I believe that our human nature leads us to connect. We want to collaborate. Traditional communities operate with rituals and rules that support constructive interactions.
We often follow unspoken rules of interaction based in our cultures. When we come from different cultures, we may misinterpret each other’s behaviors.
Across cultures and contexts, I’ve noticed a natural inclination for people to gravitate into a circle as in this video of a beautiful flash dance in a square in Tunis. There are many ancient representations of the circle and of figures in a circle. Most cultures have some sort of circling dance as ceremony. When given a chance, we face each other. When we face each other, we tend to interact, even with strangers.
So if we organize our students in a circle, there is a power and possibility–we are in this together, we will help each other, we will see each other. Yet what do we do when we’re there? How do we organize the interaction so it is productive and efficient?
Many cultures have rituals for how people interact in a circle, such as the Iroquois Council. In our culture, we have used Roberts Rules of Order for deliberative assemblies since it was first introduced in 1915.
For schools, Socratic Seminar provides an effective structure for students to learn with each other.
Protocols that can be found on the School Reform Initiative website provide many options for students (and adults) to learn in circles of different sizes–from texts, from experience, from topics and issues, from work. With predictable routines, members of a group come to own their experience as they know what to do rather than waiting for a leader to tell them each new step.
In this way, we form a new community through our shared understanding, agreements, structures for how to work and learn together. As one teacher who had immigrated from Mexico to work in a district dominated by U.S. born teachers said, “Protocols even the field so the voices who usually have the power to dominate are controlled and everyone has the same chance to talk and listen. The protocols don’t fit any of our habits—we are all doing something different than what we’re used to – another way of leveling he field.”