Creating a Class Constitution

Please Welcome the Dudicorns...

It is true. We have chosen a class name! By a vote of 10 to 8 we have become the Dudicorns of room 27 over the Taffy Tigers. We discussed the meaning of such a close vote and whether or not this negates the vote. One person even suggested that we add in the third most popular name choice and vote again so the votes will be spread out more. Hmmm....

Can all of us live with our community name? We will continue to ponder....

The choosing of the name was just the start of our week of building a constitution. We started by doing some thinking and journaling about values and what values Mrs. Duden brought into the classroom. We had discussed values before, but this served to  deepen the student understanding of what it means to value ideas rather than things. This was the basis of the classroom values that students chose. 

Parent Values

Then we turned to the parent values that were brought in through the Parent Survey. We spent some time sorting and deciding whether these parent values were represented in the student values that were already chosen.

Below you will see the document we created from the convergence of student values and parent values. You can listen in on an amazing class discussion about Growth Mindset here.


The next step was to do some learning about why we are talking about a constitution. What is a constitution? Why was it created? It may seem backward to start with the end, but I wanted to draw students attention to the history we were going to study. Who were these people in the 1600's and 1700's ? What do we notice about their agreements? What do we notice about that time? We ventured on a Museum Walk of primary source documents to get some ideas. 

Finally, we looked closely at the preamble to the constitution. What do the words mean? How do we make them our own? Dictionaries became necessary to interpret the words. We also used School House Rock as a resource.  We began the conversation about critically thinking about whose perspective is glorified in these resources and whose perspective is missing.

Here is the newly published Dudicorn Preamble written collaboratively (Ideas combined by Mrs. Duden).  

We the Dudicorns of Room 27, in order to form a more cheerful class, to establish a calm learning atmosphere, insure people’s voices are heard, provide for the common good of growing our minds and independent thought, promote the general spirit of friendship and secure the blessings of letting curiosity take us where it leads to ourselves and the grades below us, do make official this constitution for Room 27.

Stay tuned for the final ratified constitution....