Ground rules of the Level 3 Award in Education and Training (AET)

In any organisation, you need to set your company culture. Within the Level 3 Award in Education and Training, our culture or rules of the game are called ground rules. This is our code of conduct, how we expect our team and our employees to behave and what we expect of everyone who does business with us including learners. If you are a trainer, a manager or even a business owner, you need to establish your ground rules. You could establish your ground rules by dictatorship, you tell everyone what you expect, what they can do and what they can’t do. The issue with doing it this way is that we don’t get buy in from others, meaning they are unlikely to follow it if they don’t agree with it and then you’ll run into a host of disciplinary issues.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training learners ideas

The way around doing this is to encourage your employees or your learners to contribute to it or to take ownership of these rules. By making your learners or employees coming up with the rules, it increases their motivation to follow those rules but as a teacher, you facilitate this. In the Level 3 Award in Education and Training (AET), we also start by introducing the course rules and these are the behaviours that you expect from your learners. Personally, I already have a list of 20 rules I want to enforce within the class, but I want my learners to come up with these as it will increase buy in much more than if I was to tell them the rules.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training appropriate behaviour

We set ground rules of appropriate behaviour and respect for others to create an atmosphere maximises learning potential. Examples of rules you can enforce, not only in the Level 3 Award in Education and Training (AET) or any other course for that matter include:

• Being polite.
• Turning phones off.
• Arriving on time.
• Not talk over others.
• Do your homework.
• Put your hand up.
• Respect others.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training establishing ground rules

How do you establish your ground rules? We have these set in our learner induction handbooks, but we reinforce them at the beginning of every course. You could simply run a Q&A session where your learners put their hands up and give you suggestions, they might work in small groups and write on a flip chart, you might discuss rules for different activities so for example, you may need to introduce an additional set of ground rules for a practical activity. You will agree with your learners what behaviours are negotiable and what are not. This may depend on the type of course you’re teaching or the level of your learners. Let’s say the Level 3 Award in Education and Training has students whom are adults and can pretty much be trusted, we can generally agree that mobile phones should be kept on silent but take important calls outside whereas in a school environment, you may have a zero tolerance on use of phones.

Level 3 Award in Education and Training facilitating ground rules

By allowing your learners to come up with these ideas themselves, they will follow them more as they don’t want to let their peers down which gives them more motivation to follow. Just add on anything missing at the end. Keep them on display throughout, you may want to go back through them later as a reminder, but you only need to introduce your ground rules on the first lesson and not on subsequent lessons.