Framing

Creating community agreements requires framing of what they are and why they are important. It can be helpful to connect them back to course content, professional competencies, or other course documents to draw explicit connections between the activity and the classroom. 

The following language can be used or adapted to frame your own community agreement activity within your course. 

Community agreement: Consensus on what every person in our group needs from each other and commits to each other in order to feel safe, supported, open, productive and trusting… so that we can do our best work and achieve our common vision or need.

Importance: Help to create a respectful learning environment. Provide a foundation of shared expectation that supports open discussion, particularly when difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable topics emerge. Provide a vehicle for self-reflection on our classroom needs and how we can ask for them to be met. 

Option 1: Generating a list from scratch, in person

1. Journal.  Open with an individual journaling exercise to engage students in reflecting on community agreements. Give students a set amount of time, (e.g., 5 minutes), to journal on a reflection question such as: 

   1. What do you need from every person in this class in order to feel supported, open, and productive as you participate in our classroom community?

   2. When you have completed your 5 minutes of journaling, we will spend 3 minutes reviewing your writing and underlining key ideas.

2. Small Group Discussion. Get students into pairs or trios. Ask them to share their individual key ideas and then agree on their top 1-3 as a group. 

3. Group Writing. Working together and with at least one person recording, translate each groups top 1-3 key ideas into community agreements that are: 

   1. As specific as possible

   2. Actionable

   3. Positive (meaning, avoid phases that start with “don’t” – reframe those to affirm a constructive behavior rather than name a corrosive one) Example: Rather than “don’t interrupt,” consider, “Make space for everyone to complete their idea or thought in group discussions”

   4. Compatible with a diversity of needs

4. Collect. Collect the community agreements that are generated by the class into an overarching list clustered by theme, avoiding any overlap or similarity where possible. This can be done in class using a consensus building tool (as simple as thumbs up/thumbs down) or after class by the instructor and shared later.

Adapted from the National Equity Project

Option 2: Reflecting on experience, in person

1. Journal. Open with an individual journaling exercise focused on a previous experience. Give the students a set amount of time, (e.g., 5 minutes) to journal on reflection questions like: 

   1. Think about the best group discussion you have been involved in. What happened to make that discussion satisfying? 

   2. Next, think of the worst group discussion you’ve been involved in. What happened to make that discussion so unsatisfactory? 

2. Small Group Discussion. In pairs or trios, discuss the group discussions you reflected on. What themes emerge? What behaviors would you like us to bring into our class discussions? 

3. Large Group Discussion. Open the discussion to the broader class and have groups name one or two ideas that came up with their small groups to draft a set of community agreements

4. Record and Share. Record students' contributions in the classroom and share a list of community agreements with students in a following class or using course tools like Canvas. 

Adapted from Brookfield, S. and Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Option 3: Revising a draft list, in person

1. Draft list. Prior to the start of class, generate a draft list of community agreements that you as the instructor would like the group to engage with. This list can include your expectations for how you’d like students to engage, any departmental or cohort community agreements that have been generated in the past, or a sampling of common community agreements like the ones in this guide. 

2. Structure discussion. Provide the draft list of community agreements to the class on or before the day you would like to generate a list. In small groups, provide a structure for students to engage with the draft list. For example:

   1. In small groups and making sure everyone has a chance to contribute, discuss how you individually interpret each community agreement. What does it mean? What does it look like in action?

   2. After you have discussed your interpretation, what’s missing from this list? What else would be helpful to add? Should anything on the list be revised or removed?

   3. Be prepared to share out some of the additions or revisions you discuss in your groups.

3. Share. Capture and record the revisions suggested by groups and vet them with the larger class by either verbally asking for agreement, using a thumbs up/thumbs down system, or another way of showing consensus. 

Option 4: Revising a draft list, online and asynchronous

1. Introduce. While it is always important to introduce and frame the content of a community agreements activity, in a setting when students will primarily engage in the work of generating or responding to agreements asynchronously, it is very important to thoroughly frame the reasoning for the activity and connect it back to course content or pedagogy. 

   1. Ex. Are students engaging in group work? Is your style of lecture dialogic? Does this activity align with a course value?

2. Frame the draft list. Once you’ve established the importance of the broader activity, present students with the list of draft agreements you are proposing as a starting point. It can be helpful to give a broad strokes overview of how you got to this draft list. 

3. Discuss on course site. Make the draft list of agreements available on your course site and open a discussion board. Prompt students to engage with the draft list by using reflection questions like: 

   1. What is missing or requires clarification?

   2. Select a community agreement – what does it mean to you and how would it look in action?

   3. What does it look like to grow – individually and as a class – in one of these community agreements? 

   4. How can you support your peers in these community agreements?

4. Revise. Provide a specific time frame for students to engage with the draft list before you review the discussion board posts and make any revisions to best align where possible with feedback

5. Share. Share the finalized list with students either in class or on the course site.

Using agreements throughout your course

Once your class has created community agreements, it is important to keep them alive in order to maintain trust and foster a respectful environment.

You can do this by:

• Revisiting the agreements before discussing a sensitive topic

  • Ex. Before we engage in a discussion today, I’d like to draw our attention back to our community agreements. Are there any things we’d like to add or clarify on that list? 

• Revisiting them at the mid-point of the semester

  • Ex. Now that we’re halfway through the semester, please reflect on the community agreements we generated at the beginning. What are some possible revisions based on our classroom interactions so far? 

• Self-assessment throughout the semester 

  • Ex. Take a moment and reflect on the community agreements we created at the beginning of the year. What areas have been particularly successful for you so far? What would continued development look like? 

• Naming violations of community agreements in the moment

  • Ex. When a behavior doesn’t embody the hope of our community agreements, take a moment to directly name and bring up the document if you have ready access. Avoid blame or shame and encourage the class to notice what the community agreements document states and encourage all students to take a moment and reflect on how they can better embody the document 

    • “I’m hearing some interruptions happening and I’d like to point our attention back to our community agreements. Let’s pause for a moment to consider how we might better embody those in our actions.”

It is also important to notice if community agreements are becoming a mechanism for policing others in the classroom and serving to stifle difference within the classroom community. If the instructor or students notice that community agreements are being used to prevent others from contributing, it is important to revisit with the intention to revise and ensure that we all have a clear understanding of how we want to create a respectful community able to productively engage with disagreement. 

References

• Brookfield, S. and Preskill, S. (1999). Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.