Where would we be without routines in our daily lives?
Where would we be without routines in our daily lives? We have rou-tines for getting up and ready for the day, routines for finding and storing important items at home and at work, and so on. We all have hundreds of them that we practice unconsciously when dealing with ev- eryday recurring events or situations. Clearly, routines are essential to our daily lives. They become layered one on another, operate automatically, and free us to maximize the time and energy we have to spend on more thoughtful and in- teresting endeavors. For these and many other reasons, well-thought-out pro- cedures and established routines are vital to successful classrooms. Or as high school art teacher and author Michael Linsin (2014) puts it, “Routines are the lifeblood of a well-run classroom.”
Classroom routines reflect well-rehearsed procedures thoughtfully designed to nurture a positive learning environment where students experience both cog- nitive and affective payoffs. The routines we establish include ones related to housekeeping, safety and operational procedures, work habits and procedures, developing social skills and behaviors, and academic processes. Procedures become routines when students do them automatically without prompting or supervision (Wong & Wong, 2009). Thus procedures need to be clear, efficient, and directly taught. They must be modeled for students and practiced by them to ensure that they fully understand them.
Embedded in the routines we establish, and in how we support students in mastering them, are expectation messages about what we think is important and our belief in students’ capacity to achieve the standards of performance we set for them. Do our routines represent respectful and challenging standards of performance from students? A very important overall question to consider also is how our procedures and routines reflect an understanding of and respect for the cultures of our students and the values they bring with them to school. These are the dimensions of routines we explore in this chapter.
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T H E S K I L L F U L T E A C H E R106
PART TWO | MANAGEMENT | ROUTINES
WHY ARE ROUTINES IMPORTANT?
“All students have some characteristics in common; one of the most significant is the need for structured time. From energetic kindergartners to sophisticated seniors, students need routines in their school day to keep them on track” (Thompson, 2007, p. 88). Whether it is how to enter class and be ready for the day (whether or not the teacher is visibly present), or how to secure materials without the aid of the teacher, routines provide students with a sense of order, predictability, and efficacy that they can manage and control things.
On the first day of school, Danielle Conway greets her first graders one by one while assigning a number that coincides with their alphabetic position in the class roster. Their first task, as they enter the room, is to use their number to find the desk with the matching number along with their name plate. During that first morning, students will learn that their number will also guide them to their designated space in the coat closet, and to know their line-up position when the class is going somewhere together. They will learn where and how to store their snacks in one basket and their lunches on the shelf. They will practice how to unpack, empty, and store their backpacks, in an orderly way, in the coat closet (“sitting up tall and all going this way”) and how to line up in numerical order. Before the end of the day, they will practice where to get mail and where to in- sert it in their green “take home” folder (left is the “keep it home” side and right is “return to school”). As the days progress, they will practice what it means to “get started” in the morning, how to sit during partner reading, how to do their weekly job assignment, the morning work routine, how to lead their classmates in the daily calendar activities, and many more procedures that recur daily. The closing to this chapter captures in one substitute’s note the overall impact of all of this on the students. Routines provide security because they provide a sense of order and predictability. When they don’t have it otherwise in their lives, this sense of order and predictability is a cornerstone of what makes some of our students want to come to school.