Lesson Plan for Corridor Meeting #2

First Year & Mixed Halls

Creating Community Agreements

Mid September (Approximately 3rd week of the semester)

Connection to Residential Curriculum:

List what learning outcomes and competencies this strategy addresses.

  • Effective Community Engagement: Develop a sense of belonging in one’s residential community and at Miami University.
  • Effective Community Engagement: Understand how one’s actions and decisions affect the community.
  • Effective Community Engagement: Assist in the creating and follow community agreements.
  • Effective Community Engagement: Constructively give and receive feedback.
  • Intrapersonal Development: Explore personal values and identity
  • Intrapersonal Development: Identify personal strengths and areas for improvement.
  • Cultural Competency: Engage in positive interactions with people different from one’s self.

Objectives/Purpose:

  • Residents will participate in a self-guided group discussion on how they want to manage the daily operation, of their floor community and issues that arise from communal living.
  • Residents will create a document that articulates the views and opinions of a consensus of the group on issues of communal living.

Duration: This will probably take a minimum of one hour for corridors of 25 people or more. The RA should plan for approximately 2 hours plus set up and clean-up time for the meeting.

Outline:

Before the Meeting

Residents should receive the Community Agreement Guides created by the Office of Residence Life. These guides really challenge residents to thoroughly think about the issues they may face in their first potential adventure in communal living. Your role is continue challenging their reflection capacity by creating guiding questions to help facilitate the process of creating your community’s Community Agreement statement. You will want to publicize this meeting. While it is not mandatory, we want you to encourage as many residents as possible to participate in this process. You can work your supervisor if you wish to do this meeting over a corridor dinner.

At the Meeting

I.Introduce what is going to happen and provide an agenda. You probably want to say something like, “at the end of this meeting, we will have a working document on how we want see this community operate.”

  1. Ask for someone to be the scribe or nominate someone.
  1. You may nominate individuals to lead your group discussion or you can choose to facilitate it yourself. In the Upperclass communities, we are encouraging those RAs to find an UC leader to do this. If this is an option for you in a mixed community, we suggest it is a good idea.
  1. Discuss the major areas in the Community Agreement Guide

i)Inclusive Communities (or how we will treat one another)

ii)Corridor Lounge and Bathroom Cleanliness

iii)Quite Hours and Noise

iv)Damages

v)Community Security Issues

vi)Student Engagement and Empowerment

  1. Things for the RA to keep in mind during the Community Agreement Discussion

i)Is conflict, by nature, a bad thing? What benefits can be gained from conflict? Help students to see the benefitsto constructive conflict.

ii)The purpose of this discussion is to show the residents how they can be seen as authorities within theircommunity and not always have to rely on ORL staff to mediate conflicts or enforce policies.

iii)Let the students know that as the year progresses, you will be able to reassess their community standards, andthat this is not something set in stone.

  1. Review what is written in your Community Agreements document and seek clarification from residents on items that might be unclear or need continued work by the group. Feel free to challenge them to work issues out there. This is supposed to be a learning activity/process.
  1. Finish the activity by reminding the group that this will be revisited throughout the year. You can let them know that they can call meetings to review items just as you can; however, things should probably be changed by consensus and not by majority vote.
  1. For your own records (or those of your FYA), collect the Community Agreements Guides that people brought completed to your corridor meeting. This might help us better format the guides, clarify unclear questions, or improve the documents for the future.

After the Meeting

You are charged with creating the Community Agreement document that will be posted in your corridor. Post it in prominent areas in your corridor.