3 Easy Ways to Spot What Assessment Really Costs You

Assessment · Honest Trade-Offs

There is no assessment strategy that gives you time, consistency, and depth all at once. Every choice trades one for another — the trick is choosing on purpose.

⏱ 7 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Assessment / Honest Trade-Offs

Somewhere around the fifteenth persuasive writing piece on a Sunday night, most of us have had the same thought: could I just use a checklist instead? The rich rubric felt right in the planning meeting. At 9pm, with thirteen scripts still in the pile, it feels like a decision someone else made on your behalf.

That moment is worth sitting with, because it’s not really about tiredness. It’s about a trade-off nobody named out loud when the assessment was designed. In Part 2 of this series, we looked at matching assessment strategies to record-keeping systems. This final part asks the harder question: what does each strategy quietly cost you, and is that cost one you’d choose if someone made you say it out loud?

Three costs show up again and again in the research: time, consistency, and depth of insight. No strategy escapes all three. The honest move isn’t finding the mythical assessment that avoids every trade-off — it’s knowing which one you’re carrying, for which task, and why.

Trade-Off One: Time

Let’s start with the cost every teacher already feels in their body. Australian Education Union data puts full-time teachers at an average of 49.3 hours a week, with marking and planning dominating the hours beyond the timetable. A 2022 AEU South Australian survey found teachers were doing 30 hours a week beyond face-to-face teaching alone. Richer assessment — detailed rubrics, portfolios, oral check-ins — produces better evidence of learning. It also produces more hours you don’t have.

This isn’t an argument against depth. It’s an argument for honesty about the exchange rate. A five-minute exit ticket and a forty-minute portfolio conference both tell you something real about a student. They do not cost the same, and pretending otherwise is how burnout starts. For quick formative checks that protect your time without sacrificing useful data, the formative assessment approaches we’ve covered before are worth revisiting — they’re built for exactly this trade-off.

In practice, the fix isn’t cramming more hours into the week. It’s matching assessment weight to decision weight. A task that shapes tomorrow’s teaching deserves a fast, low-cost check. A task that reports a term’s learning to families deserves the time it takes. Treating every piece of work as if it needs the same depth is what makes the Sunday night pile unmanageable.

Trade-Off Two: Consistency

Here’s the uncomfortable one. Even careful, experienced markers are not as consistent as they believe themselves to be. A 2023 experimental study found that a student’s grade in one subject was significantly influenced by how that same student had performed in an entirely unrelated subject — the classic halo effect, and it held even after researchers controlled for gender and status (Schmidt et al., 2023). This isn’t a character flaw in individual teachers. It’s a known feature of how human judgement works under load, and it’s exactly what assessment for, as, and of learning tries to guard against when it separates the purpose of a judgement from the moment it’s made.

There’s a useful nuance here, though. Experienced teachers are better than novices at reading both the obvious “surface” signals — hands up, eyes down — and the harder “deep” signals, like a quiet student who might be disengaged or might just be thinking. That skill develops. It doesn’t develop by accident, and it doesn’t fully protect against bias on its own — structure still matters more than good intentions.

🎯 Moderation Moves That Actually Fit a School Week
  • Check the extremes first. Re-read your highest and lowest grades before anything else. That’s where halo effects and fatigue errors cluster.
  • Mark one question across all scripts, not one script across all questions. This keeps your internal standard consistent instead of drifting as you tire.
  • Run a five-minute calibration before you start. Grade one sample together with a colleague before marking solo. It costs almost nothing and catches drift before it happens, not after.
  • Blind-mark when the stakes are high. Covering the name is a small step that removes a documented source of bias for borderline or subjective work.

This is also the territory AITSL Standard 5.3 points to directly — making consistent and comparable judgements isn’t a bonus skill, it’s a named professional standard. Worth remembering next time moderation feels like an add-on rather than the job itself.

Trade-Off Three: Depth of Data

The third cost is the one we talk about least, possibly because it’s the hardest to see from inside a busy term: what a grade actually tells you about a student’s understanding.

Recent research has raised real doubt about that link. Comparisons between teacher-awarded grades and external, course-aligned tests have found meaningful mismatches — evidence that a grade can look confident and still not accurately describe what a student understands. That gap widens when assessment rewards compliance — submitting on time, following the format, filling every box — over genuine thinking. AJ Juliani’s phrase for this, “doing school,” captures it well: students becoming skilled at producing what a task asks for without the underlying understanding ever being tested.

A grade that’s easy to collect and a grade that’s true to what a student understands are not always the same grade. Depth is the trade-off we notice last, because it’s the one that doesn’t show up until much later.

The fix isn’t abandoning efficient assessment formats. It’s building in occasional deeper checks — a follow-up question, a brief verbal explanation, a second look at borderline work — before a grade goes into the record permanently. Even one extra “tell me how you got there” question can surface whether a correct answer reflects understanding or a lucky guess. This connects directly to performance of worth: tasks that ask students to apply learning somewhere real are far harder to complete through compliance alone.

Choosing Your Trade-Off on Purpose

No single assessment strategy solves time, consistency, and depth simultaneously. A quick multiple-choice check is fast and reasonably consistent, but shallow. A rich portfolio conference is deep and genuinely revealing, but slow. A shared rubric with clear criteria protects consistency, but only if you also protect the time to moderate it properly.

That’s not a flaw in your planning. It’s the actual shape of the problem. The teachers who manage assessment well aren’t the ones who’ve found a loophole — they’re the ones who’ve stopped expecting one, and instead ask a simple question before choosing a strategy: for this task, which cost can I afford, and which one matters most?

🪜 A Quick Decision Check Before You Design a Task
  • Low stakes, shapes tomorrow’s teaching? Choose speed. A fast formative check beats a slow, perfect one you never get to use.
  • Reported to families or used for placement? Choose consistency. Build in moderation time even if it means assessing less often.
  • Central to whether real understanding happened? Choose depth. Add one verbal or applied check before the grade is locked in.

That’s the honest version of assessment design. Not a search for the perfect tool, but a series of deliberate choices about which cost you’re willing to carry, task by task, term by term.

💬 Your Turn! Which of these three trade-offs do you find hardest to accept — time, consistency, or depth? Tell us what you’ve changed (or given up trying to fix) in the comments below.

References

Australian Education Union. (2023). The heavy hours: Work intensification for teachers and school leaders. aeufederal.org.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers — Standard 5.3: Make consistent and comparable judgements.

Juliani, A. J. (2026). The game of school is out of control. ajjuliani.beehiiv.com.

NSW Department of Education. (2024). Assessment practice — consistent teacher judgement. education.nsw.gov.au

Schmidt, F. T. C., Kaiser, A., & Retelsdorf, J. (2023). Halo effects in grading: An experimental approach. Educational Psychology, 43(2–3), 246–262.

5 Easy Ways to Match Assessment and Record-Keeping

Assessment · Record-Keeping

5 Easy Ways to Match Assessment and Record-Keeping

A brilliant assessment strategy means nothing if your record-keeping can’t hold onto what it found.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Assessment / Record-Keeping

Last week we mapped the chain that good assessment planning follows: content descriptor, learning intention, success criteria, assessment strategy. That is where most professional learning stops. In practice, one link is still missing — the record-keeping device that actually holds what you found.

Here is the scenario. You run a genuinely good practical assessment. Students are engaged, you are watching closely, and you form clear impressions about who has got it and who hasn’t. Three weeks later, at report-writing time, those impressions are gone. What is left is a gut feeling and a grade you can no longer fully justify.

That is not a memory problem. It is a mismatch between your assessment strategy and how you recorded it. This post works through five record-keeping devices, when each one earns its place, and two worked examples — English and Science — to show the pairing in action.

Why the Record-Keeping Device Isn’t an Afterthought

Susan Brookhart’s research on rubrics makes a useful starting point. She argues effective rubrics need two things: criteria tied to the actual learning, not the task, and performance levels described clearly enough that two teachers would score the same work the same way. A rubric that fails either test isn’t really a record — it’s a rough impression with a score attached.

The same logic applies to every device, not just rubrics. James Popham’s classroom assessment framework treats each record-keeping tool as matched to a specific assessment purpose. A checklist works well for binary, observable skills. In contrast, a rubric works better for quality that sits on a continuum. Use the wrong device and even excellent assessment data becomes unusable later.

Put simply, the assessment strategy and its record-keeping device are answering two different questions. The strategy asks, “what will I see or collect?” The device asks, “how will I hold onto it accurately enough to use later?” Skip the second question and the first one’s answer evaporates.

