Democracy

Establishing Meaningful Essential Agreements

Essential agreements should be positive instructions, few in number, owned by

the students and applicable in a number of contexts. By including the students in
the process of deciding upon essential agreements to govern and guide
behaviour, teachers are able to do the following:

• Ensure engagement as a result of the direct relevance to students daily

lives
• Build empowerment by giving them ownership of the rules they need to
adhere to
• Provide the experience of being involved in a collective decision-making
process
• Generate evidence in the form of signed agreements, photographs and
reflections

Part One – Focus on the negative

Students love to talk about negative things that have happened to them in their
past experiences at school. There is nothing wrong with letting them do this. As
long as you make it clear that no names are to be mentioned, no harm will be
done.

1. Have a whole class discussion about things that have caused them to have
an unhappy or unsuccessful time at school. Make sure you always bring
them back to talk about what has caused them to be unsuccessful in their
work, or stopped them from learning. Record what they say on a whiteboard
or large chart paper.
2. Send them away to write about their experiences. Make sure you really
enable them to express themselves by allowing them to write in their
mother tongue, or by allowing them to draw.
3. Use their work as stimulus for a more in-depth discussion, and add new
information to the whiteboard or chart paper.

Part Two – Making it positive

1. Explain to the students that you are all going to create a set of essential
agreements that will tell people how to behave in your learning community.
 2. Briefly go through the information that you have put together on the
whiteboard or chart paper.
3. Demonstrate how you can take a negative experience and write a positive
instruction that will tell people how to behave. For example:

a. “People made fun of my name because it sounds like something else”

b. This can be turned into the positive instruction:

c. “Respect people’s names”

4. Do several of these examples, taking suggestions from the students, until

you feel that they understand it.
5. Put the students into groups of three or four and give each group an A3
sheet like this:

For groups of four For groups of three

6. Tell the students that they will fill their space on the sheet with the positive
instructions that they think are the most important in order to make each
day at school happy and successful. You can insist on silence while the
students are working on filling only their area of the sheet.

7. When it is obvious that students have finished filling in their area of the
sheet, explain that they will now share what they have written and start
thinking about what they all agree upon. Make sure they don’t write in the
middle rectangle too soon.

8. Explain that they should now turn their attention to the middle rectangle.
After discussing all the things that the group feels are crucial for a happy
and successful time at school, tell them that they need to come to an
 agreement about what they all feel is most important. The students should
then write a positive instruction in order to make that happen. An example
might be “always look and listen when someone is talking”.

9. Walk around the room and discuss the instructions with groups as they
create them. Look out for the following things:

a. Reference to “the teacher” instead of including the teacher and

students by using a collective word like “people” or “others”.
b. Overly specific instructions like “put pencils back where they belong”
instead of “take care of stationery”.
c. The use of negative language instead of positive instructions – “don’t
run” instead of “always walk”.
d. Where two groups are targeting the same behaviour, see if you can
guide one group in a different direction. If you can’t, wait until the
whole-group feedback session to discuss repetition.

10. When the groups have written their positive instruction in the
rectangle, stick the sheets up on a whiteboard and get the students to sit so
they can see them.

11. Read through each one and check that it is a positive instruction, that
it could be used in a number of situations.

12. Ask students to identify with the one they believe is most
fundamental.

13. Put the groups in charge of two things. The essential agreements
should be clearly displayed in the classrooms and shared areas that the
students work in. Each group should create posters that are eye-catching
and easy to read. All students and teachers must sign the posters before
displaying. Groups should then prepare a series of drama sketches or
tableaus that illustrate their essential agreement.

14. Constantly refer to essential agreements every day. Get the students
used to using the words and referring to them too. If needed, connect the
essential agreements with some kind of behaviour system. Involve the
students in choosing the behaviour system and the repercussions for
consistently ignoring essential agreements.
15. Review the essential agreements if they are not working.
16. Review the essential agreements half way through the year to see if
the students have noticed any other issues that agreements need to
address.