Episode #3: 5 Strategies to Support Consistency In the Classroom

We give away pieces of us because we want to do what is best for our students, but teaching others how we would like to be treated and setting boundaries is not a bad thing. In fact it is a GREAT thing. I challenge you to start to set boundaries. Maybe it takes the form of turning off your school email notification after 4. Or, your remind notifications. Maybe it is sending out a communication to your parents that you are working on being healthy and so you are going to promise to respond to any questions that are received after 4 the following school day, and if you are out sick, you will respond when you return to school.  Imagine how much weight would be lifted off of your shoulders. 

Hi friends! The classroom environment can feel like a whirl pool.  Spinning in circles with now end in sight.   Each day the teacher has to hold the attention of 4-18 year old students for six and half hours a day. Additionally, teachers are competing with access to technology at astonishing rates. It is reported that 97% of teenagers have a cell phone and 78% of them are on  social media.  In many districts across the country one to one device initiatives allow students to have full access to anything they want on the internet all day long. Additionally, as students lose focus and attention, they may become behavior problems and cause a ruckus in the classroom. The key to maintaining a calm, cool, and engaging classroom environment is consistency! This is easier said than done. As schedules may change from day to day, or activities, and curriculum become more and more rigorous, consistent routines can take you from feeling like you're drowning,   to floating on the surface, and going with the flow as the waves and turbulence pass. So what is the key to the magic of consistency, here are 5 strategies that you can apply today that will help you and your students go with the flow as the tides may change. 

Strategy #1 Kick Off Routine for Starting the Day or Period

Every day as students enter the class they should have a specific routine required of them and it must be taught and practiced. This is true for students age 4 to 24.  Humans crave structure and predictability. The more predictability that we provide to them the more successful they will be. These routines should include how students enter the classroom, what are your routines for tardies, what do students need to do with backpacks, what should they start on when they come inside, how should they sit in their chair, whats the routine for sharpening a pencil and the list goes on and on. When I was in the classroom my expectations were that students were in their seat when the bell rang, not walking in the door, not running through the hallway, not sharpening a pencil, in their seats. No negotiations, no excuses, no flexibility. This sounds like you are a crazy dictator standing at the front of the class, but what it provides is a stable, calm and fair environment once it is practiced and students are held accountable over and over again. In my experience, this takes a couple of weeks to solidify in students but once you do it and hold the line, they will conform. No matter how difficult the student they know the expectation and can accept the consequences should they choose to not meet it. Once my students were seated each and every day they took out their notebook and wrote down their agenda. Their agenda included the learning objective for that class period. Okay, so let me take a quick a bird walk here about the learning objective. If I was in front of an audience of 500 teachers and I asked them how many of you post their objective daily, I would say about 20% would raise their hand.  Positive the objective is so important and can not be undervalued.  Just this morning, I was icing my eyes, they are so puffy because of allergies, and my sweet puppy Molly was wanting to play fetch.  Now I am a softball player and I am pretty accurate with my throw.  She kept bringing me her ball to throw and because I had ice on my eyes, I wasn't looking at my target, but visualizing the door as I tried to throw it through.  I was not successful. Not once.  I knew what my target was but I couldn’t hit it. Let me provide you with another example.   There is an awesome video on You Tube called the Monkey Business Illusion. If you have a chance go check it out, I will include the link in the show notes, but essentially what happens in this video is that the narrator tells you to count the number of passes between the players in the white shirts, and shows the objective on the screen. At the end he gives you the answer 16 passes. But then he asks three other questions, did you notice the player leaving, or the curtain turning from red to gold, how about the gorilla walking through the middle of the passes. About 50% of participants will not have noticed the gorilla. Let alone, the player leaving and the curtain behind them changing color. This demonstration is an excellent example of why we teach and review the learning objective. The brain is inundated with input and in order to help our students decipher what we want them to learn, we have to tell them. It shouldn’t be a surprise at the end of the lesson. This is one of those things that is a frequently missed opportunity for exceptional lesson design and increased student learning.  The brain remembers things that it sees at the beginning and the end. Think of a movie that you watched, you remember how it starts and probably the ending but the details in the middle get a little fuzzy.  We have all seen or heard someone sing the national anthem and start out great, “Oh say can you see, by the dawns early light. . . and then the worlds get a little lost in the middle and they finish strong, the land of the free, and the home of the brave!”   So let’s start with what we want students to learn. Begin with the end in mind.  