📋 Five Record-Keeping Devices at a Glance
  • Checklist. A yes/no list of observable behaviours or skills. Fast to use, easy to update. Best for binary, procedural skills — did the student do this or not.
  • Rating scale. Like a checklist, but with a range (e.g. rarely–sometimes–consistently). Adds nuance without the full weight of a rubric.
  • Analytic rubric. Separate criteria, each scored against clear performance-level descriptors. Best for complex, multi-part tasks like extended writing.
  • Anecdotal record. Short, dated observational notes. Best for capturing context a checklist can’t — the “why,” not just the “what.”
  • Portfolio or work sample collection. A curated set of student work over time. Best when the strategy itself allows varied formats or products.

Worked Example: Year 4 English — Persuasive Writing

Take a persuasive writing unit built around AC9E4LY06 — planning, creating, editing and publishing a persuasive text using visual features, linked ideas, complex sentences and correct punctuation. The assessment strategy is an extended piece of writing with several moving parts. Consequently, the record-keeping device needs to hold multiple criteria at once, not just a single quality judgement.

✏️ Matching the Method — Year 4 Persuasive Writing
  • Assessment strategy: Students plan, draft and publish a persuasive text on a self-chosen issue.
  • Record-keeping device: An analytic rubric with four criteria — argument structure, use of persuasive language, sentence complexity, and mechanics.
  • Why this device: A single overall grade would hide which criterion needs re-teaching. Reporting “structure: developing, mechanics: consistent” tells the next lesson’s story far better than one number.
  • Practical tip: Score the rubric during drafting, not just at publication. That gives you formative evidence you can act on before the final piece is due, not just a summative record afterwards.

Worked Example: Year 5 Science — Working Scientifically

Now compare that with a practical investigation built around AC9S5I02 and AC9S5I03 — planning a fair test and using equipment to observe and measure with reasonable precision. Here the assessment strategy is observational: you are watching students work in real time, not marking a finished product. That changes which record-keeping device fits.

🔬 Matching the Method — Year 5 Working Scientifically
  • Assessment strategy: Teacher observation during a small-group fair test investigation.
  • Record-keeping device: A checklist for the procedural skills (identifies variables, uses equipment safely, records data), backed by short anecdotal notes for anything unexpected.
  • Why this device: A rubric is overkill for genuinely binary skills — a student either identified the controlled variable or didn’t. The anecdotal layer catches the student who reasoned brilliantly but fumbled the equipment, which a checklist alone would miss.
  • Practical tip: Clip the checklist to a board and move between groups. Anything worth a note goes in the margin, dated, in under five words.
Choosing the assessment strategy is the easy half of the job. Choosing a record-keeping device that survives contact with report-writing time is the half most planning skips.

Where Digital Tools Fit — and Where They Don’t

Most Australian schools now run assessment records through a platform like Sentral or Compass, and both can genuinely help. Digital gradebooks hold rubric scores and checklist data centrally, track them across the year, and generate the longitudinal view a single lesson’s notes never could.

That said, the platform should follow the pedagogy, not the other way around. Beyond that, this connects to Miriam Plotinsky’s point about relying on a single, first impression of a student — one data point, however confidently recorded, can still mislead. A digital system makes it tempting to enter one tidy score and move on. Resist that. If your assessment strategy genuinely needs a rubric plus an anecdotal note, enter both — even if the system’s default view only surfaces the score.

For this reason, before you commit a strategy to any platform, ask one question: does this device capture what I actually need to know, or just what’s easiest to type in? If it’s the second, the record-keeping has quietly started driving the assessment instead of serving it.

Closing the Loop

Put the whole chain together and it reads: content descriptor, learning intention, success criteria, assessment strategy, record-keeping device. Each link only holds if the one before it does. A well-matched device isn’t extra admin — it’s what lets the assessment for, as and of learning you’re already doing actually inform what happens next, from tomorrow’s formative check to the report you write in Term 4.

That leaves one honest question still open: even with the right device, every one of these tools carries some bias, some time cost, and some risk of telling an incomplete story. That’s exactly where backward-designed planning earns its keep — and it’s also where Part 3 of this series picks up next.

💬 Your Turn! Which record-keeping device do you reach for most — and has it ever let you down at report-writing time? Tell us what you’ve learned in the comments below.

References

Brookhart, S. M. (2013). How to create and use rubrics for formative assessment and grading. ASCD.

Jorgensen, E. (2026, July 10). Giving students a choice in how they will demonstrate their learning. Edutopia. edutopia.org

Plotinsky, M. (2026, July 10). Working to see the full picture. Edutopia. edutopia.org

Popham, W. J. (2020). Classroom assessment: What teachers need to know (9th ed.). Pearson.

5 Easy Steps to Fix the Missing Link in Assessment

Assessment · Planning

Assessment isn’t the last decision in a lesson plan — it’s four more decisions, and they only work as a chain.

⏱ 5 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Assessment / Pedagogy

Ask a room of preservice teachers what comes after “learning intention” and “success criteria” in a lesson plan, and most will say “the activity.” Ask what comes after that, and the answer gets vaguer — a formative check, added somewhere near the end, almost as an afterthought.

That’s not really anyone’s fault. Backward design tells you assessment comes before activities. What it doesn’t spell out is that assessment is not one decision. It’s a chain of decisions, and each link depends on the one before it.

Skip a link, and the chain still looks fine from a distance. It’s only when you go to use the evidence — for reporting, for grouping, for next week’s planning — that you notice something’s missing. This is the first of three posts unpacking that chain, starting with the two links most planning conversations skip.

The Missing Link in Backward Design

In our post on backward design, Stage 2 — “determine acceptable evidence” — sounds like a single step. In practice, it’s five separate decisions, and they only work as a chain.

Get the content descriptor right, and the learning intention should follow. Get the learning intention right, and the success criteria should follow. From there, though, teachers routinely stall. The assessment strategy gets chosen on instinct, and the record-keeping device gets chosen even later — often on the walk to the photocopier, five minutes before the lesson starts.

That’s the gap this post is about. Not the first three links, which we’ve covered in detail already, but the two that come after — and the discipline of choosing them together, not separately.

🧍 The Five-Link Assessment Chain
  • Content descriptor — what the curriculum actually requires
  • Learning intention — what students will know or be able to do
  • Success criteria — what meeting the intention looks like, in student language
  • Assessment strategy — how you’ll gather evidence
  • Record-keeping device — how that evidence is captured for later use

A Quick Primer: For, As and Of Learning

Before you choose a strategy, it helps to know which purpose you’re actually serving. Lorna Earl’s framework names three: assessment for learning, assessment as learning, and assessment of learning (Earl, 2003).

Assessment for learning is diagnostic and formative. It’s evidence you, the teacher, use in the moment to adjust what happens next. Assessment as learning hands that job to the student — self-monitoring against criteria they understand well enough to apply themselves. Assessment of learning is summative. It’s the judgement that gets reported, once the learning is done.

We’ve explored the for/as/of distinction in more depth before, so treat this as the short version. What matters here is simpler: know which purpose you’re serving before you pick a strategy. A strategy built for one purpose rarely does justice to another.

This isn’t just conceptual housekeeping. AITSL Standard 5 — assess, provide feedback and report — assumes you can name which purpose each piece of evidence serves. When for, as and of learning blur together, so does your evidence trail.

Worked Example: Extending Year 5 HASS Into Record-Keeping

Take the Year 5 HASS example from our backward design post. The content descriptor is AC9HS5K03 — the impact of colonial settlement on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The learning intention: explain how colonial settlement affected Aboriginal Peoples’ lives, using specific evidence. The success criterion: describe at least two impacts, each supported by evidence from a source.

The assessment strategy was already chosen there — an exit ticket, collected before students leave the room. That’s assessment for learning: formative, immediate, used to shape tomorrow’s grouping. But an exit ticket from 25 students produces 25 individual pieces of evidence. Without a record-keeping device, all of it disappears the moment it’s read and set aside.

📋 Closing the Chain — HASS Example
  • Assessment strategy: exit ticket, two sentence starters
  • Purpose: assessment for learning — informs tomorrow’s grouping
  • Record-keeping device: a simple class checklist, one row per student
  • What it captures: who has two impacts with evidence, who doesn’t yet
  • What it misses: the quality of reasoning behind each impact — a limitation worth naming, not ignoring

Why Skipping a Link Breaks the Chain

A checklist works here because the question is genuinely binary — did the student meet the criterion, or not yet. Use the same checklist for something that needs to capture reasoning quality, and you’ll end up with a tidy spreadsheet that tells you almost nothing useful.

Compare that same lesson if the goal had been reasoning quality instead of two impacts. An anecdotal record — a few sentences noting how a student justified their answer — would have captured what the checklist could not, at the cost of more of your time. Neither device is wrong. The mismatch is choosing one without asking what the evidence actually needs to show.

That’s the trap. Record-keeping devices aren’t interchangeable, and a device that suits one assessment strategy can quietly undermine another. The mismatch rarely shows up until report-writing season, when the evidence you kept turns out not to answer the question you’re being asked. We’ll get into exactly which device suits which strategy in the next post in this series.

