Start the year right by including your students in the decision making process. By letting your students lead the way and express how they want the class to look, feel and sound, you can create a sense of belonging and inclusion from day one!
In this video, you’ll learn some fun ways to bring this to life, with Kami of course. You can get all your students to collaborate and annotate on the same document to make sure everyone has a voice.
Hey Kam-fam, it’s me, Marcus, from Kami’s Teacher Success team.
When I was an English teacher, I would venture to say my classes ran super smooth because I included my students in the decision making, rule making, and procedure making processes. So, in this video, I’m going to show you how you can facilitate smoother learning by including your students in the rule making procedure making processes. With a little help from Kami, of course.
My first idea for creating a student led rulemaking procedure process situation is to keep it simple. Try the looks, sounds and feels structure. You can start from scratch, or you can head on over to the Kami library. And this template is going to help you with classroom management. So you can take the classroom management box, you also can search for it up here using the term contract, you’ll see that there are several options for you to choose from. And the ones that we’re looking for are the ones that say look, sounds and fields, we as a class are going to define how we want this year to look sound and feel. So I’m just gonna choose Open With Kami. Voila, there it is. Now the next step is super important. You want the class to build this together. So in order for that to happen, you need to hit the share button at the top of Kami and choose anyone with link can edit, copy this link here and share it with them, you’d want to paste that link into your learning management system, I’m just going to copy it in my Google Meet chat, because I have a virtual class that I’m working with today. And look at that, I can tell my students are now joining the document because I see their collaborator icons at the bottom and the green light indicator telling me that they’re actually with this document open. So the next step is to open up the floor to your students. And the last step is you can use any tool you’d like, preferably the signature tool or the drawing tool. And I ask everyone to sign the document. So I’m going to use a signature tool. And I’m gonna draw it right here on my touch screen. I suggest you do this type of activity several times throughout the school year, because they’re kids, they change. So repeat this as needed.
My other idea is that we dive a little deeper into more functional conversations about behaviors and their consequences using a social contract template. And we’re gonna keep this super simple, we’re going to do a new page, and there are four guiding questions that can help develop a social contract, I’ll use the text tool to document. How do you want to be treated by the teacher? How do you think the teacher wants to be treated by you. So get your questions on the page. And then you want to most importantly, click the share button at the top of Kami and allow anyone with link to edit, I really want to keep my students focused. So I’m going to choose Control Features. I’ll give them the Select Tools to move things around. I’ll give them a textbox to type. And I’ll give them a pen to draw eraser, of course, we’ll remember these options and then hit OK. The next step is to get that link, copy it and give it to your students. And when you look at that lower right hand corner of the screen, my students are joining, and we workin’. It’s important for y’all to have an open dialogue about what happens. So I’m going to say mediated conversations, there talks, open communication. And so it’s getting very, very full here, I probably going to need to add several pages and that’s okay y’all. It should have writing all over it. That’s the point. After every student has contributed, remember, hover around, you can even click your navigation bar your sidebar at the top left, and check your annotation summary for student contributions. So just check that and when you’ve reached a consensus, build yourself a space to sign it. Again signature tool and my signature is already here.
This is different for some of y’all, including the students in the rule making and procedure making, but I assure you that including them increases self accountability, thereby making your classroom run just a little bit smoother. So it’s worth a try. Let us know how it goes. Thanks!