of the successful stories and negative stories to draw on as a reminder for why we needed the norms when folks had to be gently reminded to observe them at future meetings.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Curtis Johnson on July 16, 2008 at 8:04am: Great idea! I thought it was interesting how you used the negative scenarios/list to create a new list of positive norms to counter negative/unproductive meetings. I am going to present this new idea to my building principal.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Kim Carter on July 16, 2008 at 11:27am: Kim,
I love the storytelling component of your process. Stories are powerful, both in their ability to evoke understanding and to create lasting memories that help us act upon that understanding. Thank you for sharing!
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Permalink Reply by Adell Larraine Cueva on July 29, 2008 at 9:31pm: Hi Curtis,
One of the ways I use the agreements is I have a different teacher review them at each faculty meeting and they ask if there are any we want to add or do away with. They are posted every single meeting. We also give "Gentle Reminders" if someone is not following the agreements. It also helps to have a guiding question for every meeting. For example, when we were revamping our discipline plan, my guiding question was "What does effective classroom management look like? And when someone gets off task remind them that you can discuss that at a later time but we are focusing in this question at this time. You definetly have to be consistent.
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