In addition to the objective my students were required to write down what we were doing for that day. This helps with one of our favorite teacher questions, “what are we doing today?”  Just simple bullet points was perfect.  Also, because my students were required to have a notebook each assignment was number and completed in the pages that followed. This helped with organization, responsibility, and to keep my students on track who may have been absent.  The next part of their agenda, was 2-3 vocabulary focus words for the day.  Now when i started I used to list all of the vocabulary for the section that we were learning, just to have them interact with the words on a more frequent basis, but as I learned more and more about vocabulary development limiting the number of words to focus on, but requiring them to share and talk to another student about what they meant, increased their understanding and learning.  The last section on their agenda was any homework that I might have assigned. This kick off routine gave me time to take attendance, check homework, and check in with students at the beginning of each period. I would never sacrifice this time! It pays dividends down the road! 

The Potential Conflict: 

Like all systems there are opportunities for potential conflict or hiccups. The number one potential conflict with this routine is lack of enforcement by the teacher. With any system that you implement in your classroom it is your responsibility to hold the students accountable. Sometimes we may feel like our students do not pay attention to anything, but as soon as we treat them differently or don’t hold them to the same expectation as another student an explosion happens. The responsibility for the implementation is on YOU! If your implementation of any routine in your classroom is inconsistent then the outcome with your students will be inconsistent. Another potential conflict with the routine I shared above is time, but to be honest, I felt like this was time well spent that didn’t require a ton of planning or heavy lifting from me. Additionally, it developed responsibility and organization in my students which I loved. I also, kept a digital and print version of their notebook where everything for my class existed.  I will include a picture of my daily agenda in the show notes if you want to check it out. More about this in a future episode. 

Strategy # 2  Feel the Energy

At all age levels there is an ebb and flow of the classroom environment. Knowing your students and paying attention to their body language, their volume, and their interaction with you in the classroom is a way to monitor the feel of your room. When students are chatty, off task, antsy, and have a lack of focus, this could be a sign of lack of engagement, or total engagement,  difficulty in the task, anxiety about the weekend, there are so many reason that kids may not be doing what we are asking, but being attentive to the environment can cue you as the educator to pause and provide a break. What does that break look like, oh the options. Across all grade levels mindfulness exercises are a great way to help with the signs of anxiety and stress. Having students say in their head affirmations about how they can be successful and solve problems in the classroom is a great way to help encourage them to have a growth mindset.  Progress is better than perfection. I am providing this freebie Student Affirmations as a guide to help support if you don’t know where to start. If you find that your students are on the opposite end of the spectrum and need support in having energy and getting motivated you can do the opposite. At the younger grades using tools like Go Noodle can help give your students a burst of energy or help them get the wiggles out. Another great easy activity to change the state of your students is just to give them a minute to talk with their peers about something else, their favorite ice cream, what they did this weekend, their favorite meme, the question doesn’t matter, but if your class is off task, or starting to percolate pay attention. Use this as an opportunity to check in on their learning, but not before letting them talk about it with a peer first. And make it structure. Set a time, give a signal, and be consistent.  I am a planner so I would frequently pre-plan questions that I was going to ask my students and provide them with the sentence started that they could use if they needed it.  Let me know if you would be interested on these tagged to the standards by DMing me on instagram @thelearningprojectjenn and I will shoot them over to you.  

At all grade levels, assigning activities that include competition or that allow students to get out of their seat and move can help increase their energy and get their heads off of the desk.  Movement is good for all of our students and the more we can integrate movement into our teaching, the more engaged and more energy students will have. When I taught Anatomy and Physiology I would take my high school students outside with sidewalk chalk and they would create diagrams on campus, we did the Hokey Pokey to help them learn the bones and the whole time they laughed and learned. One hundred percent engagement. Find ways to include students that engage them. Each day if a student looks forward to what is happening in your class that consistency will be helpful in their behavior, academics and social emotional well being in the classroom. 

