A piece co-authored with my co-teacher, Anna Sage.
Hoover Dragons are collaborative, equitable, mindful self-advocates. When we started the work of creating community norms, it was very important to us that all members of our classroom community contributed to make a plan that aligns with our school vision. With teacher support, all learners worked in groups and shared ideas to create our “group plan,” a set of expectations we could all agree on to be successful learners.
We refer to this plan often during teaching, “Friends, our group plan asks us to be mindful listeners by having a quiet mouth when somebody is talking.” However, our group consistently needed reteaching around many of our norms. After many planning periods complaining about how long it was taking to get through material because of our many redirections, changing things up for whole group instruction and learning more about rules, we, as teachers, looked at each other and said, “How can we empower our learners to be more successful self-advocates and tell us what they need?” We remembered this article, from Rethinking Schools, that critically examined the effectiveness of group norms and gave a suggestion of how to help learners feel more invested in the community norms.
We started with the question “Do we need to change our group norms?” to which one learner said, “Yes,” because so many of us were not following them. Then, we had a discussion about our needs and made a group list of what our needs are. Following that discussion, students worked collaboratively in small groups to identify which needs from our list were most important to be successful with the group plan. From the most commonly identified needs, we created our own version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
Interestingly, the most commonly identified need was a need for fresh air and nature. This identification allowed us as teachers to implement a class reset, or mindful minute outside, easing our transition from lunch to learning. Additionally, using the hierarchy of needs to ask students if they are in a place where they are most successful has allowed them to advocate for the things they need to move toward success such as a movement break, an extra snack, etc.
By incorporating Maslow’s hierarchy into the classroom, we are finding that our learners are beginning to embody our school vision by self-advocating and taking advantage of small moments to be mindful. By asking students to be reflective and tell us what they need we are allowing them to feel empowered within our classroom. We hope to extend their learning by offering future opportunities for them to teach others about mindfulness and self advocacy.
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