CCP: Episode 34 // Routines and Procedures Every TEACHER Needs
do you Ever feel like you say the same thing over and over in your day? yes! That’s how I feel about ‘Routines and Procedures’!
We know it’s important for our students to have routines and procedures to provide predictability, order, and peace in your classroom. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s important for teachers to have routines and procedures as well.
In this episode I discuss how to plan out your day from the morning to the afternoon. Enough with feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list and daily tasks. Learn how to have success in your routine.
You’ll Learn:
(Timestamps Shown)
How to have a productive and successful workday (1:25)
What to do to start your day on the right foot (3:13)
What to add to your list of things to get done in your morning routine (3:56)
How to realistically spend your lunch and planning period (5:06)
Several quick tasks to complete in a short amount of time (5:51)
To not let your ‘ready to go’ morning self be upset with your exhausted afternoon self (6:28)
How to group tasks together so you get more done in less time (8:41)
To create a realistic time frame to complete certain tasks (9:15)
How to clear space in your mind (10:39)
How to create a detailed list of all the routines and procedures you do in a day (11:16)
How to turn overwhelm into confidence (13:20)
How to thank yourself later (14:46)
LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE
Episode 24: Curriculum Mapping and Planning For a New School Year
Episode 27: Developing a Strong Classroom Management System
Setting Up a Student Data Binder (FREE Resource Included)
REVIEW & SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLASSROOM COMMUTE PODCAST
Don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get notified each week when a new episode gets dropped! And - if you love what you hear, I’d be so honored if you took a quick moment to rate and review the podcast so that other awesome teachers can find the podcast!
TRANSCRIPT:
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Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey there, Rachael here. Welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast. I'm so glad you're joining me again for another episode or if you're new, I'm so glad you found us at the time of this recording. We are 100% both feet in to the back to school season. I feel like, as teachers, this time of year we talk so much about classroom management for the students and routines and procedures that we need students to follow. In fact, if you've been listening for the past few episodes, I feel like I've said the words 'routine and procedure' a thousand times to the point where my face is turning blue and for good reason! It's super important to establish a classroom management system that is going to work for your students. In fact, I did an entire episode on classroom management that I will link to in the show notes. I also talked a ton about routines and procedures because they really do set the foundation for a successful school year.
One thing that we might forget to think about or talk about are those routines and procedures that we establish for ourselves. We know how important it is for students to have clear routines and procedures because it helps create predictability, order, and peace in your classroom. But have you ever thought about setting your own routines and procedures as the teacher? Because even as adults, we need a set of guidelines to refer to throughout our day to be productive and successful? I know that I love a checklist waiting for me in the morning to help me know how to start my workday. I don't have to waste time getting started. I don't have to think about how each task is going to be completed because I followed the same process over and over and over. I know the steps I need to follow in order to get it done because I've created a daily, a weekly, a monthly set of routines, as well as the specific procedures that I use to complete those routines in order to help me check off my to do list. And so today, I'd like to share with you some teacher routines and procedures that you might consider setting up for yourself to help you be more successful in and out of the classroom. Just to make sure that we're on the same page. When I say routine, I'm referring to what tasks need to be done. When I say the word procedure, I'm referring to how that routine task will be done. All right. Are we good? Let's dive in.
I'm going to break routines and procedures for teachers up into three categories. The first category being those routines and procedures that you do right away in the morning when you first arrive at school or maybe even before you get to school. The second category are going to be those routines and procedures that you will follow during your lunch and planning periods. Then finally, I'm going to be talking about some routines and procedure tips for the afternoon after your students have left for the day and you are ready to wind up your day before heading home.
So let's first talk about your morning routine. When you arrive at school, do you know exactly what you need to do before students arrive? Checking off the same tasks every day, either literal tasks or even mental tasks, things that you need to think through. If you do them in the same order, it will help you start your day on the right foot. It's amazing how creating and following a very specific routine can be so freeing. You'll find that you forget less when you do things exactly the same way every day. No more running to the copy room to make those copies of that one sheet that you forgot about. We are designed to be creatures of habit. Routines eventually run on autopilot and free up space in our minds. Consider including these tasks to streamline your morning routine. The first task, on many teachers to do lists in the morning, is to check your mailbox in the office or wherever your mailboxes are housed. Check any messages on your school phone from parents or other teachers/administrators in the building. Check your email. Although you may want to include this particular task in the afternoon so that you don't get sucked into a rabbit hole of email after email. If f you can put some limits on how long you let yourself check an email, you might want to include this in your morning routine. Pass out morning and bell work that you provide to the students and put it on their desks and have them ready to go if needed. Set your classroom schedule display for the day if you have one. Reset your behavior charts. For example, if you have a clip chart that you use for your students, be sure that all students are back on that 'ready to learn spot' or wherever they begin their day at. Review your daily plans and make sure that you have all the copies, hand outs, and materials ready to go. They should also be part of your afternoon routine as preparation for the next day. It always helps if you have one last look at it before you start your day. Think about these tasks that I just mentioned and literally put them in the order that you want to complete them and do it in that order every single day. It will eventually become autopilot and you will know exactly what to do as soon as you walk in the room.
