Today I want to give you 5 simple starting routines that you can use in the first five minutes of every lesson, to promote and encourage a calmer more learning focused classroom.
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First Five in Five
You can’t change anyone’s behaviour. Sorry to disappoint you. You can however enforce routines and habits for your students that will help to replace their own habits and as a consequence will overtime have an impact on their behaviour.
Every day there are routines or activities in your classrooms that can either contribute to diminish unnecessary disruption and misbehaviour in the classroom. Your awareness of these routines and how they impact behaviour in your class is a significant factor in how you manage your classroom.
Today I want to give you 5 simple starting routines that you can use in the first five minutes of every lesson, to promote and encourage a calmer more learning focused classroom. Beginning teachers, these five routines are the easiest and quickest way to start getting some wins on the board with your classroom management. Experienced teachers, ignoring these routines may well be setting you up for unnecessary stress and misbehaviour.
Tip 1: Meet your students at the door:
Make sure that you are well prepared before your lesson so that you’re not setting up when your students start arriving at the door in the morning or after break times. Be at the door ready to meet and greet them. Why?
The reason I suggest that you meet them at the door is this: relationship is absolutely paramount to effective behaviour management. Meeting your students at the door is a really effective way of building relationships. It gives you an opportunity to greet them, smile at them, find out about their weekend, find out about what they did at lunchtime, talk to them about their hobbies. But also, it helps you to notice or observe anyone that might be coming to the class restless and out of sorts. If something’s happened in the playground or if something’s happening at home, you’ll usually be able to spot behaviours, body language, attitudes before they even get into the classroom.
When you are at that door greeting students and relating to them, you’ll be able to catch behaviours before they come into a classroom, and positively, and proactively, respond to them in a timely manner, rather than waiting for it to come into your classroom and disrupt the learning.
High school teachers if you’re worried about having your lesson set up because you have to walk from another class, don’t worry I’ll cover that with Tip 4. What I would recommend to you is, better to wrap up your previous lesson early than to be late to the beginning of your next lesson. The first five minutes of your lessons will be the most crucial for calming the class. The last 5 minutes of a lesson is usually the least productive. I know which one I want to priorities.
So, meet your students at the door.
Tip 2: Line Them Up:
Take the time to make sure they line up before you walk in the door. Lining up is something that I recommend for all teachers who want to establish and maintain a calmer classroom. Why? Because it is a starting routine, or a ritual of readiness.
Lining up gives students an opportunity to reset from whatever they were doing before they came back to the classroom. A moment where they are able to get ready, get their books out, get their pens out, calm down and show that they are ready to enter the classroom. If you’ve got them lined up, facing the front in an orderly fashion, you’ll very quickly be able to tell which students are not ready for learning, or not ready to enter the classroom appropriately. It just gives you a way of nipping that behavior in the bud before it actually comes into the classroom, but it also helps them to reset.
Yes, I even recommend high school teachers line their students up. I’ve work in a high school, and I have worked with teachers in getting even their year tens and elevens to line up. It is a good practice of orderly, respectful behaviour before they enter the classroom, and helps you to observe behaviours before it takes control of your lesson.
What if they won’t line up? I’m glad you asked. With tricky classes, you will have to practice and teach them your expectations. 80% of your class will start following the expectations fairly quickly. Take a couple of minutes to settle your high flyers and if you can get them calm and facing the front even for a moment I would say, let them in.
If however you have a small group or individual who is refusing to line up and you’re starting to lose the attention of the rest of the class, set them a simple, silent independent activity (see tip 4) and let the majority in. Stop the non compliant students at the door and tell them they will not be permitted in the classrooms until they have lined up, then close the door. Very quickly your mid level behaviour student will comply and then you’ll be left with your high flyers. Explain to them again that they will not be allowed in until they line up and close the door. They may escalate briefly, but in most cases once they have no audience you will find they comply fairly quickly.
Bonus Tip: Are you in a flexible learning environment with rolling starts or where lining up is not practiced? Try an alternative micro-compliance like getting them to stand behind their seat before starting the lesson. Establishing a starting routine that signals calm, respect and compliance with teacher instructions is essential to starting your lessons well.
Tip 3: Teach them how to walk through the door:
Take the time to explicitly teach and enforce an ‘entering the class’ routine. Whatever your entering the class routine looks like, you must explicitly teach them how to enter walk through the door appropriately. Walking in the class quietly and in an orderly fashion will have a very powerful impact on setting your class up for the next lesson.
Make sure that they are entering the class in an orderly fashion. When we move through doorways our brain has a hard reset function that momentarily causes us to forget what we were doing previously and prepares us to take in behavioural information for the new environment we are entering. It’s called the doorway effect. If you’ve ever gone to the fridge or if you walked into another room of your house and found yourself standing in there unable to remember why you opened the door, that’s the doorway effect. It is an instinctive self preservation response that we all have that is designed to set us up for the required behaviour in our new environment.
By teaching your students to way through the door in a calm and orderly fashion, you will actually take advantage of the doorway effect on their brain and set them up to receive your desired behaviour information for the classroom. If they are entering the class in a calm orderly manner, their brain will be telling them “this is a calm environment and you need to behave in kind.” If they enter the door in a boisterous and uncontrolled way, then that is the behaviour information that their brain will take in.