For now, the discipline that matters is simpler: choose your record-keeping device at the same time as your assessment strategy — not afterwards, once the marking pile has already landed on your desk. The same logic applies to a summative performance of worth, where the stakes for getting the record right are even higher.

“A learning intention without an aligned assessment strategy is a promise you can’t keep. A strategy without a record-keeping device is evidence you’ll never use.” — TeacherTalk

💬 Your Turn! When you’re planning, do you choose your record-keeping device deliberately — or does it get decided by whatever’s already open on your desk when the bell goes? Share what’s worked below.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standards 1, 2, 3 & 5). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

Earl, L. M. (2003). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximise student learning. Corwin Press.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.

7 Proven Phrases That Actually Stop the Battles

Week 19 · Classroom Management · The Language of Correction

7 Proven Phrases That Actually Stop the Battles

The words you use in the moment of correction matter as much as the rule you wrote on the wall.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Classroom Management / Pedagogy

Last week’s post ended with a challenge, not an answer. Procedures handle the routine moments. Regulation handles the moments a student’s nervous system has taken over. The real skill sits in between — reading the room well enough to know which problem you’re actually looking at.

Even once you’ve read it correctly, you still have to open your mouth and say something. Get that wrong, and a thirty-second correction turns into a five-minute standoff in front of the whole class. That’s the piece nobody’s covered yet in this series, and it’s the one most new teachers get the least training in.

Bill Rogers, the Australian behaviour management researcher whose work has shaped practice here for three decades, built an entire framework around one deceptively simple insight: how you correct a student matters as much as whether you correct them.

This is the final post in our Classroom Management series. We started with Wong and Wong’s procedures, moved to the Berry Street regulation-first approach, and now we finish where the rubber actually meets the road — the words you choose the moment a rule gets broken.

Why Rules Need to Be Co-Constructed

Rogers’ first move happens well before any correction is needed. Rules handed down by the teacher on day one — no talking, no calling out, put your hand up — invite testing. Students had no say in them, so they feel no ownership of them. By contrast, rules built with the class in the first week create something closer to a shared agreement than an imposed list.

In practice, this takes one lesson. Ask students what helps everyone learn, and what gets in the way. Turn their answers into four or five positively phrased rules — we listen when others are speaking, not don’t interrupt. Consequently, when you correct a student later, you’re not enforcing your rule. You’re reminding them of theirs.

🪑 Building Co-Constructed Rules in One Lesson
  • Ask, don’t tell. “What do we need from each other to learn well in this room?”
  • Cluster the answers. Group similar responses into four or five broad rules, not fifteen specific ones.
  • Phrase them positively. State what to do, not what to avoid.
  • Display and revisit. Put them up, and refer back to them by name during corrections — not just at the start of term.

The Least Intrusive Intervention Wins

Rogers is firm on this point: match the correction to the size of the behaviour. A raised eyebrow or a tactical pause handles most low-level disruption. Save the directed, public correction for behaviour that’s actually disrupting learning. Overcorrecting minor moments — what Rogers calls sweating the small stuff — is exactly how ordinary corrections turn into the battles this post is named after.

In other words, there’s a hierarchy: non-verbal cue, then a tactical pause, then a quiet word directed at the individual, then a clear directed choice — only then a consequence. Most calling-out, fidgeting, and off-task chatter never needs to go past step one or two.

Correct the behaviour, not the child. A good correction leaves the lesson running and the relationship intact.

Language That Corrects Without Shaming

The core of Rogers’ framework is a distinction between describing behaviour and directing it. “Why are you doing that?” invites a debate you don’t want mid-lesson — and debate is how a thirty-second correction becomes a battle. “Facing this way, thanks” names the expected behaviour and moves on. The first puts a student on the spot in front of peers. The second gives them a face-saving way back into the lesson.

That said, this isn’t about being soft. It’s about being precise. Directed language is often shorter and clearer than the question-and-justification exchange it replaces — and it keeps the correction between you and the student, not the whole class.

💬 Bill Rogers’ Go-To Correction Phrases
  • “Facing this way, thanks.” Names the expected behaviour, not the unwanted one.
  • “You’re okay to finish that after the lesson.” Offers a choice, not an ultimatum.
  • “Thanks for…” stated before compliance, not after — it assumes cooperation rather than demanding it.
  • A first name, said once, said calmly. No lecture attached. The name alone is often enough.

Even so, tone carries as much weight as wording. The calmest voice in the room during a correction is usually the teacher’s — not because the behaviour doesn’t matter, but because a calm correction is one a student can hear.

Bringing the Series Together

Three posts, three layers of the same classroom. Wong and Wong’s procedures give students a structure for how the day runs. Berry Street’s regulation-first approach gets students into a state where they can actually access that structure. And Rogers’ correction language is what holds it together in the moment something goes off track.

None of the three works well in isolation. A beautifully co-constructed set of rules means little without procedures to back it up. A regulated class still needs corrected in the moment. As a result, the strongest classrooms tend to have all three running at once, and each one covers for what the others can’t.

Over to You — Which correction phrase are you going to try this week? Or if your class already co-constructed its rules this year, how’s it held up under pressure? Share below — three posts in, this series has been shaped as much by what you’ve told us as by the research.

References

Rogers, B. (2011). Classroom behaviour: A practical guide to effective teaching, behaviour management and colleague support (3rd ed.). SAGE.

Rogers, B. (2015). Classroom management: The language of discipline. Scholastic.

5 Proven Ways to Calm Your Classroom Before Trouble Starts

Classroom Management · 5 Proven Strategies

5 Proven Ways to Calm Your Classroom Before Trouble Starts

A routine only sticks in a room that already feels safe. Safety has to come first — not as a nice-to-have, but as the actual mechanism.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Classroom Management / Pedagogy

Last week’s post set out seven procedures worth teaching in the first days of a new class. How to enter the room, how to get attention, how to pack up. Useful, practical, Monday-morning stuff. But here’s the catch nobody tells you in your teaching degree.

You can teach a procedure perfectly. Model it, rehearse it, reinforce it for a fortnight. And it will still fall apart, instantly, for one particular student on one particular afternoon. Not because the procedure was badly taught. Because that student’s body isn’t in a state where any procedure can land.

This is where the Berry Street Education Model picks up the thread. It doesn’t replace what we covered last week. In other words, it explains the layer underneath: the part that has to be in place before a routine can hold.

What Berry Street Actually Argues

The Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) grew out of work with traumatised young people, many in out-of-home care. It’s now used in more than four hundred schools across Australia, mainstream and specialist alike. Even so, its central claim travels well beyond trauma-specific settings.

The model organises classroom practice into five domains: Body, Stamina, Engagement, Character, and Relationship. Relationship sits underneath all the others as the foundation, not just one item on the list. The first domain, Body, is also the one BSEM training starts with. That ordering is deliberate.

The underlying idea draws on what’s sometimes called the “reptilian brain” framing. Before a student can reason, follow an instruction, or rationalise a threat, their stress-response system has to settle. As a result, a dysregulated nervous system cannot access higher-order thinking, no matter how clear your procedure was.

You cannot procedure your way past a nervous system that doesn’t yet feel safe. Regulation has to come first, every time, for every student — not as an exception you make once.

Why This Isn’t a Contradiction of Last Week’s Post

It would be easy to read this as walking back last week’s argument for procedures. It isn’t. Procedures and regulation solve different problems, and most classrooms need both.

A procedure tells a regulated student exactly what to do. It removes ambiguity and friction for the eighty or ninety per cent of moments where a class is functioning well. By contrast, regulation work is what makes the other ten or twenty per cent survivable. These are the moments where a student’s stress response has taken over, where no procedure is going to reach them.

Skip procedures, and you get chaos in the easy moments. Skip regulation, and your best-taught procedures collapse the instant a student is genuinely dysregulated. BSEM doesn’t ask you to throw out structure. It asks you to notice which problem you’re actually looking at, in the moment, before reaching for a fix.

What This Looks Like in an Australian Primary Classroom

BSEM’s full training runs across several days and covers far more ground than one blog post can hold. What follows are entry points — small, evidence-aligned practices a classroom teacher can start using without a Berry Street accreditation.

🌿 5 Regulation Practices Worth Starting With
  • Brain breaks and positive primers. A short burst of movement or a brief mental challenge between activities. Use it proactively, not only after things go wrong. The aim is readiness, not reward.
  • A named de-escalation space. Somewhere in the room, even a corner, a student can go to regulate without it being treated as a consequence. The difference between time-out and a regulation space is entirely in how it’s framed and offered.
  • Noticing the body before the behaviour. Elevated voice, fidgeting, withdrawal, refusal to make eye contact. These are often stress-response signals arriving before the behaviour you’d usually respond to. Catching them earlier gives you more options.
  • A predictable entry ritual. The same calm greeting or settling routine every time a student arrives, regardless of their mood. Predictability itself is regulating, even before anything is said.
  • Co-regulation, not just self-regulation. Your own calm, steady tone does real work here. A dysregulated student often borrows their state from the adult in the room, for better or worse.