The Potential Downside: 

When you are working on shifting the culture in your classroom some students may feel silly doing a guided meditation of mindfulness exercise and not want to participate. If those students choose to not follow along it is okay. Don’t battle them.   Instead, conduct the activities with the rest of the class and have a private conversation with the student afterwards. Another way to combat this problem is to explain to your students why you are engaging in these sorts of activities. Brain research promotes mindfulness to promote focus and productivity and if you are intentional about setting up time in your class to help support student focus it's a win for everyone. Now I taught in a block schedule. That’s 100 minutes a class period, and for you elementary folks, thats you 120 minute ELA block. Brendon Bruchard wrote and incredible book called High Performance Habits where he did a meta analysis of the worlds top performers and hack their productivity tricks. One of the things that he highlights in this book is that 50 minute blocks of time increase productivity. When we cross reference that information with brain research on attention and retention, our kiddos have 4-7 minutes of focus time. I would argue that this is even shorter now with how they scroll Tik Tok. Social media research shows that you 7 seconds to capture someones attention. This need for chunking time and intentionally planning to change the energy in your classroom is indispensable. 

Strategy # 3 Loose but Tight (Structure with Choice) 

This could be the holy grail of education if teachers could find effective ways to implement it consistently while still maintaining high levels of rigor and not over planning. We all have standards that we must teach our students, but the value in what we are teaching comes in providing our students opportunities to use skills that they have and apply them in novel ways. How many times in our classrooms do we allow students to create novel projects of their choice. I hope that you say this frequently but in reality in most classrooms that I have walked through, I see all students working on the same project in the same way, and sometimes it is even the same way that I did the assignment when i was in high school 20 years ago. Eeek. This is a scary thought. The antiquated assignments that we have our students complete are not engaging and therefore not an effective way to support consistent learning in the classroom. If we want our students to learn at high levels then we need to provide them instruction in areas that build their skills and allow them to apply them in ways that they choose. As a biology teacher every year I would reflect on what I had taught for each unit and modify the assignments that I provided to make them better every time, giving different and diverse access points for all students.   Those assignments would all have rubrics. Rubrics are an effective way to give consistency for your students and not have to plan every little step for every single assignment. When you have a rubric you can allow your students to have more autonomy in the products that they produce. These products can now take a variety of forms a powerpoint presentation, a youtube video, a documentary, model, film strip, lab report, article, essay, and so on and so on. Providing the structure of a rubric while allowing for flexibility creates ownership of the assignment. The more frequently you provide a rubric and show students with the rubric what you are expecting your students will turn in high quality work on a more consistent basis. Plus with the addition of tools like Chat GPT, or Wolfram Alfa, I am not concerned with what a kid can copy and paste from the internet. I am much more interested in hearing them articulate and apply their understanding of the content. This allowed me to grade students understanding of content through conversation rather than everything in writing.  Towards the end of my teaching career, I started giving students a learning style inventory.  It was a great tool for them to learn about how they learn and reflect on what they needed to do to be successful, but it also was a great tool for me to understand the dynamics of my class and think about ways to create assignments and opportunities for them to learn in their style. I integrated multiple modalities into my instruction every single day. Built in differentiation! 

The Potential Conflict: 

Getting a classroom set up to support this loose but tight model takes time and commitment. But it also help by providing some build in differentiation for your students with disabilities, and English Learners.  The support of having rubrics that can overlap from unit to unit is a great trick. For example, if I want to have my students show me with visuals how cell membranes look and how they function, I am going to have a rubric for the products that I want them to create, not something specific to content. This way my rubric can be used in the next unit when I need them to demonstrate how natural selection is seen in nature. They can choose what product they want to create and I do not have a new rubric for each unit and all of the products that come with it. Oh and another added benefit, it decreases the time you spend grading exponentially! 

Strategy #4 Set Boundaries

In order to be the best possible teacher for your students you have to be the best you. This means you have to practice self care. You need to set boundaries for your work that allow you to still have friendships, time with family, and taking care of your health. When you can take care of yourself on a consistent basis then when you show up for your students you are in the best place to provide them with support. I worked with  a teacher that everyday during passing period he takes  a lap around the buildings. He described getting outside the four walls of his classroom as a mental restart, the next class period. On top of that, the exercise gives you endorphins, and endorphins make you happy. Thank you Elle Woods!   

