Our FABulous Classroom Consitution

Creating a classroom culture where my students feel safe, have fun, and are welcomed is important to me and why I decided to ask the experts, my students, for their input. They have been doing this student thing for a while after all so they should have the best ideas. Students, much like adults, need to feel included and cared about. By giving them an opportunity to share and discuss ideas for their learning, they were able to provide input for our FABulous Classroom Constitution. 

Just before we started this activity, I was sitting in my own class on responsive classroom. The instructor was talking about using the acronym FAB which stands for fun, acknowledge, and belonging. I love the simplicity of this catchy phrase so I found a way to incorporate it into the students’ work to develop our classroom constitution. We will get to that a little bit further down in the post. 


Students began this lesson brainstorming ideas in small groups using the prompts you see to the right. These prompts were also projected on the wall in the classroom. As they shared and discussed ideas, a scribe recorded these thoughts on the handout below. Click here to view the digital version or to make a copy of your own. 



One of my classroom goals is to create lessons and activities that require both student collaboration in learning and self reflection to show what they have understand about a given topic. Middle school students love to socialize and benefit greatly with time to talk to their peers. Why not give them a chance to talk with purpose before sharing what they have learned? After the group brainstorming activity, each student was required to summarize the ideas in their own words using a Google Form with the same five prompts. This self reflection gave me a chance to organize student responses while reading about their thoughts on a successful learning environment. It also gave every student a platform for sharing ideas and being heard. In addition to summarizing the group discussion, students could add new ideas.  

Positive Learning Environment

Using student responses, five word clouds where created to highlight the big ideas and vocabulary that was shared in the Google Form. We discussed the purpose of word clouds and the fact that bigger the word in the word cloud, the more frequently it occurred. This gave us a chance to further discuss their ideas and give ownership to the shaping of our classroom. To the right are the results of student responses for what a positive learning environment looks like. 

Next I shared the constitution that I had created based on the FAB concept, fun, acknowledge, and belonging. I wanted to keep it short, to the point, easy to remember, and focused on student voices. Before we published this constitution, each class was given a chance test whether or not their ideas met the criteria. I wanted to make sure that every voice was heard. Ultimately the students had to decide whether or not the final set of guidelines met all of the ideas they developed during the group brainstorm and independent reflection. Some students shared ideas that they felt were not captured in our constitution but after some discussion and feedback from their peers, everyone agreed that all ideas were in fact included in these three simple guidelines. Our classroom is in fact FABulous!