For any culture to cohere, its members need a common purpose.  Think of a sports team, where the purpose is to win games, or an extracurricular activity, where the purpose might be to build a theatrical set or publish a student newspaper.  Such a purpose gives the culture meaning and direction, and it is what its members behavior is organized to accomplish. In your classroom, that purpose is defined by the Prime Directive.

The Prime Directive, as defined in the last chapter, is this:  

Self-directed learning is the basis for all

classroom decisions, large and small.

This is the bedrock that guides all the work of transformation that you will implement in your classroom.  It is also the bedrock of the classroom culture, so let’s simplify it for the sake of discussing it with our students.  The Prime Directive in the classroom might be simply stated:

Our purpose is for every one of us to learn as much and grow as much as possible.  Everything we do in this room is based on that purpose.  

Establishing this idea and reinforcing it tenaciously is critically important in creating the classroom culture you are trying to achieve — it is the common purpose that gives meaning to everything that you and your students do.  It helps organize their behavior.

In addition to providing a powerful positive motivator, the Prime Directive has a corollary that is a powerful constraint on inappropriate or counterproductive behavior.  It is this:

No one has the right to interfere with anyone else’s learning.

This has the remarkable advantage of making the rules impersonal.  They are no longer the dictates of the teacher being imposed on the students, but rather the ground rules that are necessary to be able to pursue the common purpose and obey the Prime Directive.  When a student is disruptive, for example, a teacher can legitimately say “I think you are making it hard for the students around you from learning right now.” It’s not the teacher making a student do something, it isn’t a power struggle, it’s just the way we do things here.  We are about learning.

This also makes many problems self-correcting.  When the culture has a common purpose, people who violate that purpose find themselves outside the culture, something that most teen-agers don’t want to do.  Many situations that might have become disruptive power struggles are now handled within the classroom when students remind each other of the purpose of doing what they are doing.  For instance, a study group that wants to finish going over a test or a lab group that wants to complete a lab activity may constrain the disruptive behavior of one student without needing the interference of a teacher.