Before You Teach: Fostering Respect in Your Classroom

Rights, Respect, Responsibility is designed to involve young people in discussing personal, sometimes sensitive, topics. To do this effectively, it is important to create and maintain a safe, respectful environment in which participants can share freely. You can create and maintain a safe, respectful environment by introducing and reinforcing ground rules. Engage all students in creating, understanding, agreeing to and respecting the ground rules. Post the ground rules on a wall for every session. Remind students, when necessary, that everyone has agreed to abide by the ground rules. See the section on creating and using ground rules starting on page 14 of the Teacher’s Guide.