Month: June 2026

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.