Encouraging student discussions with shared community agreements
Help students practice learning as an intellectual and as an adult.
The UCLA classroom, a place of open inquiry and learning, can provide opportunities to challenge and discuss ideas. However, some students might not know how to participate in discussions — maybe they haven’t been privy to the hidden curriculum— or what collegiate discourse looks like. As educators, we hold a position of power in the classroom that we can wield to establish and reinforce social, cultural and even political norms. Including how we conduct class discussions.
We often starts by sharing community agreements in our workshops. These are shared norms that the group establishes and reinforces during our conversations. We include them in our workshops to model how you might be able to normalize them in your own classroom.
Community agreements are an effective strategy for managing classroom behavior and group dynamics. You can direct the class to the community agreements as a way to intervene unwanted behavior in potentially disruptive classroom discussions.
I’m also reminded that learning is a science, where every student is a scientist in their learning discovery. Community agreements can spark curiosity and wonder. I love how an Edutopia article references the power of “Yet” and “have yet to learn,” and that community agreements centers students’ voices and experiences. So that they can be heard, but are also necessary to build the students’ growth in learning.
Consider starting with a list of 5-8 guidelines and co-create a few more with your students to empower them to share in class discussions. Establish community agreements at the beginning of the quarter, and revisit them often. We encourage that you model community agreements as much as you can. The simplest way you can model is with the use of “I” statements (“I wonder…” , “I think I am hearing you say…”). When you model “I” statements, you remind students these are your thoughts and positions from your own experiences, which will hopefully encourage students to share their own.
Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (2014) point out that community agreements can be starting points to build up to more constructive discussions that engage students to grapple with challenging ideas and multiple perspectives, to reflect on their own lived experiences and delve deeper into their own self-knowledge, and to find their learning edge and push it further with deep critical thinking.
Here are examples from Sensoy and DiAngelo:
Strive for intellectual humility. Be willing to grapple with
challenging ideas.Differentiate between opinion— which everyone has—and
informed knowledge, which comes from sustained experience, study, and practice. Hold your opinions lightly and with
humility.Let go of personal anecdotal evidence and look at broader
group- level patterns.Notice your own defensive reactions and attempt to use these reactions as entry points for gaining deeper self-knowledge,
rather than as a rationale for closing off.Recognize how your own social positionality (e.g., race, class,
gender, sexuality, ability) informs your perspectives and
reactions to your instructor and those whose work you study
in the course.Differentiate between safety and comfort. Accept discomfort
as necessary for social justice growth.Identify where your learning edge is and push it. For example,
whenever you think, I already know this, ask yourself, How can
I take this deeper? Or, How am I applying in practice what I
already know?
And here is CAT’s adaptation of Sensoy and DiAngelo’s work, which we share in our workshops:
Additional Resources
Setting Classroom Agreements, a guide by UCLA’s Intergroup Dialogue Program and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT).
A guide to classroom, or community, agreements for a variety of class size and context with sample language you can use. There is also a section for Do’s and Don’ts when establishing agreements.
Develop Community Agreements, by Center for Education, Innovation & Learning in the Sciences (CEILS).
Part of their First Day of Class teaching guide, CEILS share strategies to create and sustain community in your classroom. They also include short agreements that you can build on with your class.
“Respect Difference? Challenging the Common Guidelines in Social Justice Education,” by Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo (2014).
Shared community agreements, or guidelines, are important for active participation, however, Sensoy and DiAngelo’s paper shed light on the fact that community agreements can actually increase inequities in the classroom, often times validating students in dominant positions and silencing minoritized groups. They do share insights and examples for responding to positionality and power in classroom discussions. They remind us that knowledge is socially constructed.
Advancing Inclusion and Anti-Racism in the College Classroom: A rubric and resource guide for instructors, from UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
A toolkit, recently used by UC Berkeley to revamp 10-large enrollment life science courses, to help instructors modify their courses with an eye towards centering students’ lived experiences to increase equity and accessibility in course design. This guide is meant for self assessment and reflection, and not to score courses or instructors.
“The climate for diversity at Cornell University: Student Experiences,” by Sylvia Hurtado, Josephine A. Gasiewski, and Cynthia Lua Álvarez (2014).
UCLA Professor Sylvia Hurtado, and scholars, conducted a research on a general population at Cornell University students to understand why underrepresented students have less positive experiences at the univeristy when reflecting on engagement and inclusion compared to the general population. This study also provides opportunities for educators to reflect on their teaching and take steps in our pedagogy to suppport inclusion in the classroom, so that we send messaging to our students that we are invested in their well being.
How to Solve the Student-Disengagement Crisis from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Guest author Professor Elaine M. Hernandez shares that as educators, we should teach students about the hidden curriculum, and the unspoken and unwritten rules that some students aren’t aware of and to help unlock their potential to succeed. Sometimes it takes someone mentioning a tip to help others feel encourage and empowered to wield it.
Daniel Heath Justice’s Teaching Philsophy
I came across this insightful statement on why teachers should share community agreements: "…my goal is to help my students to take responsibility for their part in the creation and maintenance of the world we share—to understand themselves as active storytellers and co-creators, not simply passive recipients of other peoples’ stories."