Perfect Your Classroom Procedures with the Help of Our Guiding Questions [episode 150]

Emily  0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re looking at how guiding questions can elevate your procedures and sharing a teacher approved tip for organizing things now to get ahead.

Heidi  0:49

We start our episodes with a morning message just like we used to do at morning meeting in our classrooms. This week’s morning message is what do you use for student whiteboard erasers?

Emily  1:00

And people feel very strongly about whiteboard erasers, it turns out. Because we had almost 100 comments on this post. It was kind of crazy. Well, Jennifer cut up old flannel bedsheets. And I did something similar with old T shirts. So we got our erasers for free.

Emily  1:17

But people have lots of cheap suggestions too. Cindy Christie and Deanne buy pieces of felt and cut them into fourths. I think she’d have felt costs what $1.50. So that’s a pretty cost friendly eraser. Alena gets generic magic erasers and cuts those down. Daisy skips any cutting and just buys felt coasters from the dollar store.

Heidi  1:38

I thought this was such a good idea. So I went looking well, just online. But I couldn’t find any felt coasters at our dollar tree. But I did find this set of eight on Amazon for $10. So you know, it’s a little more than $1 per coaster.

Heidi  1:53

But what I like is that they come in this like little metal rack that just keeps them all neatly stacked and contained. So I think that could be really handy if you have these all in a supply caddy. Or if you’re having you know, keeping these in the tables or desks, just a way to keep everything organized and contained.

Emily  2:11

Yeah, that’s a good idea. And I bet that these are a little sturdier and hold up longer than like the pieces of felt maybe do.

Heidi  2:18

Yes, they’re much thicker.

Emily  2:19

Well, lots of people use socks. Some teachers go with black socks so they don’t show stains. Some people stock up on baby socks at the dollar store. And some people just bring in their old socks that have lost their match. Many teachers mentioned that they like using socks because whiteboard markers can be kept inside.

Emily  2:38

Julie, Katie and Jody get those little round face scrubbers from the dollar store. Those are a three in a pack. So that’s a pretty good deal. And Sarah mentioned that she likes those because they’re small enough to fit in pencil boxes.

Heidi  2:51

That’s a good point. Some of these are kind of big.

Emily  2:54

Steph bought actual six inch microfiber cloths and she says they’ve held up for five years. Amanda says that in a pinch her students just use a tissue that works. Yep, I think yeah, I think I often is just like, alright, grab a paper towel.

Emily  3:11

Heather and Arlene both like the small magnetic erasers. Towanda says you can get 48 for $12 on Amazon and they last for ages. Beth adds it since they’re magnetic, they can stick on the sides of student desks. And since she numbers them, it’s easy to return any stray ones to their owners. That’s clever.

Emily  3:29

Paula wins for the most economical though, and she asked parents to send in used dryer sheets. She says they work great and take away all the marker residue. She stores them in a container and kids can just grab a new one whenever there’s gets yucky. She says it’s part of their Reduce Reuse Recycle lesson. Probably smells nice, too.

Heidi  3:50

Very earth friendly.

Emily  3:51

We’d love to have you join the conversation over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  3:57

Well, I hate to break it to everyone but we are into August now.

Heidi  4:02

I double checked because it didn’t seem possible. But the calendar has confirmed the Augustness of the situation.

Emily  4:10

This is the kind of moment that makes us pause and ask why do bad things happen to good people? We don’t deserve this.

Heidi  4:18

No, we don’t and you don’t deserve it either. If you want to hang out in the space of denial and bargaining for a little bit, you do that. Go back and check out episode 134 where are we talking about the 10 states just summer break. There is no rash.

Emily  4:34

Well, I guess it depends on your school starts there might be a little bit of a rush just like a tiny one if you are headed back to school in the next two to four weeks.

Heidi  4:44

How dare you?

Emily  4:46

I’m sorry, sorry. Everybody just take a deep breath. We will get through this together.

Heidi  4:54

Well, if it really has to be back to school season, then it is time for ATTABOY.

Emily  5:01

ATTABOY is our acronym for affirming, training, teaching and assessing at the beginning of the year, which are our back to school goals.

Heidi  5:11

Last week, we talked about how to affirm your students in the first few days of school. Definitely go back and check out last week’s episode if you want some fun ideas.

