My term position as LwICT teacher leader for my school division ended recently and I started teaching Grade 6 when second semester began on February 3rd. I was interested in having students provide their input on classroom expectations, learning activities and classroom procedures/routines, so we spent some time in our first few days developing belief statements.
First, I shared my own belief statement with students and talked about what those ideas mean to me.
Next, we did some brainstorming as a class. We used the whiteboards to generate ideas in response to several questions. We thought about what makes a good student, what makes a good teacher, what types of activities we'd like in our classroom, how we'd like to be treated, things we'd like to keep the same and things we'd like to change. The students gave some wonderful suggestions and we've been working on incorporating their ideas.
Our final step was to take the ideas from our brainstorming and summarize them into a class belief statement. The poster below is what our class came up with and I think it's a fabulous list of things to strive for!
The students requested that their belief statement be printed as a poster for our classroom and we're lucky to have a large-format printer in our school, so it now hangs in our classroom as a beautiful reminder of what we're working towards as a class!
