This chapter will:

• describe the role of various rules and regulations in the group's life;

• present ways of developing a constructive system of classroom norms and ‘learning contracts’;

• discuss the implications of group norms to the broader question of classroom discipline.

When people are together, in any function and context, they usually follow certain rules and routines that help to prevent chaos and help everybody to go about their business as effectively as possible. Take traffic, for example: if there didn't exist some rules, most of us wouldn't dare to sit in a car – of course, this is exactly why every country in the world has developed their own ‘Highway Code’. But traffic is also a good example to illustrate that there is more to rules than simply whether they exist or not: Why is it that some of the traffic rules seem to be generally observed in a given context, whereas some others are constantly violated (e.g. we rarely jump the red light but often park illegally)? And why is it that cultures differ widely in the extent to which they observe certain rules and not others? Or, more generally, what makes a rule work? And are all rules as explicitly formulated as the Highway Code? In this chapter we will address these questions with regard to the classroom situation and examine how class rules contribute to the group's life and to the level of discipline in the class.