Now, let's talk about some routines and procedures for your lunch and your planning period. You don't want to spend your entire lunch period at the copy machine, so make sure you have clear expectations about what tasks you'll allow yourself to complete during your lunch and your planning period. Ideally, during your lunch, you're going to eat. What a novel idea. When you start to get clear about your routines for other times during the day, hopefully you're going to find that you'll be able to do just that more and more. Since planning periods are typically too short to really accomplish anything major, make sure that you're realistic about what you can get done. I like to use my planning period for miscellaneous tasks that are not crucial to the success of the rest of that day. During your planning period, you might consider these following tasks to complete as part of your planning period routine. Check and respond to emails, again, give yourself some barriers, guidelines, and limits to how long you let yourself do that. Prep any materials that you might be using for the rest of the day, such as math manipulatively or any science equipment that you might need for a science experiment. Have those set out, ready to go. Grade a specific amount of papers that you think you might be able to complete. Make any quick phone calls, straighten up your desk and classroom areas. As the day goes on, our desk can become quite the pile of papers so give yourselves a quick five minutes to roughly put things back into place. You can do this again at the end of the day as well to do a final sweep through.
Here are some teacher routines for the afternoon. It's the end of the day. You're exhausted and you just want to go home. You're tempted to just leave it and head out for the door telling yourself 'I'll deal with it in the morning'. The temptation is real, but guess what? Morning is going to come and your morning self is going to be annoyed that your afternoon self did not clean off your desk and make those copies for the day. In effort to keep your morning self happy with your afternoon self, consider adding these routines to your afternoon ritual.
Task one, clean off your teacher desk. If you did that a little bit during your planning period, it shouldn't be such a big job. Put papers away, manipulatives away, put pencils back in the drawer/cupholder, file away any papers, things that you need to put away off of the desk, do it now. Check and respond to email. Like I mentioned earlier, this might be the most optimal time to do it because you likely have a little bit more time to really look at those emails instead of wasting your entire morning time or your entire prep period checking emails. Do that now. Now that the students have gone home, make any phone calls that you might need to make or make any copies that you need for the next day. This will prevent you from having to stand in line in the morning or during your prep period. You might even choose to make copies for an entire week at a time in order to avoid daily copying. You can do this on Friday afternoons before you leave. You make all your copies for the week and you're good to go. That's another routine and procedure that you may want to set up for yourself. I know that that is not always possible so if you do need to include it in your day, I suggest doing it in your afternoon ritual. In the afternoon is another great time to put away loose material, stray crayons, markers, and anything else that may have lost its way during the day during your activities. Touch base with any teachers or administrators as needed and grade papers as you need to as well. Again, put these tasks in a specific order and complete them in the same order every day until it becomes on autopilot. Of course, no routine or procedure is perfect and there will be those days when something will throw you off course but if you have a specific routine and procedure to come back to, you don't have to waste time getting back on track.
Now, I have a couple bonus tips for you as far as how to go about planning your routines for the week. You might consider giving each day a specific theme. You might find that you don't need to do every routine every day. For example, on Monday afternoons, you spend time grading so that you don't have to do it every day or on Friday afternoons, like I mentioned, you make all of your copies for the following week so that you don't have to do it at the end of each day. Maybe you send out parents weekly email on Wednesday mornings. By batching certain tasks, you're going to spend less time shifting your mind from task to task. One of the ways that you can make your routine successful is by giving each routine a specific time frame. I kind of already mentioned this with the email, but by giving yourself a limited amount of time to work on something, you will minimize the rabbit holes that you will go down by getting sucked into one specific task. Now, of course, you're going to need to be realistic here. Don't tell yourself that you're giving yourself five minutes to check email when you know for darn sure it's going to take you at least ten. Give yourselves a realistic time frame that you can stick to so that you don't end up blowing your entire morning just on weeding through your inbox or another task that typically takes you too much time. If you need to set a timer for yourself to keep you accountable.
