Community Circles: Definition and Key Features

Definition: A regular routine that provides an opportunity for students to form positive bonds with one another and their teacher and build a welcoming, cohesive, and inclusive classroom community.  

Key Considerations for Equity:

Key Feature 1: Create a structure where students can practice positive, collaborative, and inclusive behavior. 

Key Feature 2: Ensure that topics discussed go beyond review of the daily schedule and allow students to learn about each other and their families, living situations, their abilities, talents, dreams, and goals.  

Key Feature 3: Give students the opportunity to review and practice the expectations for circle time (e.g., behavioral expectations for sharing, listening, respectful responses).

Key Feature 4: Leverage these conversations to promote social, emotional, and behavioral skill development or for class problem solving. 

Purpose: Sharing rituals help students learn how they are similar to each other and can reduce exclusionary behavior (i.e., us vs them thinking; othering). It also helps students value and to be curious about their differences.   

 Tips:  

• Connect to current topics across different cultures and communities. 
• Sharing can be done by each member, in dyads, or by selecting 2 to 3 students each day. 
• Keep a tracking sheet to ensure that, overtime, all student voices are heard during community circles.
• Ask students and caregivers for topics to be discussed in community circles.
• Use community circles for prosocial skill development such as respectful listening, sharing, and learning. 
• Hold community circles at a consistent time of day or week so that they become an expected practice. In addition, Circles can be held or called at any time to discuss problems, solve problems, and hold students accountable for harm (without being punitive) and prevent future harm.