Novel ways to Norm with your Students!

If you’ve followed me for a while then you know I am a BIG fan of taking the time to NORM your class WITH your students. Involving them in this process is an important first step in establishing a sense of belonging, and investing their voices in the process helps to make the process more meaningful when you need to revisit the norms when expectations are not being met.

If you’ve never done this before, I encourage you to read this blog for step-by-step instructions and download this freebie to help you and your students with the process. After you establish the norms (yes ONE set of norms for ALL your classes), you can have students sign community contracts that are visible with the community norms, all year round! Read a blog about that here. 

Now, if you’ve already done this process for a couple of years, you might be feeling worried about your student’s investment if you do the exact same thing again… I totally get this! In fact, the question was brought up several times in La Familia Loca PLC last month which is WHY I decided to write this blog!

We know how important this process is but we also know “the brain craves novelty” (thank you Carol Gaab) ! I want to provide you with a couple of alternative ideas to accomplish this same goal of co-created community class norms!

Novel strategy number 1- Norming Carousel

Ideally, students will start by sitting in a circle. Get them to write their goals for the year on a piece of paper and then pair them up with a student. (Same process as the original) Once they’re paired, give each set of students a blank piece of paper. (If you want to be extra, make sure every pair has a different color pen, marker, or colored pencil to write with). Next, they’ll discuss what THREE community expectations should be followed in order for their goals to be met in class this year. They’ll come to an agreement on those and write them on the piece of paper. For this first discussion I would give 3-4 minutes. (Set a timer)

When the timer goes off, students will all rotate. Each pair will leave their paper behind (if you’re deskless they can just leave the piece of paper on a clipboard), and they’ll rotate to the next pair of chairs where another pair have left behind their three norms.

They’ll read those norms and, using a chalk-talk like strategy, they’ll engage with those norms on the paper by writing any thoughts they have, any connections they find with their norms, and any disagreements they feel are important to be mentioned. Give them 2-3 minutes to do this before the timer goes off, and they can rotate again to the next set of chairs.

This might look something like this after a couple of rounds if you gave each pair a different color to write with:

This was NOT a real life example, just one I wrote up for you to visualize what it could look like! If you haven’t heard yet, I am taking a YEAR maternity leave to be able to stay home with my baby and hopefully serve teachers in a more meaningful way this year! 

You can decide, based on how much time you have and how engaged students are in the activity, how many rounds of rotations they do. 

After several, they should start to see patterns in what expectations are mentioned consistently and what the class as a whole values for the community. That’s when you facilitate a conversation with them to come up with the final community norms. 

Now, you’re probably wondering how you do this when you have multiple classes! I taught 9 classes per day last year, and we had the SAME norms in EVERY class! I was really intentional though, to make sure and facilitate that last conversation in a way to ensure students knew I would be doing this process with EVERY class and we would find the common themes across the whole school day. The norms end up being VERY similar across the board and students feel just as much a part of the process knowing that they’re co-created with ALL of your students!

Novel strategy number 2 – DotStorming!

I LOVE Dotstorming! It was introduced to me by a colleague a few years ago named Justin Smith. 

Here is a YouTube tutorial of how to use dot storming! I will walk you through how to set up a board and how to give students the ability to VOTE for the norms that they feel are most important for the school year ahead!

I think you’ll quickly realize that dotstorming can be used for SO MUCH MORE than just norming! I’ve used it for OWIs, for storyasking, for voting on fiesta ideas, and SO MUCH MORE!

I hope this is helpful, and I am SO excited to connect with you more this year through my blogs, podcast (Teaching La Vida Loca), YouTube Channel, Instagram, Facebook, and of course in person at workshops! You can find what workshops and conferences I’ll be attending near you right here on my website! Just click here!

JOYfully yours,

Annabelle