Street Law’s Tips for Developing Deeper Community Guidelines[1]

Many classrooms set community guidelines, norms, or rules. Often these include important basics such as “respecting one another” or “listening to one another.” While critical to successfully engaging in current and contested issues, such guidelines may be too general for students to meaningfully implement during challenging discussions. How do they know, for example, that they are showing respect? How do they know that others see those actions as respectful? These tips will help your students build deeper, more valuable guidelines.

Examples of Deeper Community Guidelines

  • Step up, step back: those who are quiet, try to step up and share; those who speak often, try to step back and encourage others to speak, too
  • Be brave: try to share even when you’re unsure or nervous
  • Confidentiality: ideas learned can be shared, but who said what, names of people in stories, etc., do not leave the room
  • One mic: only one person talking at a time
  • Active listening: eye contact, taking notes, nodding, etc.
  • Use respectful language: this should include respecting the names and gender identities of classmates and using respectful terms to speak about identity groups
  • Be curious: explore everything with curiosity, even if not every idea works out
  • Encourage each other: do not put one another down, laugh at a classmate, etc. Instead, build on each others’ ideas, ask your classmates for their opinions, etc.
  • Disagree with ideas, not people: we try to disagree with each other without saying that someone is a bad person because of an idea they share
  • No judgment: we are all learning. We are free to try out new ideas, be wrong, etc. We do not judge our classmates for trying out new ideas, getting things wrong, etc. We help each other learn instead
  • Growth mindset: be willing to change your ideas, and allow others to change theirs
  • Notice emotions: if you feel very emotional in a discussion (angry, upset, etc.) in a way that does not feel helpful, take a moment to yourself or ask for help
  • Speak with care: think about how your words may impact others so that you don’t hurt people. For example, think about whether something you’re about to say is likely to be hurtful to people of a certain race, gender, religion, disability, etc.
  • Consider intent vs. impact: sometimes what we say is hurtful even if we don’t mean for it to be. Apologize if the impact of your words is hurtful, even if that was not your intent
  • Oops & ouch: If you say something that might be hurtful, say “oops” and correct yourself; if someone else says something hurtful, say “ouch” so that we can address it
  • Hold each other accountable: speak up if someone accidentally or on purpose breaks our community agreement so that we can address the problem

Tips for Eliciting Deeper Community Guidelines

Students will often come up with valuable, but surface-level, guidelines if they aren’t given the right prompts and preparations. These tips can help you support deeper thinking among students about community guidelines.

  • Before having students discuss what community guidelines would be valuable as a class, give them time to think individually and/or in small groups about what makes them feel safe and able to speak up in a group. Prompts may include:
    • What has made you feel comfortable sharing your opinion with other people in the past? What has made you feel uncomfortable?
    • Remember a time when you felt safe or unsafe discussing a hard topic. What made you feel comfortable or uncomfortable?
    • Who are some of the people you feel safe sharing your opinions with? What makes you feel safe to do so with them? What could we do in our classroom to help make you feel that way?
  • When students make suggestions during a discussion about community guidelines, help them dig deeper by using prompts such as:
    • How do you know that X is happening? g., How do we know that listening is happening?
    • Does X look the same for everyone? If not, what are different ways we show X? g., Does respect look the same for everyone? What are some of the different ways we show respect?
    • What does X look like, sound like, and feel like? g., What does respect look like, sound like, feel like?
    • Can you say more about X and what that means to you? g., Can you say more about participating and what that means to you?
    • What do you need to feel safe discussing difficult issues?
    • Ask students to consider guidelines they have not shared but that may be important to include. g., What about confidentiality?
  • You may want to consider starting the discussion on community guidelines with a pre-made list of community guidelines that offer students as a starting point to build on. This may help students arrive at a deeper understanding of what kinds of guidelines would be useful.
  • Revisit and revise the class’s community guidelines. As students gain more experience with classroom discussions on difficult topics and as trust develops within the classroom community, they may be better able to come up with nuanced guidelines and analyze what has worked well and what may still be missing in their existing guidelines.

The Importance of Naming Conventions—Native American Legal Timeline

Respectful language in classroom discussions extends beyond the basics of not using blatantly rude language or language that is inappropriate for a classroom setting. It must also include efforts to refer to people using appropriate terms. When teaching with Legal Timelines, this may be particularly critical when using the Native American Timeline resources.

The Native American Timeline materials predominantly use the term “Native Americans” but may include other terms if preferred in sources that are cited. This is in accordance with guidance from the National Museum of the American Indian:

What is the correct terminology: American Indian, Indian, Native American, Indigenous, or Native?

All of these terms are acceptable. The consensus, however, is that whenever possible, Native people prefer to be called by their specific tribal name. In the United States, Native American has been widely used but is falling out of favor with some groups, and the terms American Indian or Indigenous American are preferred by many Native people. Native peoples often have individual preferences on how they would like to be addressed. When talking about Native groups or people, use the terminology the members of the community use to describe themselves collectively.[2]

When discussing Native peoples, agreements about terminology should be included when creating community guidelines. If there are students in the classroom who identify as Native American, their input can be sought in determining how the class should refer to native communities if these students wish to provide such input.

Additional Resources

Below are some additional resources you can consult to help create the strongest possible community guidelines for your Legal Timelines discussions.

  1. Additional information on navigating terminology related to Native Peoples from The National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Knowledge 360 Resource.
  2. The Center for Courage & Renewal’s Touchstones for Creating Trustworthy Spaces provides additional ideas for helpful norms that can be used in community guidelines.
  3. Discussion norms, listening, and empathy are all important interpersonal factors in conversations about race and social identity. Street Law’s Social-Emotional Learning Bundle provides mini-lessons to support building norms, listening skills, and empathy. (Though this resource was originally designed for use with Street Law’s Deliberation materials, its lessons reach far beyond Deliberations.)
  4. Learning for Justice’s Civil Discourse in the Classroom offers a detailed plan for building argumentation techniques and discussion norms..
  5. Facing History provides two videos showing what it looks like when classes go through what they call a “contracting” process for creating classroom norms. Video #1 and Video #2

[1] Select content in this resource was inspired by the work of Mosaic: Interfaith Youth Action https://mosaicaction.org/
[2] “Teaching & Learning about Native Americans,” National Museum of the American Indian, https://americanindian.si.edu/nk360/faq/did-you-know#category-1.