| Unit | Community-Building for Middle School Classrooms |
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| Lesson Name | Establishing Community Norms |
| Grade Band | Middle School (6-8) |
| Required Materials |
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| Standards / Competencies |
SEL Core Competencies:
ELA Standards: Listening and Speaking, Writing Social Studies Theme: Individual Development and Identity |
| Recommended Time | 90 mins |
| Essential Question | What’s important to us as a group? How do we want to treat each other? |
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| Learning Objectives | Learners will brainstorm and refine a list of agreed upon community norms. |
| Activating Prior Knowledge | Ask the group, What are three words that you would use to describe yourself? Go around the circle and let each person answer the question or pass. |
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| Core Instruction |
Introduce: Today we’re going to work on creating norms for our community. Ask, Does anyone know what the word “norm” means? Post the definition and ask the group what questions they have about the word. Explain: We’re going to get into small groups and brainstorm the words that describe the ways we want to treat each other in this class and the things we’d like to leave out of our community. Write each word on an individual post-it note. For example, you might write down kindness on a post-it note as something we want in our community and racism as something we want to leave out. When we’re done, we’ll come back together and share. Share in: Use the visual of the island you drew as a representation of your classroom community (if you have a creative group, you may want to name your island). Have each group share aloud and stick their post-it notes of what they want on the island and the post-it notes of what they don’t want “out to sea”. Ask: Can we agree that we don’t want any of the things that are posted in the water? Throw those post-it notes away. Propose: Let’s discuss and group our post-it notes into categories of similar words/ideas. If possible, recruit a couple of learners to facilitate this activity for the group. At this stage, you can throw away duplicates. Post: “We agree to…” and ask: Looking at the groups of similars words, can we come up with 3-5 norms that we want to establish for our community starting with the statement we agree to? Work to come to consensus. OR Present the following three norms and ask the group if they can arrange their post-it notes under each of these categories. Ask, Do you think these three capture all of things we’ve included on our post-it notes? Let’s put each post note under the norm we think it goes with. Is there anything we want to add? We agree to:
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| Wrap-up | Write the agreed upon norms on a large poster board, have everyone sign to show agreement. *This can be done in the next session for the sake of time. Additionally, a group of learners may want to take on creating the display poster. |
| Learning Beyond Classroom Walls |
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| Supplementary Resources |
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| Instructional Content Adaptations |
Mini Lesson (15 mins): Present students with the definition of “norms”. As a large group, brainstorm a list of the ways you want to treat each other in this class. Alternatively, present to your group the following list of community norms: We agree to:
Have a discussion/brainstorm what each of these looks like in your community. For example, ask What does it look like to take care of each other in this class? Teachable Moment (10 mins): Display your group norms on the wall in your space. When you have community challenges, pull your group norms off the wall and use them as a centerpiece for your discussion. Diverse Learning Profiles This lesson can be adapted in various ways to account for English Language Learners, and students who may need support with reading and/or writing. Ideas for modifications include:
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