When Miguel Ruiz wrote the FOUR AGREEMENTS, he once again brought to the fore the importance of reaching agreements with ourselves. As the school year begins in the US, both educators and students look to the upcoming school year. Autumn is often a time of reflection and reorganization of our lives after the hustle and bustle of a summer of adventures and vacations.
In classroom success, teachers and students are members of a team. Individually and collectively, three basic questions are asked and answered during the team building process: “Who am I?” “Who are you?” and finally, “Who are we?” By answering these questions, by creating agreements in the classroom, teachers and students build a firm foundation for the upcoming school year. I believe that the most effective agreements are formed at the level of life principles. This is the level that answers the question, “Who do I want to be?” It is not the level that answers: “What am I going to do?” It is the level of opportunity, not obligation. It’s the level where I stop thinking, “I have to do such and such.” to “This is an opportunity to be the mother, the daughter, the educator, that I want to be.”
The four agreements that form the foundation of the school year are personal, social, role, and goal agreements. The teacher and each student in a class must have a personal agreement that answers the question “Who do I want to BE?” In answering that question, you have to remember that you can’t be everything. They need to limit their lists to three or five principles that they want to use to measure their success. For example, my top three BEs are wise, generous, and spiritual. The list is used to self-assess who a person is being. The number one life skill is self-assessment, and responsible self-assessment measures how aligned you are with your agreements with yourself and involves assessing what is within a person’s control. Regularly, a person needs to ask themselves: “What did I do today to live my principles?”
The second of the agreements, the social pact, responds to the question: Who do we want to be when we are together? After each of us has developed a personal agreement, after each of us is clear about how we want to BE, then collectively we must come to a consensus on how we want to treat each other. In order to form a social agreement, we all must have a sense of connection to everyone else in the group, and there must be a modicum of trust between group members. In a school, the social agreements can usually be summed up as: “We want to learn, be respectful, responsible and safe.”
The third type of agreement, the role agreement, answers the question, “What is my role in getting us where we want to go?” In our family car, whoever sits in the shotgun seat (front seat, passenger side) plays the role of navigator. This has been our long-standing family arrangement. In a classroom, it is best if all involved adults and students in the room are present during role negotiation. The discussion and compromise process used to determine roles lays the foundation for a successful school year during which many pitfalls and obstacles are avoided. Role clarification lets students know what to expect and helps develop a safe risk environment.
Goal agreements, the fourth and final type of agreements, infuse district and state standards with relevant student needs. To develop meaning and relevance in content learning, and to enhance student engagement in learning, teachers and students together develop essential questions for each of the major units of study and for the year. All learning is personal and constructivist in nature, and Essential Questions, if carefully developed, foster personal engagement with the content. Engaged and challenged students, students who see real value in what they are learning, are more interested in learning, and create fewer classroom distractions. Goal setting for students easily moves into student-led conferences.
When these four agreements are included at the beginning of the school year, the processes that then create rituals and routines that highlight these agreements become the foundation of effective classroom task and relationship management. Agreements take the guesswork out of expectations; they make explicit what for many is implicit.