At last month’s Community of Practice meeting, we discussed how to implement sociocracy in schools, and came up with the following tips. What are your tips for implementation?
- Avoid pure top-down implementation- having people who opt-in consent to join.
- Clarity of domains very important- who gets to decide what? Who gets to give feedback only?
- Parents consent that they will learn sociocracy in order to have a consent vote.
- When you sign up, you will do a training. (Ex do it yourself ELC training).
- Actual training materials- everyone watches School Circles training version.
- Intro to rounds and consent (staff and students).
- Breakout groups with role-plays: decide “what’s for dinner."
- Practice selection- selection process to choose an activity to do the rest of the hour.
- Build tools slowly- start with rounds, consent, build to selections, then more complex proposals and circle structure.
- Learning through living in sociocratic meetings, not just training and talking about it.
- Acknowledge the culture supporting sociocracy- ex. NVC and conflict resolution tools.