None of this requires abandoning the procedures from last week’s post. A brain break can sit inside a transition procedure. A regulation space can be one of the options inside your “getting help” routine. The two systems are meant to run together, not compete.

Relationship Is the Domain Underneath the Domains

BSEM places Relationship beneath the other four, and that’s worth sitting with rather than skimming past. None of the Body-domain strategies work as box-ticking exercises performed at a class instead of with one. A breathing exercise offered by a teacher a student doesn’t trust reads as one more adult instruction to comply with. The same exercise, offered by a teacher the student has a relationship with, reads as care.

This connects directly to formative assessment work you may already be doing elsewhere in your teaching. Noticing which students are regulated and which aren’t, moment to moment, is itself a kind of ongoing assessment. In practice, it’s just aimed at readiness to learn rather than at curriculum content.

For Australian teachers, this also sits inside AITSL Standard 4, specifically 4.1 and 4.4 — supportive environments and student wellbeing. The standard doesn’t separate behaviour management from wellbeing. Increasingly, neither should we.

A Caution Worth Naming

It’s tempting to read trauma-informed practice as a complete explanation for every difficult classroom moment. That temptation is worth resisting. Not every disruption is dysregulation. Sometimes a student is just bored, under-challenged, or testing a boundary in an entirely ordinary way that has nothing to do with trauma.

Treating every behaviour through a trauma lens can be its own kind of mistake. It can excuse what actually needs a clear, calm boundary. Even so, it can be exhausting to apply universally when most of your class, most of the time, is simply regulated and getting on with the day. BSEM’s own framing supports this. Regulation strategies are there for the moments that need them, not a replacement for the procedures that carry the rest of your day.

The skill worth building isn’t choosing one framework over the other. It’s reading the room well enough to know, in a given moment, whether you’re looking at a procedure gap or a regulation gap. Then, responding to the one that’s actually in front of you.

That reading-the-room judgement is exactly where this series goes next. Part 3 turns to Bill Rogers and the language of correction itself. What to actually say, in the moment, once you’ve worked out which problem you’re solving.

Where does this show up for you? Do you have a regulation space, a brain-break routine, or a way of reading the room before you respond? Tell us what’s working in the comments below.

References

Berry Street. (2020). Berry Street Education Model: Trauma-informed positive education [Brochure]. Berry Street. berrystreet.org.au

Stokes, H., Kern, M. L., Turnbull, M., Farrelly, A., & Forster, R. (2019). Trauma informed positive education: Research and evaluation of the Berry Street Education Model (BSEM) as a whole-school approach to student engagement and wellbeing (2016–2018). University of Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standard 4). aitsl.edu.au

7 Routines That Will Actually Stop Day One Chaos

Classroom Management · Procedures vs Rules

7 Routines That Will Actually Stop Day One Chaos

A classroom doesn’t run on rules. It runs on routines you’ve rehearsed until nobody has to think about them.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Classroom Management / New Teachers

Last week’s post argued that classrooms drift toward whatever behaviour feels easiest, not whatever behaviour is best. That piece ended with a promise. The next series would look at the habits we build deliberately, in the first days of any class. This is where that starts.

Picture a typical Day One. 28 new faces, a seating plan that won’t survive recess, and a list of rules already half-forgotten by lunchtime. By Tuesday, the rules are still on the wall. The routines, if nobody ever taught any, are not.

Most of that gap isn’t a discipline problem. It’s a missing procedure. That distinction comes from Harry and Rosemary Wong’s long-running guide, The First Days of School. It changes how the first days should be planned.

Why the First Days Decide the Whole Year

Harry Wong spent decades studying what separated highly effective teachers from the rest. His finding, repeated across editions of the book since 1991, is blunt. The degree to which a teacher establishes clear procedures in the first week predicts most of the year that follows. In other words: not the teacher’s personality, not the difficulty of the class, but the procedures.

The First Days of School has sold close to four million copies since it first appeared. It remains one of the most assigned texts in teacher preparation programs worldwide. That kind of staying power is rare in education. In practice, it usually means an idea is simple enough to use on a Monday morning. It is also durable enough to survive decades of classroom change.

For Australian preservice and early-career teachers, this maps directly onto AITSL Standard 4. The standard asks teachers to create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments. Standard 4.2, in particular, asks you to manage classroom activities so that all students are productively engaged. In other words, that is not a personality trait. It is a set of taught, rehearsed behaviours.

Rules vs Procedures: The Distinction Most New Teachers Miss

Most new teachers walk into Day One with a list of rules. Be respectful. Be on time. Bring your equipment. These are not wrong. Even so, they’re not what gets a class running smoothly.

A rule governs behaviour broadly and carries a consequence when it’s broken. By contrast, a procedure is different. It’s how something gets done: how students enter the room, how they get your attention, how they hand in work. It carries no penalty at all. You don’t punish a student for not yet knowing a procedure. You teach it again.

Wong puts it plainly. Procedures govern almost everything we do outside school too, from boarding a plane to ordering at a drive-through. Without them, ordinary moments become mayhem. Students need the same scaffolding. As a result, they settle fastest when they know exactly what happens next, every time.

Rules tell students what will happen if they get it wrong. Procedures make sure they never have to wonder what to do in the first place.

This is also where last week’s post on classroom friction connects directly. A well-taught procedure is the lowest-friction path available — for both the student and you. Skip the procedure, and the easiest path students find on their own is rarely the one you wanted.

Seven Procedures Worth Teaching First

You don’t need 30 procedures by Friday. Wong’s own advice is to start small and add more as the year settles. For an Australian primary classroom, these seven cover most of what derails a typical day.

🪜 7 Procedures to Nail in Week One
  • Entering the room. Where bags go, what happens at the door, what students do the moment they sit down. This single procedure prevents most of the chaos of a Monday morning.
  • Getting attention. One consistent signal works best — a raised hand, a chime, a clap pattern. Teach it explicitly, and use it every single time, not just when things get loud.
  • Asking for help. A clear way to flag “I’m stuck” that doesn’t require shouting your name across the room or simply downing tools.
  • Finishing early. Without this one, your fastest finishers will invent their own procedure — and it usually involves bothering everyone still working.
  • Handing in work. One tray, one basket, one digital folder. Consistency here saves you hours of chasing missing work later in the term.
  • Transitions. Moving from mat to desks, from one subject to the next. Transitions eat more instructional time than almost anything else when they’re left unplanned.
  • Packing up. What gets put away, by whom, and in what order. Rehearse it until it takes minutes, not the last 10 chaotic ones of the day.

How to Actually Teach a Procedure

Announcing a procedure once is not teaching it. In practice, students need to see it, try it, and repeat it until it requires no thought at all. Wong’s cycle is simple. It works just as well for a five-year-old as it does for a Year 6 class mid-term.

🎯 The Teach → Model → Practise → Reinforce Cycle
  • Teach it. Say it once, plainly: “When I raise my hand, it means stop talking and look at me.” One sentence, not a five-minute lecture.
  • Model it. Show what it looks like — and, just as usefully, what it doesn’t. Some teachers ask a confident student to model the “wrong” version first, for a laugh, before showing the right one.
  • Practise it. Have the whole class try it, immediately, while the explanation is still fresh. Do it again if the first attempt is messy. This costs two minutes and saves you weeks.
  • Reinforce it. Notice it out loud for the first fortnight. “I love how quickly tables one and two packed up” does more work than any poster on the wall.

Here’s the part most new teachers skip: step three. It feels slow to stop and practise lining up on the first afternoon. There is content to cover and a term to plan. That said, the two minutes spent rehearsing a procedure on Day One are cheaper than the alternative. Without it, you lose those two minutes again — badly — every single day for the rest of the term.

What Happens in Week Three, When It Slips

It will slip. A wet-weather day, a relief teacher, an excursion — and suddenly half the class has forgotten how lining up works. Even so, this is normal, not a sign you’ve failed.

The fix is the same cycle, not a punishment. Re-teach the procedure, briefly, the way you’d re-teach a maths concept students have half-forgotten over the holidays. This sits squarely inside AITSL Standard 4.3 — managing challenging behaviour. It’s worth noticing that the standard talks about managing, not punishing.

Beyond that, it’s also worth watching which students the procedure is failing for, and why. That kind of noticing connects directly to formative assessment in any other part of your teaching. A procedure that has quietly broken down for one student, while the rest of the class moves on, is data. Treat it that way.

