What is the Safety, Order and Rights ® value set? It is a simple way to express the idea that schools should be places where (1) students physical and emotional safety is protected; (2) the learning environment is protected from distractions and disruptions (order is maintained); and (3) the rights of everyone are protected, students and teachers alike.

The Safety, Order and Rights ® value set evolved from an awareness of what is going on in today’s classrooms and schools. There is a growing concern that the task of keeping order is replacing the job of teaching students. While educators encourage interactive learning, the resulting noise and activity make classrooms more chaotic than in the past. Students have more freedom to determine when and how their work gets done. Large class sizes have become the norm with the result that maintaining order and maximizing learning time is more of a challenge. The response is often to create more and more rules hoping that we can point to a rule for all the misbehaviors we witness, further adding to the problem of chaos.

Schools need to create an environment where learning can occur - a culture of behavior for the whole school that supports learning. The Safety, Order and Rights ® value set serves as an efficient framework to accomplish this in a way that is respectful of all parties involved.

The value set is designed to concentrate on the most basic needs of the school without getting mired down with endless rules or differing ethical systems. It incorporates the realistic and street-oriented elements of law enforcement training and acknowledges the basic environment that must exist in today’s schools for maximum learning:

• The SAFETY of everyone in the school must be maintained.
• ORDER must be maintained for maximum learning time.
• The RIGHTS of everyone in the school must be protected, including the right to an education and the right to have personal boundaries respected.

To create a culture of behavior in your school using the Safety, Order and Rights ® value set, students must be taught the process of monitoring their own behavior. To do this, use the verbal technique that continually reminds students of their choices - they can choose to comply or they can choose a consequence. They have the power to choose a positive or a negative outcome. By inserting this decision-making process about their own behavior, students will learn to evaluate and choose positive outcomes before intervention is needed.

Example from Today’s Classroom: Foundations of and Current Trends in Education

Lesson 4.b  Diversity in the Classroom