Classroom Charters Help Create Harmonious Communities

At OES, students learn more than essential subject matter. They learn how to be members of a beloved community. This includes educating students from an early age on how to interact with one another in a way that is caring, thoughtful, and responsible.

In the Lower School classrooms, students start the year by creating a classroom charter. Founded on the RULER social-emotional learning curriculum, a class charter describes how a class would like to feel throughout the year. The students identify these feelings and create action items for how they will go about upholding those feelings in a classroom community.

When the charter has been finished and signed by all the students, it is displayed in the classroom so everyone can see it and refer back to it during the year. An example of a word on a charter might be “safe,” and an action would be “to respect everyone’s personal bubble.”

Third Grade Teacher Erin Flaherty said she likes the charter because the students create it. “I feel like sometimes when setting expectations, we teachers ask leading questions because we know in advance what we want the answer to be. The charter is very student driven and my classroom charters have been incredibly different from year to year.”

“Last year, when I taught fourth grade, the kids really liked the word ‘weird,’” continued Flaherty. “We talked about this a lot—is ‘weird’ really a feeling? But it was a big part of their identity, so they landed on the word ‘quirky.’ And the action item was ‘embrace the weird.’ We would go back to that when something funny happened during the year: ‘Let’s embrace the weird.’ As a teacher, my sensibilities might have kept me from using that word—but keeping it helped the students buy into the process.”

Dan Bowman, who just started as a fourth grade teacher at OES this fall, shared that when his class was creating their charter, the children were being kind of silly and arguing about words when one of the students said kindness shouldn’t be a word on their charter. “The class balked, expecting him to say something that distracted us from our work,” said Bowman. “I asked the group to hear him out. He responded, ‘Kindness is overplayed!’ The student challenged the class to think deeper. He explained that being kind wasn't enough, they needed to pay attention to how other people feel and show kindness because they care. The class discussed this and decided to add, ‘We will be empathetic to all’ to our charter.

The class also decided they wanted to take the word “safe” a step further and push themselves out of their comfort zone, so they changed it to “be safe in a good way.”

“I was impressed and proud of how they used a healthy dose of silliness to push their thinking toward a more nuanced version of their desires for the learning community and their charter,” said Bowman.

There are broader guidelines for the entire Lower School community, too.

“Our students share a lot of spaces and transition in and out of those shared spaces, so we have some simple Lower School agreements we use at recess, in the lunchroom, and in specialist classes. Those agreements are to keep things safe, kind, fun and fair for everyone. We work together to determine the actions and behaviors that support safe, kind, fun and fair,” said Assistant Head of Lower School Kirstin McAuley. (These guidelines are posted for reference in common areas.)

Flaherty added, “Rather than laminate our charter and make it this untouchable thing, we can cross out words right on the charter and write new ones, if we decide something isn’t working for us or we want different words. That’s really powerful, to see that on the wall.”

Students shared what they thought about making their school charters:

“I enjoyed that it was everybody’s words and not just what one person said. Because one person might not have the same experiences as another person.” Lucy H. ’34

“I want to feel confident because it’s fun to be confident. Then you can be confident about how you’re playing, and other stuff.” Jory B. ’34

“We all cooperated to make our charter. Every table had a scribe—I was one of the scribes—and we all decided which one to do. It was really hard for our table to agree, but then we decided to vote, and we picked our top three.” Heidi W. ’34