Now, before we go on here, I want to encourage you to think about all those tasks, a lot of ones that I mentioned and maybe some other ones that you have. I want you to think about all of the things that you do during your day other than the actual teaching portion of your day and I want you to make a giant list of all those tasks. Then I want you to rearrange those tasks into the categories that I mentioned into your morning routines, your lunch and planning periods, and then your afternoon routines. I want you to order them in a way that makes sense to you as far as how you're going to complete them. Then I want you to give each task a time frame that you typically need for that particular task. Getting everything out on paper is super helpful, not only to clear the space in your mind, but also to help you really think about it in a realistic way and to go about mapping out when each task is going to be completed. Be sure to include the littlest tasks all the way up to the biggest tasks so that you don't leave a single thing out. Then once you outline the routines that you need to complete in the morning, during your lunch and planning periods, as well as in the afternoon, now you can develop clear procedures for how to get them done. Take some time to think about exactly how you want something to be done so that it's done right every time.
Here are some tasks, some of the ones I've just mentioned previously, that you're going to want to develop a specific procedure for. Remember, procedure is how it's getting done. You are going to need a procedure for how to organize and store your student handouts. For example, will you use baskets or file folders to organize your daily papers? You need a procedure for how to pass back student work. How will you pass them back? Will you give them to students to pass back? Are you going to use mailboxes for your students? How often are you going to pass it back? Are you going to do it every day? Are you going to pass back all the work on Fridays? What's the procedure for passing back student work? Also, you want will want to develop a procedure for connecting and communicating with parents. This is a big one. Do you need to connect daily, weekly, monthly? How often do you need to use a special app such as the Reminder App? I will link to that resource in the show notes, or are you going to send out emails or newsletters once a week or once a month? Develop the procedure for how you're going to communicate with parents and then stick to it. You need to develop procedures for grading papers, think through how often you'll be grading. Which assignments get formal grades? Which ones are more of just a pass/fail type thing? Or that you're just checking in for a quick assessment. You'll also want to develop procedures for planning. How much curriculum are you going to plan for at a time? Are you going to go one month out, a quarter out? How will you plan for one subject at a time?, or are you going to plan all subjects week by week? How are you going to create those plans? Are they going to be in a digital or paper planner? Are you going to be planning on your own or do you need to set up a schedule with a teacher that you're going to be planning with? All of these things you need to think about when it comes to planning for your curriculum.
You can check out Episode 24 if you want more tips on how to curriculum map, I will link to that in the show notes. Develop procedures for completing and filing away important paperwork like your IEPs and behavior contracts. Come up with procedures for collecting and storing student data. I have an entire resource that you can use to set up a student data and I will link to that resource in the show notes. When you really start to think about everything that you do in your day, over the course of the week, over the course of a month, you really come to realize that there are a ton of procedures that you're following without really even knowing it. If we get clear about those procedures, we can be more effective, we can be more successful, and we will find that we're less scatterbrain when we think about everything that needs to be done in our day. I know that when I think about all the things that you plan for, all the tasks that you complete, and the way that you complete those tasks can feel overwhelming when you list them one after another. That's why I really encourage you to write down not only your tasks, like I mentioned earlier, but to also put into writing, the procedures that you follow. This is going to be helpful for you to refer back to. It also might be helpful if you have a co-teacher that you work with or your job sharing, or maybe you're going out for a long term leave and you have a sub coming in, you can provide them with your written procedures that they can follow so that there's less confusion during that transition. And of course, when you initially set up your routines and procedures, it's going to be tedious, especially if you are writing them down and recording all the details. I think you will find that once you have it all set in place and your routines and procedures are established, it's going to create peace and order. Not only that, but confidence in your everyday teaching. This is one of those things that you put a lot of energy in so that you don't have to put a whole lot of energy in after it's already set in place.
I encourage you to get yourself a glass of coffee, wine, or whatever beverage that you enjoy, sit down and really map out the routines that you follow each day and then the procedures for how to get those routines done. You will thank yourself later when you are buzzing right through your to do list each morning and afternoon.
That's all I have for you today. You can get all the information that we talked about today over at the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/34. I hope you have a great rest of your week and I will see you again next week. Bye for now.
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