Entering the door appropriately is also a signal to transition into a new mode of thinking, or new mode of operating. Our brain associates environments with learned habits and triggers instinctive responses based on the environments we are in. That seemly innocuous moment when they enter the classroom is actually an opportunity for you to signal to the students that they are now entering an environment of learning, that playtime is finished, and a different set of behaviours is required.
The way students transition through the classroom door will set the tone for how they approach that next activity and help you get them settled much quicker than ususal. I can’t emphasis the power of this routine enough. Teach it, practice it, enforce it. If they’re not entering the classroom properly, exit them back to the door and get them to walk through that door in an appropriate fashion. Keep doing it until they understand and follow your expectation. Trust me, you’ll thank me later.
Tip 4: Have a starting activity for every lesson
A starting activity or routine is a simple, silent activity that can be done independently for about 5 mins as soon as they enter the classroom.
If you are tired of starting the first 10 minutes of every lesson trying to settle the class then you need to start with a quiet starting activity. Whenever children come in from an activity, like say lunch time, or when they’re arriving in the morning, they will frequently be hyped up and excitable. Your starting routine is designed to help them calm down and get 80% of your class on task quickly. That will give you time to settle your 15% mid level kids and then give you bandwidth to calm your 5% complex kids before starting to teach. IT will also give you an opportunity to set yourself up for the lesson without having to fight disruptive off task behaviour.
Your activity or routine must be one that will actually help them to calm down, to center themselves, and get themselves ready for their learning.
So for English, for example, or if it’s a literacy type subject, you might get them to do 5 minutes of silent reading, just to centre themselves, to get themselves focused on their learning. If it’s a math subject, or numeracy subject, then you might get them to do some kind of quiet mental maths routine, or times table.
Other useful routines can be word searches, cross words, quizzes or mindfulness activities.
Whatever it is, it must be something they can start independently and require no input from you. Something that is going to get them in their own space, that’s going to shut down the interactions with their peers, and help them to be ready for the learning before you actually start teaching.
Give the starting routine instruction to them, before they enter the class so there is no down time if they have to wait while you sort out the couple of kids who didn’t want to line up.
This gives you 5 minutes to deal with escalated individuals without having the rest of the class get rowdy while they wait for you. It also gives you an opportunity to set yourself up for the lesson. Turn the projector on, get your laptop going, put stuff up on the board.
Ensuring your students remain occupied while you are getting ready.
Some of the most common places that behaviour gets out of control is in transitions. In those times where students don’t have a set activity and teachers are distracted with getting ready or dealing with challenging individuals. Line up times and the 5 minutes before you start your lesson are the times when behaviour can get out of control really quickly. Set up starting routines and watch your transition to learning flow with ease.
Tip 5: Get an attention grabber
Before you even start the lesson, before you give your instructions, make sure you have an attention grabbing signal. Don’t ever try and teach or give instructions over the top of talking or students who are not paying attention to what you’re saying. because If this is your habit, you probably already feel frustrated by having to raise your voice or repeat instructions. You can minimise this just by making sure you’ve got their attention first.
Now, depending on the age of your children, and depending on your personality type, there are dozens of attention grabbing rituals or signals that you can use.
You might do call and response clapping, hold your hand up in the air and wait for them to be silent, or say something like “class, class, class” and then have them respond with “yes, yes, yes” (my personal favourite), you stand in the corner of the room and count down from 3, 2, 1 or any number of other options. Just google it, there are heaps of options out there. Whatever your starting routine and attention grabbing ritual is, Just find something that works for you, and make sure you use it every time you need to talk to your class.
Some things to watch out for when choosing an attention grabber:
- Make sure you are comfortable using it all the time. This will be your go to all day long and it can’t be something that annoys or frustrates you.
- Make sure it has an ability to vary the pattern if you can’t catch their attention the first time. (vary the clapping rhythm, change the pitch or pace or your call and response or use both verbal and none verbal elements to your countdown.) you won’t always catch them on the first try (if they are engrossed in their own world or distracted) but don’t get frustrated, just change it up slightly and cut through the distraction.
- Don’t use your attention grabber in anger. Stay calm and light-hearted when calling them to attention otherwise they are likely to develop a negative response to your attention grabber and resiste responding consistently.
So there it is; my 5 ninja tips or routines for making sure you start every lesson with calm, focused students who are ready to learn.
They may sound simple or even trivial, but I assure you that my first 5 in 5 will be the quickest classroom management win that you implement this week. You will need to teach them explicitly and may have to practice them a few times, but if you implement them with consistency they will have a significant effect on how you start each lesson.
Try them for 2 weeks and let me know how you go.
If you’d like to learn more about managing classroom behaviour effectively, why not check out our FREE video course Behaviour Management Blueprint. See below for details.
If you would like to learn more about managing classroom behaviour effectively, why not check out our FREE video course Behaviour Management Blueprint. See below for details.
FREE eBook – Behaviour Management Blueprint:
5 Essential Strategies for Effective Behaviour Management
