Children Make the Rules at This School
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Students in Erica Diamond's second grade class put their hands in the air to indicate that they are quiet and prepared to begin their class council.
Posted: Tuesday, April 6, 2010 7:45 pm
The meeting came to order. Wriggling second graders gathered into a circle on the rug, jostling and toying with each others' hair. Scrawled in a child's handwriting on the agenda: "Smelt it delt it." One boy earnestly explained to classmates that he didn't like when people joked, "You smelt it, you dealt it!" after he smelled something bad.
"It makes me feel embarrassed," he told his classmates. "And I didn't really do it."
So his classmates weighed the matter. One boy scoffed that the saying was just a joke. Another said it hurt his feelings, too. The second graders voted to set a simple rule: Just don't say it. Their teacher, Erica Diamond, sat alongside them, offering suggestions but never overruling them.
"At my old school you just told the teacher and the teacher would talk to them," said Amelia Marshall, a second grader in Diamond's class. "Here we solve it with friends."
Setting the rules is part of schoolwork at Innovations Academy, an unconventional K-8 charter school with roughly 200 students that practices what it calls "positive discipline." Children handle disputes together instead of running to the principal. They create rules adults might not agree with. The idea is children will become more independent, cooperative and thoughtful instead of merely compliant, learning the