Procedures get you a class that runs without your constant intervention. Even so, they don’t, on their own, get you a class that feels safe enough to take risks. They don’t make the rules feel owned, rather than imposed. That’s where this series goes next. First, what has to be true before any routine can stick. Then, building expectations with your class, instead of just for them. For now, though, start here. Plan it backwards, the same way you would a lesson. Decide what a smooth handover looks like, then teach directly toward it.

What’s the one procedure that took you the longest to get right? Was it transitions, attention signals, or something nobody warns you about in a teaching degree? Tell us what worked — and what didn’t — in the comments below.

References

Wong, H. K., & Wong, R. T. (2018). The first days of school: How to be an effective teacher (5th ed.). Harry K. Wong Publications.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standard 4). aitsl.edu.au

5 Moves That Stop Students Taking the Easy Way Out

 Pedagogy · Cognitive Engagement

Why Your Classroom Might Be Teaching Students to Switch Off

The problem isn’t that students resist thinking. It’s that we’ve made not thinking the easier option.

⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Pedagogy / Cognitive Engagement

The average time a person spends on any single screen before switching has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to around 47 seconds today. That is not a phone problem. That is a habit problem — and schools have been quietly building it for decades.

Last week’s post on productive struggle made the case that genuine learning requires cognitive effort — and that effort is often uncomfortable. That said, naming productive struggle as a goal is the easy part. The harder question is: what force is working against it? Why do students so reliably reach for the path of least cognitive resistance, even when they are sitting in a room designed for learning?

The answer isn’t laziness. In most cases, it isn’t even a lack of motivation. It’s something more structural — and more fixable.

What Is the Path of Least Cognitive Resistance?

The brain is an energy-conservation machine. Left to its own devices, it defaults to the lowest-cost route available. Psychologists call this System 1 thinking — fast, automatic, low-effort. System 2, the slower and more deliberate mode, is what we need for analysis, problem-solving, and genuine learning. The catch is that System 2 is expensive. The brain only commits to it when it has to.

This is not a design flaw. In most areas of life, conserving cognitive energy is sensible. The problem arises when classroom environments are structured in ways that make System 1 sufficient. In other words, when students can get through a lesson — answer the questions, fill the worksheet, satisfy the teacher — without ever really thinking.

The OECD defines cognitive engagement as the mental state where learners exert sufficient, sustained effort to persist with a complex idea or unstructured problem. That definition is worth holding onto. It is specifically about effort and persistence. Not compliance, not busyness, and not the appearance of working. By that definition, a class full of students who are on task may still not be cognitively engaged at all.

A student checking Instagram to survive a pointless lesson is different from a student checking Instagram during a lesson they find meaningful. We tend to treat these as the same problem. They are not.

How Classrooms Create the Problem

Here is the uncomfortable part. Distraction is not just something that happens to learners from the outside. It is also something that learning environments create from the inside.

Compliance-based classrooms — built around predictable tasks, scripted routines, and curricula disconnected from students’ questions — don’t simply fail to engage learners. Over time, they train students to zone out. To wait for class to end. To treat thinking as optional. The path of least cognitive resistance becomes the default setting. Not because students chose it, but because the environment made it easy.

That said, this is different from the phone debate. Removing distractions from the outside — banning devices, adjusting seating — addresses one half of the problem. The other half is internal: the structure of the learning experience itself. A student who finds a lesson genuinely purposeful will resist external distraction far better than one simply going through the motions in a phone-free room.

In practice, this means the question isn’t only “how do I keep students on task?” It is “what is the task asking of them, cognitively?” Those are different questions. Only the second one changes the default.

The Environment Angle: Make Thinking the Easier Choice

Research from UCL suggests that human decisions are shaped not just by deliberate reasoning but by the friction profile of available choices — how easy or effortful each option feels. The implication for classrooms is direct. If passive compliance is frictionless and active thinking requires effort, most students will choose compliance. As a result, the fix isn’t only to motivate students to think harder. It is to reduce the friction on thinking and raise the friction on switching off.

In other words, that’s a design problem — and it has design solutions.

Reducing Friction on Thinking

🏗️ Environment Moves That Shift the Default
  • Change the seating expectation. Rows facing the front make passive reception easy. Clusters or paired arrangements make conversation the default. Neither is always right, but consider what behaviour each layout makes effortless.
  • Build in talk as a structural requirement, not a reward. When discussion is positioned as “time to chat before we get back to work,” students read it as a break. When it is built into the task — “you need a partner’s view to complete this” — thinking becomes the easier path.
  • Use visible thinking tools. Mini whiteboards, sticky notes, and shared documents make thinking visible and public. That slight social pressure — knowing others can see your ideas — raises the cost of switching off.
  • Vary the routine intentionally. Around 45% of everyday behaviours are repeated in the same location without deliberate thought. When every lesson follows the exact same structure, the brain learns to run on autopilot. Small, deliberate variation — a different entry task, a different question format — keeps System 2 online a little longer.

The Planning Angle: Build Demand Into the Task

Environment changes help, but they are only scaffolding. The more powerful lever is the task itself. Even so, a thoughtfully designed environment cannot compensate for a task that requires no thinking.

For that reason, the key question at the planning stage — before you write the lesson, not after — is: at what point in this task does a student have to think? If the answer is “never, really,” the task needs redesigning, not better classroom management. This is exactly the territory that backward design addresses. Start from the learning intention and work backwards to a task that genuinely demands it.

Beyond that, the type of thinking matters. Tasks that ask students to recall, copy, or follow a procedure leave System 2 largely unused. By contrast, tasks that require students to evaluate, connect, justify, or construct something novel pull System 2 into the work. That is the core of what we covered in our post on higher-order questioning — and it applies equally to tasks, not just questions.

Task Design Checks Before You Teach

✏️ Four Planning Questions to Raise Cognitive Demand
  • Can a student complete this without thinking? If the answer is yes — if recall, copying, or pattern-matching is sufficient — redesign the endpoint. Add a “why” or “how do you know” requirement.
  • Does the task have a low floor and a high ceiling? Every student should be able to begin. Not every student should be able to finish quickly. Open-ended tasks with multiple entry points make switching off less tempting because there is always somewhere to go.
  • Where is the decision point? The moment a student must choose — between interpretations, approaches, or ideas — is the moment cognitive effort is unavoidable. Plan at least one genuine decision into every task.
  • Does the task connect to something students actually care about? Relevance reduces the pull of least resistance. Students will do more cognitive work on a problem they find worth solving.

Making Thinking the Low-Resistance Option

The goal is not to make classrooms cognitively exhausting. Students need to build capacity gradually — and they need to feel the success of thinking hard and getting somewhere. That is exactly the territory covered in the productive struggle post: challenge needs to sit within reach.

Even so, the framing shift matters. For most of us, the instinct is to fight the path of least resistance. To push students to try harder, engage more, focus better. That framing puts all the responsibility on the student. A more productive question is: which path are we making easy? In a well-designed classroom, the low-resistance option and the thinking option are, as often as possible, the same thing.

That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens in the planning stage and in the physical arrangement of the room. It happens in the habits we build — deliberately — from the first weeks of the year. Which is, conveniently, what the next series of posts is going to look at.

What does the path of least resistance look like in your classroom? Is it a particular task type, a time of day, or a room setup that makes switching off too easy? Share what you’ve noticed — and what you’ve tried — in the comments below.

References and Further Reading

Juliani, A. J. (2025). We have a distraction problem. But we’ve been solving the wrong half of it. ajjuliani.com. ajjuliani.com

OECD. (2025). Ensuring cognitive engagement: Unlocking high-quality teaching. OECD Publishing. oecd.org

University College London. (2017, February 21). Humans are hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance. ScienceDaily. sciencedaily.com

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

5 Powerful Moves That Will Actually Make Students Struggle

Week 15 · Pedagogy · Task Design

5 Task Design Moves That Actually Stretch Every Student

Productive struggle isn’t what happens when a task is too hard. It’s what happens when you’ve designed it just right.
⏱ 6 min read · By Matt Faulkner · Pedagogy / New Teachers

There is a particular kind of classroom frustration that has nothing to do with behaviour. It is the lesson where students race through the task, and you realise about twelve minutes in that it asked nothing of them. Or the opposite: where you pitched it harder and now three hands are up, six students are staring at the ceiling, and two have quietly written their name and stopped.

Both of those outcomes have the same root cause. The task was not designed with stretch in mind. It was designed with content in mind — and there is a difference.

Last week, we looked at how backward design changes what you plan for. This post takes the next step. Once you know where students need to get to, the question becomes: how do you design the task that gets them there — one that genuinely challenges without tipping into frustration? The answer has a name in the research literature: productive struggle. And it can be deliberately built in.

