Tag: AITSL Standard 4

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.