Rules and Why I’m Not Going to Have My Kids Make Them

Collaborative rule-making is something I’ve been encouraged to try since I was an education student.  It’s just never worked out for me. When I started teaching, most of my freshmen ESL students didn’t speak English at the beginning of the year, and it’s hard to draw “Follow directions,” so..I skipped them.
Instead, I taught classroom routines as best I could. When something happened that I didn’t want repeated, I’d add a rule to the board. “No throwing things!” went up after a kid was beaned with a hacky sack (aw, the nineties, good times), for example.
These days I teach eighth grade in a rural Title I school with a very diverse set of kids. They wildly differ in their experiences with school, but when I sit them down and try to talk about rules, the answers are formulaic and boring. They look at me like I look at my leaders when I realize a meeting could’ve been an email: “we spent all this time to come up with that?”
​ So, maybe it’s my style, or the age of kids I work with, or some failure on my part, but I am not succeeding at collaborative rule making. Instead, I hew back to my Harry Wong-informed short rule list and we just move forward to procedures, which I do spend a lot of time on. My class moves smoothly and I find that I very rarely have to fall back on “It’s a rule, so you have to do it!” and when I do, I’ve usually screwed something up on the way.
I feel bad about not being up to date in my methods, even though it’s been working. People are really into collaborative rules. But I checked the research1 and I was relieved to find that this approach can work very well for students with emotional and behavior disorders.  This fits with my experience, I think, but it might have to do with my own need for structure.
This year, I’m going to watch and see how rules affect students who get in trouble. I don’t have specific consequences tied to rules other than if a quick “hey, don’t” doesn’t cover the situation, we take the conversation into the hall. Sometimes these lead to detentions or ISS, and I want to know more about that.  
I’m going to try to keep track of who gets into those conversations, what triggered the situation, and what the outcome was to see if I’m handling students fairly and if my rules are helping or hurting. 
1 Kostewicz, D. E., Ruhl, K. L., & Kubina, R. J. (2008). Creating Classroom Rules for Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders: A Decision-Making Guide. Beyond Behavior, 17(3), 14-21.