What “Just Beyond Comfortable” Actually Means

Lev Vygotsky described the zone of proximal development (ZPD) as the space between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with support. Tasks that sit below the ZPD require no new thinking. Tasks that sit too far above it produce confusion and disengagement. Tasks that sit right at the edge of the ZPD — just beyond what a student can currently do alone — are where genuine learning occurs.

John Sweller’s cognitive load theory adds important precision here. Working memory is limited. When a task overloads it — too many new elements at once, too much unfamiliar vocabulary, too many simultaneous steps — students cannot process the content, let alone learn from it. In other words, difficulty alone is not the goal. Productive difficulty is. The task needs to be complex enough to require real thinking, but structured enough that thinking is actually possible.

For teachers, that distinction is everything. A task is not automatically rigorous because it is hard. It is rigorous when it demands higher-order thinking within a structure students can manage. As a result, designing for productive struggle is less about making tasks harder and more about making them smarter.

The Mindset Piece: Designing for Effort, Not Just Difficulty

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset is relevant here — but not in the way it is usually applied. It is not enough to tell students that struggle is good for them. If the task design sends the opposite message — if there is only one right answer, if being wrong feels like failure, if speed is implicitly rewarded — then the growth mindset poster on the wall is just decoration.

Dweck’s central finding is that students who believe intelligence is fixed avoid challenge to protect their self-image. By contrast, students who believe ability grows through effort seek out challenge. The task itself can reinforce either belief. A task with one quick answer rewards speed and confidence. A task that requires iteration, justification, and revision sends the message that effort is the point.

That said, this is not about lowering the stakes or removing rigour. It is about designing tasks where being stuck is a legitimate part of the process — and where the structure supports students to push through, rather than wait for the teacher to rescue them.

There is a timely corollary here for AI use in classrooms. Cognitive scientist Paul Kirschner draws a useful distinction between cognitive offloading and cognitive outsourcing. Offloading — writing notes, drawing a diagram, working through steps on paper — frees up working memory while keeping the student as the thinker. Outsourcing — asking AI to explain, summarise, or produce — transfers the thinking itself to an external agent. The student receives a finished product. Nothing is encoded in long-term memory. For teachers designing tasks with productive struggle in mind, the question is worth asking: does the way students are using AI protect generation, or remove it entirely?

5 Design Moves That Build Productive Struggle In

These moves can be applied individually or in combination. They work across year levels and learning areas. Even one move applied consistently will shift what students experience in your classroom.

🎯 5 Task Design Moves for Productive Struggle
  • Move 1 — Open the entry point. Design tasks with a low floor and a high ceiling. Every student can begin; not every student will reach the same endpoint. This removes the paralysis of “I don’t know where to start” while keeping stretch available for those who are ready for it. Jo Boaler’s work on low-floor/high-ceiling tasks in mathematics is the clearest articulation of this principle in practice — and her YouCubed site has free task banks worth bookmarking.
  • Move 2 — Withhold the scaffold before the answer. Give students the problem before you give them the method. Even five minutes of initial thinking — before any explicit teaching — activates prior knowledge, surfaces misconceptions, and means the instruction that follows has somewhere to land. This is not about leaving students stranded. It is about priming the brain to receive new learning. There is a memory research term for what happens here: the Generation Effect. When students generate an answer — retrieve a word, attempt a problem, construct an explanation — they remember it significantly better than when the same information is simply presented to them. The act of production is itself the act of learning. Jamie Clark’s DistillED newsletter on the Generation Effect is worth reading alongside this post — it is one of the clearest explanations of the research and its classroom implications available right now.
  • Move 3 — Limit the information given upfront. Real-world problems rarely arrive with all the relevant information pre-sorted. Give students a question and some — not all — of the information they need. Require them to identify what’s missing or what they’d need to know. That act of identifying gaps is itself higher-order thinking.
  • Move 4 — Require justification, not just answers. “What is the answer?” asks for recall. “How do you know?” asks for thinking. Build justification into the task structure — not as an add-on, but as the core requirement. A student who can get the right answer but cannot explain it has not yet learned what you think they’ve learned.
  • Move 5 — Build in a “stuck” protocol. Before students begin, name what to do when they get stuck. Three specific options: re-read the task, try a different starting point, or discuss with a partner using a sentence starter (“I think the problem is asking me to…”). This removes the habit of raising a hand the moment something feels difficult — and it signals that being stuck is expected, not a sign of failure.

What This Looks Like in HASS: Year 5 Source Analysis

A standard source analysis task gives students a primary source and asks them to identify the author, date, and one key message. That is a recall task. It sits well below the ZPD for most Year 5 students who have been doing this since Year 3.

A productive struggle version applies Moves 1, 3, and 4. Students receive two short sources on colonial settlement — a settler’s diary entry and an account from an Aboriginal perspective — with no guiding questions. The task is simply: what story are these two sources telling, and where do they disagree? From there, students must write one claim supported by evidence from both sources.

The open entry point (Move 1) means every student can begin with an observation. Limiting the guiding questions (Move 3) means students must decide what matters. Requiring a supported claim (Move 4) means the answer is not retrievable without genuine analysis. The teacher’s role shifts from answer-giver to question-asker — circulating and probing with higher-order questions that push thinking further rather than narrowing it toward a predetermined response.

For more on structuring formative checks around this kind of task, the post on formative assessment strategies covers exit ticket design in detail.

What This Looks Like in Maths: Year 3 Multiplication

A standard multiplication task: Solve 3 × 4. Solve 5 × 6. Solve 7 × 8. Students either know these or they don’t. There is no thinking available beyond retrieval — and no entry point for students who aren’t yet fluent.

A productive struggle version uses Move 1 and Move 2. The teacher displays 24 counters on the interactive whiteboard and asks: how many different ways can you arrange these into equal rows? No method has been taught yet. Students work with their own counters, recording each arrangement. From there, the class shares findings — and the teacher introduces the array and the number sentence as the language for what students already discovered.

The low floor means students working at different points of readiness can all begin. The high ceiling means a student who finds three arrangements quickly is asked: how do you know you’ve found them all? That follow-up question — requiring justification and systematic thinking — is where the stretch lives. In practice, it produces more mathematical reasoning than a worksheet of 20 isolated facts ever will.

Beyond that, notice what the task design does to the explicit teaching that follows. Because students have already struggled with the concept, the instruction has a problem to solve. It lands differently than instruction delivered cold.

Where the Gradual Release Fits

Fisher and Frey’s Gradual Release of Responsibility model — I do, We do, You do — is one of the most widely used frameworks in Australian primary schools. It is also frequently misapplied in ways that accidentally prevent productive struggle.

The problem arises when the “I do” phase is so thorough that the “You do” phase requires nothing beyond imitation. Students are not struggling — they are copying. The GRR is designed to scaffold students into independence, not to eliminate the experience of not-yet-knowing.

Used well, the GRR creates the conditions for productive struggle at the “You do” stage by deliberately withdrawing support at the right moment. The key is that the “We do” phase builds enough shared understanding that students can tolerate uncertainty — not so much that the independent task becomes a rehearsal of what they’ve already watched you do.

That calibration — knowing when to hold the scaffold and when to pull it back — is one of the most important professional judgements in teaching. Even so, it is a judgement that gets easier with practice. And it starts with task design that has stretch built in from the beginning.

Design the task for the thinking you want, not just the answer you need. Students rise to what the task demands of them — and rarely higher.

💬 Over to You — Which of the five moves are you already using, and which one are you going to try first? Or if you’ve got a task that created genuinely productive struggle in your classroom, share it below. The best ideas on this site always come from teachers who’ve already done the hard yards.

References

Bertsch, S., Pesta, B. J., Wiscott, R., & McDaniel, M. A. (2007). The generation effect: A meta-analytic review. Memory & Cognition, 35(2), 201–210. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193441

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In M. A. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, & J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). Worth Publishers.

Boaler, J. (2016). Mathematical mindsets: Unleashing students’ potential through creative math, inspiring messages and innovative teaching. Jossey-Bass.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2014). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the gradual release of responsibility (2nd ed.). ASCD.

Kirschner, P. A. (2026). Offloading? No outsourcing! Retrieved from https://paulkirschner.com

Slamecka, N. J., & Graf, P. (1978). The generation effect: Delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 592–604. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.4.6.592

Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

How Smart Teachers Plan Backwards — and Get Better Results

Here is a question worth sitting with: when you plan a lesson, what do you plan first? If the answer is “the activity” — the game, the worksheet, the group task — you are in good company. Most new teachers start there. In practice, that instinct is also the source of one of the most common planning problems in Australian classrooms: lessons that are busy but not particularly purposeful.

The shift that separates competent planning from genuinely effective planning is deceptively simple. Expert teachers start at the end. They ask: what do students need to know or be able to do by the close of this lesson? From there, everything else flows backwards from that answer — the activities, the questions, the formative checks.

