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Teaching Procedures

 Teaching Procedures

Many veteran teachers will tell you that the two most important things you can do during the first weeks of school are to teach procedures and routines and to build your classroom community. This blog post concerns the first point about teaching routines and procedures.

Some tips for teaching procedures:
  • Model exactly what you want the students to do and have them practice it over and over until they are doing it exactly the way you expect them to.
  • Make a list of all the routines/procedures students need to know in order to be successful in your classroom and put them right into your lesson plans.
  • Some examples of procedures that most teachers have are:quiet signal, how to enter the classroom in the morning, bathroom, how to walk in the hallway, how to get/store supplies, how/when to take a break, how to interact on the rug/at desks etc., how to pack up at the end of the day.
  • Focus primarily on teaching procedures and building community the first couple of weeks, teaching academics will only be possible if these things are strongly in place.
  • Sometimes anchor charts with visuals can help to illustrate procedures or provide reminders.
  • Have a really clear picture in your mind of what you want a procedure to look like.

Responsive Classroom has a particularly effective method for teaching procedures called interactive modeling. It has the following steps:

  1. Tell the students which procedure you are going to be modeling.
  2. The teacher models the procedure silently while students watch silently.
  3. The teacher asks the students what they noticed.
  4. One or two students model the procedure while the other students watch silently.
  5. The teacher asks the students what they noticed
  6. The whole class tries the procedure and repeats as necessary until students are able to do it to the teacher’s standard.

If you are really thoughtful about how you teach procedures and routines, you will have so much time for teaching and learning. Taking the time to build a strong foundation will pay off all year long.

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