Part of setting boundaries is not being available to your students, parents, and admin 24/7.  It is so easy to fall into the trap of the 24 hour availability cycle with tools like email, text and reminders, but it is not healthy. It is important for us to have a life and an identity outside of being a teacher. I was horrible at this as a teacher and admin. I had my phone on me all of the time and would provide immediate responses to anyone that asked for anything from me. This is a sure fire way to burn ourselves out. As teachers I feel like we have this inherent trait of giving. We give away pieces of us because we want to do what is best for our students, but teaching others how we would like to be treated and setting boundaries is not a bad thing. In fact it is a GREAT thing. I challenge you to start to set boundaries. Maybe it takes the form of turning off your school email notification after 4. Or, your remind notifications. Maybe it is sending out a communication to your parents that you are working on being healthy and so you are going to promise to respond to any questions that are received after 4 the following school day, and if you are out sick, you will respond when you return to school.  Imagine how much weight would be lifted off of your shoulders. 

The Potential Conflict: 

Time. We always say that we are unable to commit to ourselves because we do not have time, our time and what we do with it is our choice. Find ways to carve out small amounts of time, for yourself each day to take care of your health.  It will actually help your mind to be more productive when you sit back down to work. 

Strategy #5 Create Goals and Track Them 

Goal setting is an awesome way to support your students in achieving and attaining long term goals and more importantly short term goals.  We can not under estimate the value of celebrating small wins with our students.  Each week with your students you should provide them with set time to write down 5 things that they want to see themselves doing in the next week.   So often our culture focuses on the importance of BIG GOALS and DREAMS. If I am being honest, those big goals and dreams that I have left me feeling like because I wasn’t accomplishing them, I wasn't successful.  Talk about a hard life to live up to. My goal is to have 1000 email subscribers, and the fact that I have 10 shouldn’t tell me that I am not successful, but seeing each week that my list is growing that is worth celebrating.  Small wins matter! Progress is better than perfection, and perfection is unattainable! Lif is not all of nothing.  We need to show our students what it is like to meet a goal.  Have them choose one of their goals to focus on and begin supporting them to make progress on that one goal until they reach it.  These goals do not have to have anything to do with what is happening in your classroom, but they can. The purposel of this activity is that it allows for students to choose what is important to them and they work on it. They are the masters of what they want to focus on. If it is assignment completion, great! Test prep, awesome! Being on time to class, amazing! The point is that students are the ones creating their goals and developing the perseverance to see that goal through to fruition. It so important to emphasize progress over perfection. As I am starting this podcast, I have big goals that I want to achieve and I have had to work very hard to not let those big goals get in the way of the tiny pieces of momentum that I am gaining by being consistent.   Kids make mistakes, hell we all make mistakes, but it shouldn’t take us off the path that we want to achieve. If a goal is truly that important to a student then all they might need is for someone to actually tell them they have the ability to achieve it. 

The Potential Conflict: 

Time is always going to be a challenge but teaching not only ourselves but our students to look inward and reflect on their learning, self awareness, confidence and persistence will help them to have a much more fulfilled and productive life.  Information is now available to them more than ever and teaching our students about growth and self-reflection will continue to serve them and be more valuable than a single piece of content that they can google on the internet. 

Now I know that these strategies my not be the most exciting or flashy but I can promise you that they are work the investment.  The 5 strategies are #1 Create Kick Off Routine, #2 Feel the Energy and Plan for It, #3 Loose But Tight, provide structure with choice, #4 Set Boundaries, and stick to them and #5 Set Goals and Support students in achieving them. I  hope these 5 strategies will help you to gain some energy, get back on track, or start a new week or month, or school year feeling energized. These are some of my favorite routines that helped my classroom be an incredibly fun and engaging learning environment. If there is something that stood out in this episode that you are interested in hearing more about, connect with me on social @thelearningprojectjenn and remember that the free resource for student affirmations is at www.learning-project/affirmations. I hope you have an amazing day and that this episode left you feeling motivated, inspired and excited about your classroom. Happy Teaching!