That approach has a name: backward design. Put simply, it means designing for learning rather than for activity. This post explains how it works, why the research supports it, and what it looks like in two real Australian classrooms — one in HASS, one in Maths.

Why “Covering the Content” Isn’t Planning

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe introduced backward design in Understanding by Design (2005) — and it remains one of the most cited frameworks in curriculum planning. Their core argument is straightforward: if you design a lesson around an activity, the activity becomes the goal. If you design it around a learning outcome, the activity becomes the vehicle.

The difference matters more than it sounds. An activity-first lesson might be engaging and enjoyed by students. By contrast, a learning-first lesson does all of that and moves students measurably closer to a specific understanding. One fills time well. The other changes what students can do.

John Hattie’s research reinforces this. In Visible Learning for Teachers (2012), he identifies clear learning intentions and success criteria as among the highest-leverage moves a teacher can make — with an effect size of 0.75 on student achievement. That said, intentions only work when they are genuinely specific. “Students will learn about fractions” is not a learning intention. “Students will be able to add fractions with the same denominator and explain why the denominator stays the same” is.

The Three-Stage Planning Framework

Wiggins and McTighe describe backward design in three stages. In the Australian context, each maps directly onto the AITSL Professional Standards that preservice and early-career teachers are assessed against. For that reason, understanding the framework is not just good pedagogy — it is also good professional preparation.

🪜 Backward Design: Three Stages
  • Stage 1 — Identify desired results. What should students know, understand, and be able to do? This comes directly from the Australian Curriculum content descriptor and achievement standard for your year level. This is where AITSL Standard 2 (Know the content and how to teach it) does its work — you cannot write a learning intention for content you don’t understand deeply yourself.
  • Stage 2 — Determine acceptable evidence. How will you know students have learned it? This is your assessment — not just the end-of-unit test, but the formative check you build into the lesson itself. Exit tickets, questioning, observation, mini whiteboards. AITSL Standard 5 (Assess, provide feedback and report) lives here.
  • Stage 3 — Plan learning experiences. Only now do you choose activities — the ones that most efficiently move students from where they are to where Stage 1 says they need to be. This is AITSL Standard 3 (Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning) in action.

Notice the order. Assessment comes before activities. For most new teachers, that sequence feels backwards — even counterintuitive. In practice, it is the sequence that makes every other planning decision easier. Each activity can then be evaluated against one clear question: does this move students toward the learning intention, or does it just fill time nicely?

Stage 1 in Practice: Writing a Learning Intention That Works

A learning intention describes what students will learn — not what they will do. “Students will complete a fact file about ancient Egypt” is a task description. By contrast, “Students will identify two ways ancient Egyptians adapted their way of life to the Nile River” is a learning intention. The distinction is worth practising until it becomes automatic.

Hattie suggests sharing the learning intention with students at the start of the lesson — not as a compliance exercise, but because students who know where they are going are better placed to monitor their own progress. That self-monitoring is itself a high-leverage learning behaviour. For this reason, the learning intention pairs naturally with a success criterion: a student-facing description of what meeting the intention looks like in practice. The Australian Curriculum v9.0 achievement standards are the most reliable anchor for writing success criteria at the right level.

✏️ Learning Intention vs Success Criterion — The Difference
  • Learning intention: “We are learning to identify how the features of a place influence the way people live.” (The what of learning — teacher-language, curriculum-anchored.)
  • Success criterion: “I can name two features of the Nile River and explain how each one shaped life for ancient Egyptians.” (The how will I know — student-language, observable, specific.)
  • Not this: “We are learning about ancient Egypt.” (Too broad — students cannot self-assess against it, and neither can you.)

AITSL Standard 1 (Know students and how they learn) shapes how you write these. A success criterion pitched at the wrong level — too abstract for Year 3, too simple for Year 6 — will not function as a genuine reference point for students. In other words, knowing your cohort is not separate from writing good intentions. It is part of the same act.

Worked Example 1: Year 5 HASS

The following example applies backward design to a Year 5 HASS lesson on colonial Australia, anchored to the Australian Curriculum.

📋 Backward Design in Action — Year 5 HASS
  • Curriculum anchor: AC9HS5K03 — The impact of colonial settlement on the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
  • Stage 1 — Learning intention: “We are learning to explain how colonial settlement affected the lives of Aboriginal Peoples, using specific evidence.”
  • Success criterion: “I can describe at least two impacts of colonial settlement on Aboriginal Peoples and support each with a piece of evidence from a source.”
  • Stage 2 — Formative evidence: An exit ticket — students write two sentence starters: “One impact was… because the evidence shows…” and “Another impact was… For example…” This is collected before students leave and informs the next lesson’s starting point. For more on making exit tickets work, see our post on formative assessment strategies.
  • Stage 3 — Learning activities: (a) Paired analysis of two short primary sources — a settler diary entry and an account from an Aboriginal perspective. (b) Structured discussion: what do these sources agree on? What do they show differently? (c) Individual written response using the exit ticket stems. The Venn diagram activity — which we’ve discussed before as an alternative to the overused KWL chart — works well at step (b) to surface the contrast between sources.
  • AITSL connection: Standard 1.4 (Strategies for teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students) and Standard 2.4 (Understand and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) are both directly relevant here. Source selection and discussion framing must be handled with cultural care and, where possible, informed by community consultation.

Worked Example 2: Year 3 Maths

The same framework applies equally to Maths — where the temptation to jump straight to a worksheet or manipulative activity is especially strong. Even so, the three-stage sequence holds. Start with what students need to understand; build the assessment check; then choose activities that close the gap.

📋 Backward Design in Action — Year 3 Maths
  • Curriculum anchor: AC9M3N04 — Multiply and divide using a range of mental and informal written strategies.
  • Stage 1 — Learning intention: “We are learning to use an array to show how multiplication works and explain what the rows and columns represent.”
  • Success criterion: “I can draw an array for a multiplication fact, label the rows and columns, and write the matching number sentence.”
  • Stage 2 — Formative evidence: Mini whiteboard check — teacher calls a multiplication fact (e.g. 3 × 4), students draw the array and hold it up simultaneously. Teacher scans for: correct dimensions, correct orientation, students who have drawn repeated addition rather than an array. That pattern in the errors pinpoints exactly where re-teaching is needed. See our post on reading the room mid-lesson for more on using student responses as real-time data.
  • Stage 3 — Learning activities: (a) Hook: teacher places 12 counters on a document camera and asks — “how many ways can I arrange these into equal rows?” Students explore with their own counters. (b) Explicit teaching: name the array, define rows and columns, connect to the number sentence. (c) Guided practice: three teacher-led examples with student input. (d) Independent practice: students draw and label three arrays of their choice, then write the matching number sentence. (e) Mini whiteboard exit check as described above.
  • AITSL connection: Standard 2.1 (Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area) — understanding why arrays work (not just how to draw them) is essential before teaching this lesson. Standard 3.3 (Use teaching strategies) — the move from concrete (counters) to representational (drawn array) to abstract (number sentence) is the CRA sequence, and it should be deliberate, not accidental.

The Teaching-Learning Cycle: Beyond a Single Lesson

Backward design works for a single lesson. It works even better when it organises a whole unit. The teaching-learning cycle used across Australian curriculum areas — building the field, deconstruction, joint construction, independent construction — is itself a backward-designed structure. You begin with the end text or performance in mind and work back through the scaffolding students need to get there.

For new teachers, the most practical application is this: before you plan any lesson in a unit, write the end-of-unit assessment task first. Not after you’ve taught everything — before. That task becomes your compass. Consequently, every lesson can be evaluated against one question: does this move students closer to being able to do that?

Beyond that, this approach connects directly to what we’ve explored in our posts on designing a performance of worth and feedback that feeds forward — both of which assume a clear destination that students are working toward. Without a backward-designed starting point, those strategies lose their anchor.

A Note on Using AI in This Process

If you are using AI to support your planning — and there are good reasons to — backward design gives you a much stronger prompt structure. Instead of asking AI to “write a lesson plan on fractions,” give it your learning intention, your success criterion, and your formative check. From there, ask it to suggest activities that bridge the gap. That sequence produces something genuinely useful. By contrast, starting with “write me a lesson” produces something generic.

In other words, the quality of your AI output is a direct reflection of how clearly you have done Stage 1 yourself first. The framework does not become less relevant when AI is involved. If anything, it becomes more important.

The One-Page Planning Habit

For preservice teachers on prac, and for first-year teachers building confidence, a full backward-design unit plan for every lesson is not realistic. That said, the thinking behind backward design can be applied in under five minutes per lesson with a simple habit. Before you open any planning document, write three things on a sticky note.