Emily  5:20

This week, we’re moving into T for training. When we talk about training, we mean the procedures and expectations and routines your students need to master in order to function efficiently and independently in your classroom.

Heidi  5:36

We have got lots of episodes about how to teach procedures to your students.

Emily  5:41

Yeah, you could go back to episodes 75 or 89, or 146, just to name a few.

Heidi  5:49

But today, we’re going to back up a little and talk about where to start with planning your procedures. If you don’t have a clear vision of what your students should be doing, then your students definitely won’t have that vision either.

Emily  6:01

When it comes to teaching your procedures, the first thing you need to know is which procedures you need. We have an extensive checklist of possible procedures that might be useful in your class. You can find it in our store or click the link in the show notes.

Heidi  6:17

You can print the list and then you know just check the ones you need. But if you do this digitally in Google Docs, you can just delete anything that doesn’t apply to you. And then for the suggestions that are left, you can decide which ones you just want to explain and which ones need a full procedure with specific steps to follow.

Emily  6:37

So this is the difference between telling students what to do if they are carrying something while walking in the hall and teaching students how to walk in the hall.

Emily  6:46

For example, if they need to take their book with them to the library, I tell them to hold their books in front of their chests, so they don’t drop them done. They might need occasional reminders, but I’m not going to sweat it. When it comes to hallway procedures, however, I have a series of detailed steps that I explain, model and how my students practice.

Heidi  7:06

Creating those detailed steps take some thought, though. And that’s where guiding questions come in.

Emily  7:12

We examined 26 different aspects of a school day, and pulled out the questions that have to be answered in order for that part of the day to function smoothly.

Emily  7:21

Take class jobs for example. You need to know if you want students to have class jobs, how you’ll assign them, what the students will do, if you’ll use a job chart, where you’ll display the job chart, what happens when a student with a job is absent, and so on.

Heidi  7:38

If you are an established teacher, you might be thinking that your procedures are working great. And so none of this applies to you. But pausing to reflect on your procedures is helpful for any teacher, no matter how many years they’ve taught

Emily  7:52

Plus, you’ll get such a thrill of checking off all the things you have already decided.

Emily  7:58

And there are several benefits to using guiding questions to reflect on your procedures. In fact, we have a list of 10 benefits. The first is of course that you know exactly what you need to teach your students. Your students can only be as effective as you are. So it’s important to make sure you’re as effective as possible.

Heidi  8:16

Our guiding questions resource has a page for each procedure, where you can list the steps the students need to follow. And also a place for you to list what your responsibility is, in making the procedure successful.

Heidi  8:30

Have you ever stopped to consider your role in your students procedures? Maybe you need a system for dismissing students that doesn’t lead to chaos. Or maybe you need to make sure their extra trash cans around the room to streamline cleaning up.

Emily  8:43

Besides creating the steps needed to make a procedure work, the second benefit of guiding questions is that it helps you identify what works instead of defaulting to what’s familiar.

Heidi  8:54

When you start out as a new teacher, maybe you remember, there are literally 1000s of decisions to make. And you have to make them without the benefit of experience. So how do you make those many, many decisions? You go with what’s familiar. Maybe it’s what you saw on your own elementary school. Maybe it’s what you’ve seen online or what you’ve seen other teachers do.

Emily  9:17

And maybe what you defaulted to as a new teachers working for you. But maybe there’s a better solution that you haven’t considered yet. If you stopped to think about what you need from your class jobs, you might realize that what would be most useful for you is to have two kids assigned to each job so you don’t have to worry about someone being absent.

Heidi  9:34

Emily and I taught a workshop about procedures last winter and one of the attendees was shocked to realize how much she had never stopped to consider about her classes procedures. Like we all do sometimes she was just defaulting to her habit instead of stopping to figure out if there was a better way.

Heidi  9:53

And I think that’s an under-recognized source of teacher exhaustion. We just keep doing the things we’ve always done them because we are so busy and taking time to reflect feels frivilous.

Emily  10:05

Right. Who has time?

Heidi  10:08

But if we don’t stop to consider if what we’re doing is actually working the way we need it to, it’s possible that we are just making our lives harder. Maybe having your class line up in one long line is exactly what you need, but maybe having two lines will cut way down on hallway behavior problems.

Emily  10:25

And that brings us to our third benefit of guiding questions. They help you troubleshoot problems.

