Teaching.IU

Context

Creating classroom or course environments which encourage student engagement requires student input.  Establishing agreements is a mechanism for soliciting and attending to what students desire from your course and the learning environment while also providing the instructor with an opportunity to share those things they need from students in order to best serve them.  The story structures a transparent discussion aimed at co-constructing parameters that will form the learning environment and guide instructor-to-student as well as student-to-student interactions. 

Step-by-Step Implementation

1. Each individual (students and instructor) creates a list of what they need to be successful in the course.   
   • This step is most effective if basic policies and course structure have already been introduced.  Needs work better on the “agreements list” if they are focused on how the community will interact.  Otherwise, they tend to be a list of demands of the instructor.  Students may need to be explicitly prompted to consider how they prefer to learn, what they expect of each other in terms of etiquette or netiquette, etc. 
2. Students work in small groups to share their individual lists and create a group list. 
3. In the face-to-face environment, groups share one item from their list at a time while a class secretary or the instructor begins a master class list.  Online, this might be handled by finding themes in discussion posts, through Zoom, or in shared document spaces. 
4. Classroom discussion. Once a master list is generated and the instructor’s needs are also included, the class discusses whether they understand each need listed, whether some should be combined into a broader statement, and whether they can live by the agreements.  Agreement lists are most effective if kept to 10 items or fewer.   
5. Keep the list of agreements.  Post them in the Canvas site for the course.  Post them in the room when the class meets.  Refer to them when you need students to engage in specific ways, know challenging material is coming that will require a strong learning community, or begin to experience tensions in the course.  If needed, revisit and revise the list. 

Effectiveness

Students in my courses are pre-service teachers.  Many of them move on to use this strategy in their own classrooms not just as a way of getting to know students and managing classroom behaviors but also of teaching younger students how to work and live interdependently and to realize that an individual’s actions might hold consequences for the larger group.  Within the university context, students say that this process enhanced my transparency as an instructor and led them to trust that I had their best interests in mind throughout the course.  In several instances students have utilized class agreements to assist them in having difficult conversations with classmates with whom they had a conflict.