🎯 The Three-Question Planning Check
  • What will students be able to do by the end that they couldn’t do at the start? (Your learning intention — one specific, observable thing.)
  • How will I know if they’ve got there? (Your formative check — exit ticket, whiteboard, observation, question.)
  • What is the most direct path from here to there? (Your activity sequence — chosen because it serves the intention, not because it fills the time.)

Those three questions, answered honestly before you start planning the rest, will improve your lessons more reliably than any template, resource pack, or planning app. They are the essence of what AITSL Standard 3 asks of you. Put simply, they are the difference between a lesson that covers content and a lesson that builds learning.

“Don’t ask ‘what will I teach today?’ Ask ‘what will students be able to do at the end that they couldn’t do at the start?’ The answer to the second question is your lesson.” — TeacherTalk

💬 Your Turn! Do you plan backwards from the learning intention — or do you start with the activity and work forward? And if you’ve made the switch to backward design, what changed for you? Share below — your experience is exactly what another new teacher needs to read this week.

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). (2018). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Standards 1, 2, 3 & 5). https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximising impact on learning. Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2nd ed.). ASCD.

7 Free Classroom Tools That Actually Cut Your Workload

Not every classroom has a full class set of iPads. Not every school has fast, reliable Wi-Fi in every room. Not every teacher has time to learn a complex new platform this term. And that is completely fine — because some of the most effective digital tools in education are also the simplest, and some of the most engaging learning experiences require very little technology at all.

This is the final post in our Teaching in the Digital Age mini-series. After exploring digital citizenship and AI as a planning partner, today we’re going practical and low-barrier — a toolkit of digital tools, starting with QR codes, that work in any Australian classroom regardless of budget, device availability, or technical confidence. Because equity matters: if a strategy only works for well-resourced schools, it’s not a solution — it’s a privilege.

QR Codes: Still Underused, Still Brilliant

TeacherTalk has covered QR codes before, but they deserve a fresh look — because their use in Australian education has expanded enormously, and many teachers are still only scratching the surface of what they can do. QR code use in Australian educational institutions has grown rapidly, with schools using them for everything from interactive scavenger hunts to distributing differentiated resources to managing classroom transitions.

The core advantage of a QR code is deceptively simple: it eliminates the barrier between a student and a digital resource. Instead of dictating a long URL, writing it on the board while students squint and mistype, a QR code is scanned in two seconds. That friction reduction turns out to matter a lot in a busy classroom.

Here is how to generate one for free: Adobe Express has a free QR code generator that requires no account. Canva, which most Australian teachers already use, also generates QR codes in its free tier. Both take under a minute.

15 Ways to Use QR Codes Right Now

📱 QR Code Ideas: Start Simple, Go Further
  • Differentiated task cards. Create three versions of a task (below, at, and above year level) and link each to its own QR code. Students scan their code and access the appropriate resource independently — no shuffling of paper piles, no broadcasting which student is working at which level.
  • Exit tickets via Google Forms. Create a Google Form with 2–3 quick comprehension or reflection questions, generate a QR code for it, and post it on the board at the end of the lesson. Students scan, respond, and you have instant formative data in a spreadsheet before they’ve packed up. Links naturally to our post on formative assessment strategies.
  • Learning centres or rotations. Each station in a learning centre has a QR code linking to the task instructions, video stimulus, or additional resource for that station. Students move through independently, without needing the teacher to explain each station every rotation.
  • QR scavenger hunts. Place QR codes around the classroom or school (on doors, walls, furniture) each linking to a clue, question, or resource. Students work in pairs to scan, respond, and move to the next code. High engagement, builds inquiry skills, gets students moving.
  • Vocabulary walls that talk. Add QR codes to word wall displays linking to short explanatory videos, audio pronunciations, or student-created explanations. Particularly powerful for EAL/D students who can access translations or visual supports independently.
  • Reading response journals. Link QR codes on the back of library books or in book corners to a Google Form where students log their reading response — a sentence, a rating, a question it raised. Builds reading culture and gives you an informal record without marking piles of exercise books.
  • Parent communication. Add a QR code to newsletters, classroom displays, or student work portfolios linking to a video explaining the unit of work, a gallery of classroom activities, or a parent FAQ. Bridges the gap between classroom and home in seconds.
  • Assessment instructions. Link the task instructions for a major assessment to a QR code on the assessment sheet. Students can re-watch or re-read the instructions independently without needing to interrupt the teacher.
  • STEM challenge materials. In STEAM activities, QR codes can link to research resources, instructional videos, or design criteria — making inquiry more independent and reducing the teacher as the sole information source. Links to our earlier post on STEAM in the classroom.
  • Student reflection. Post a “Week in Review” QR code each Friday linking to a short reflection form. Three questions: What’s one thing you learned this week? What are you still wondering about? What would you like more help with? Takes five minutes and gives you rich planning data for the following week.

Beyond QR Codes: 5 More Free Tools Worth Your Time

QR codes are the gateway, but they work best as part of a broader low-barrier digital toolkit. Here are five more tools that Australian primary teachers are using effectively right now — all free, all low-complexity, all high-impact:

1. Padlet (padlet.com) — A virtual corkboard where students can post text, images, links, and video. Brilliant for brainstorming, exit tickets, collaborative research, gallery walks, and prior knowledge activation — a much richer alternative to the KWL chart we’ve previously critiqued on this very blog. The free version allows up to three active boards — rotate them across your units.

2. Mentimeter (mentimeter.com) — Live polling, word clouds, and quick question tools. Students respond on any device using a simple code — no account needed on the student end. A word cloud of student responses to “What do you already know about…?” is a far more engaging and visually rich prior knowledge check than a KWL chart. The free tier supports basic presentations and is perfectly adequate for most classroom uses.

3. Kahoot! (kahoot.com) — Most Australian primary teachers already know Kahoot, but many underuse it. Beyond the game-show quiz format, Kahoot can be used for vocabulary practice, formative review before an assessment, and even student-created quizzes where students design questions for each other — which is a genuinely higher-order task requiring deep content knowledge. Free for teachers.

4. Canva for Education (canva.com/en_au/education) — Free for all Australian teachers and students through the Education plan. Beyond creating posters and presentations, Canva’s Whiteboard feature is excellent for collaborative brainstorming, its video editor supports student multimedia projects, and its QR code generator is seamless. If your school doesn’t yet have school-wide Canva for Education access, it’s worth raising with your administration — it consolidates multiple tools into one.

5. Book Creator (bookcreator.com) — A multimodal publishing tool where students create digital books combining text, images, audio, and video. Excellent for summative assessment tasks — the kind of performance of worth where students demonstrate learning through creation rather than a traditional essay or test. The free teacher account allows one library of 40 books — enough for a class set.

The Equity Principle: Digital Tools Must Work for Every Student

Everything in this post is premised on a principle worth stating explicitly: digital tools should expand access, not create new barriers. As we explored in our AI ethics post, technology that advantages the already advantaged is not progress.

When choosing digital tools, ask: Can every student in my class access this? Does it require a device? Does it require home internet? Does it require a parent with a credit card? If the answer to any of these is “yes, and not all my students have that”, you need either a school-funded solution, a paired alternative, or a different approach entirely.

QR codes work beautifully in this regard — students can share devices to scan, codes can be printed and taken home, and the content they link to can be cached or printed as a fallback. The other tools above all have offline or low-bandwidth options worth exploring if your school has connectivity challenges.

A Word on Tool Overload

A final caution: resist the temptation to use every tool, every lesson. Digital tool overload is a real phenomenon — students (and teachers) spending more cognitive energy managing the technology than engaging with the learning. The most effective classroom technology is the technology that becomes invisible — so embedded in the routine that students don’t think about how to use it, only what they’re using it for.

Pick two or three tools from this post. Learn them thoroughly. Build them into regular routines. Then, and only then, consider adding another. That is the same principle we apply to teaching strategies generally — as our earlier post on teaching strategies noted, even the best technique becomes stale when overused. Mix it up, but do it deliberately.

“The best EdTech is invisible. Students aren’t thinking about the tool — they’re thinking about the learning. That’s the sign you’ve got it right.” — TeacherTalk

💬 Your Turn! What’s your go-to digital tool in the classroom — the one you couldn’t imagine teaching without? And is there one on this list you’ve been meaning to try? Share below — you might inspire someone else to take the leap!

References

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2023). Australian Curriculum v9.0: Technologies. https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au

Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

QR Codes Australia. (2025). Harnessing QR codes in Australian education today. https://qrcodesaustralia.com.au/qr-codes-in-australian-education/

Selwyn, N. (2011). Schools and schooling in the digital age: A critical analysis. Routledge.

Uniqode. (2025). Creative ways to use QR codes in the classroom. https://www.uniqode.com/blog/qr-code/qr-codes-in-schools-and-classrooms-for-enhanced-learning