Heidi  10:31

Classroom procedures have a lot of moving parts. If you’ve got a good procedure that isn’t working the way you want, it can sometimes be a challenge to narrow in on the problem. Using the guiding questions can help you pinpoint exactly what tweaks would make your sticky procedure a successful procedure.

Emily  10:50

And if your tweaks aren’t working, this is where the fourth benefit comes in. If you’ve gone through the questions and are still having problems, it makes it easier to get help. You can show exactly what you’ve tried and what isn’t working.

Heidi  11:02

It’s like going to a doctor and saying I feel achy, versus going to a doctor and saying I get foot cramps every day at four o’clock. One of those scenarios is easier to resolve than the other.

Emily  11:13

The fifth benefit of using guiding questions is that they help you streamline your procedures for efficiency, which we love around here. They help you see the order that steps need to happen.

Heidi  11:25

And this goes beyond having your procedure steps in a logical order. It can help you organize your whole classroom more efficiently.

Emily  11:32

Yeah, if you want students to put their homework folders in a basket each morning, it might make sense to have that basket near the backpack hooks and not on the other side of the room.

Heidi  11:40

For me, the first thing I wanted my second graders to do when they entered the room was to mark their lunch choice. So I moved my chart as close to the door as possible. Convenience made it more likely that my students would do what I needed them to. So it still wasn’t 100%. Most of the time it really helped.

Emily  12:00

Yeah, and we want to make it as easy as possible for students to meet our expectations. So let’s plan our procedures in a way that supports them.

Emily  12:08

Another way that guiding questions support students is in helping us identify where we need multiple procedures.

Heidi  12:15

The list of needed procedures is pretty lengthy. There are a lot, it might be tempting to make things less overwhelming by having fewer procedures. But what ends up happening is that you may have fewer procedures overall, but the procedures you have are bulky and difficult to follow.

Emily  12:33

Think about everything that has to happen when students arrive at school. Maybe they have to gather in the front of the building and wait for the bell. Then what happens when the bell rings they have to get to your classroom, unpack their backpack, mark their attendance or lunch count, turn in papers, fill a water bottle, put their lunches somewhere, put their snacks somewhere else, get a chair, get a pencil get out their first activity.

Heidi  12:54

And if they have to go to breakfast of that gets even more complicated.

Emily  12:58

If you are working on your list of procedures steps and you see 12 steps in your arrival procedure, red flag red alert that that procedure is too big.

Heidi  13:07

Sam that you might know from Engineer Does Education, she worked as an efficiency expert before becoming a science teacher. And one of her Instagram stories, she said that an ideal procedure has only three to five steps. That was kind of a big lightbulb moment for me. I guess it does make a lot of sense if we want students to follow our procedures, we can’t have a giant list of steps for them to have to remember.

Emily  13:32

That means instead of having one procedure for arriving at school, maybe I have one for entering the class and I have a separate procedure for unpacking a backpack.

Heidi  13:41

If your students have a lot of things that they need to take out of their backpacks, you might end up with more than five steps. In that case, it makes more sense to maybe have a seven step procedure for unpacking a backpack than unpacking Part A and unpacking Part B.

Emily  13:58

There comes a point with planning procedures where you have to weigh the outcomes. Is it more efficient to have two short procedures for unpacking a backpack? Or is it more efficient to just have one longer procedure?

Heidi  14:08

And this is why it is so helpful to write down every step before you start making your plans. It’s a way to get fresh eyes on things.

Emily  14:17

And when you do you might find that instead of a dismissal procedure, you need a cleaning up the room procedure and putting things in your take home folder procedure and a waiting for the bus procedure.

Heidi  14:28

The seventh benefit to using guiding questions to plan your procedures so that they give you psychic powers.

Emily  14:34

Okay, explain please, Heidi.

Heidi  14:37

Well, part of being a prepared teacher is having a plan for issues that have not happened yet. But let’s be honest, they are likely to be in your future. When you’re dealing with kids, it is really hard to reflect in the moment and figure out the most effective response when a group of kids are dropping base 10 blocks and the backs of each other shirts instead of doing their math centers.

Heidi  15:00

But if you have already figured out your plan for how you’re going to respond, when kids get off task during centers, you are so far ahead of the game, it is like you predicted this exact moment was going to happen.

Emily  15:13

And the benefit of having thought through your response ahead of time, is that it means you can address the problem instead of reacting to the problem. The eighth reason to use guiding questions for your procedures is that they can help you generate creative solutions.

Heidi  15:27

Those solutions aren’t limited to stopping kids from goofing around, guiding questions can help you figure out why water bottles are driving you nuts, or why your Chromebooks are never getting charged.

Emily  15:37

And that brings us to our last two benefits of using guiding questions to help you plan your procedures. And both of these involve other teachers.

Heidi  15:45

Our ninth benefit is that guiding questions can help create a common vocabulary for your team or for your whole school. They give you a way to get everyone on the same page about expectations for recess and lunchtime. And then the other time when your kids are interacting. They make it so everyone is clear about how things are handled in your school.

Emily  16:05

And our 10th benefit maybe my favorite one is that they can help you onboard a new teacher. Whether that as a teacher that’s new to your team, new to your school, or brand new to teaching. Guiding questions can help you identify exactly what you need to share with them to help them be successful.

Heidi  16:22

Hopefully, this discussion has gotten your wheels turning and you are eager to dive into fine tuning and streamlining your classroom procedures.

Emily  16:29

I’m sure you are dying to get into this now. So we will link our guiding questions resource in the show notes so you can get started. And you can come join the conversation with us over in our teacher approved Facebook group.

Emily  16:43

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week, we leave you with a small actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is pack your bags. Tell us more about this Heidi.

Heidi  16:57

We talked a lot about getting ready ahead of time. And one thing you might want to consider is packing any bags that might be useful. Probably every teacher could use a field trip bag, you might want to add a first aid kit, hand sanitizer wipes, tissues, maybe even paper towels, you probably want parent contact info, and anything else that you might need when you’re away from your class.

Heidi  17:21

You know, if you have recess duty, you might want a small bag that you can take out with you that has band aids and tissues and a whistle. You can even pack an emergency classroom kit. And you can extend this beyond emergency planning. Maybe you have a chair cover and some desk decorations that you put up for birthdays. Keeping them all together in a bag might be the easiest storage option.

Emily  17:43

Or if you have a bunch of stuff you need to leave for the substitute teacher, a sub bag might save you from having to go through a bunch of cupboards to get prepared for a sub.

Heidi  17:51

I wanted to use this prompt as a morning message, but I was worried that it was too niche and it wouldn’t get any responses. We would absolutely love to know if you have bags prepared for certain teaching events. This is right up our alley. We want to know all the details. So stop by the Facebook group and tell us all about them.

Heidi  18:11

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

Emily  18:16

I’m giving extra credit to my new sunshade for my minivan.

Heidi  18:21

It’s so fancy.

Emily  18:22

I know it’s a delight because it’s basically an umbrella that you pop open and it fills the windshield. The handle kind of props against the dash to keep it up. I have never been good about using a sunshade, even though in the summer, my van gets like a million degrees hot, but it’s because it’s just such a hassle to put one up. But not this one. This one’s easy peasy.

Emily  18:43

So you know, it’s the little things in life. I’ll link the one that I got in the show notes. But you’ll want to check the dimensions or look in the reviews to make sure you find one that works for your particular vehicle.

Heidi  18:56

And the thing I like about it is that it folds up to about the size of an umbrella a little bit tiny bit bigger, but not much. Whereas like a lot of the sunshades I’ve had in the past are like you know, massive size you you fold them up accordion or whatever. And it’s still humongous.

Emily  19:12

Yeah, yeah, like this one. This one is just chef’s kiss in my kind of invention that just like perfectly solves the problem. So hopefully it lasts a long time too. But so far, so good. What are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

Heidi  19:26

My extra credit goes to the new EP from Vincent Lima called Versions of Uncertainty. He’s kind of I think he’s kind of a new Indie artists. He looks very young, and I only know him because Spotify recommended him. And I like music that is very mellow and emotionally vulnerable. And they get the best not everybody’s vibe.

Heidi  19:46

But if you do like that kind of music like maybe you’re into Noah Khan or Lizzie McAlpine, you should definitely check out Vincent Lima. His song Orpheus is so good. It’s so good. And I have had The Only Thing left on repeat for days. It’s like in my head now it’s so good. I love it.

Emily  20:04

Okay, I’ll check it out.

Heidi  20:07

That is it for today’s episode. Remember to use getting questions to plan out all of the efficient steps for your procedures. And don’t forget today’s teacher approved tip to pack your bags.