Tag: classroom management

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

Tips for New Teachers

I must admit I almost gave up teaching in my first year as the reality of 40 Year4 children in a classroom with me as the only adult in the room was too daunting! I found the balance between classroom management and being someone whom the children wanted to learn from a challenge! The real classroom was very different to my highly successful practicum placements when the “real” classroom teacher was in the room with the prac student! These are the tips for new teachers I wish someone had handed me back then. On reflection, I always said my first year was about me getting my head together about how to teach and only in the second year did I begin teaching to be effective. Having said that, after four years of teaching Year 4, I was ready to pull my hair out and wanted a change of grade. Fortunately, I was given a Year 6 class and so my learning of the curriculum grew.

I think my initial “sink or swim” introduction to teaching has always stuck with me and may be the main impetus why my Masters of Education thesis was on developing a more effective induction model for beginning teachers.

Tips for new teachers — coping with first year overwhelm

If you look online there is a plethora of articles and books on advice for first year teachers. “5 Mistakes to avoid as a first year teacher”, “20 things I wish I knew as a first year teacher”, etc. To save you having to glean through all these resources, I have done the job for you and looked for commonalities to make your job easier! Here are my top tips for new teachers, the ones that came up again and again.

5 Top Tips for New Teachers: A First Year Survival Guide

  1. Teaching Philosophy: I suggest spending some time writing adjectives that describe the type of teacher you wish to be. Just write them down on a blank piece of A4 paper without categorising them. Leave this aside on your desk for a few days and as new words come to mind, jot them down. (This process relates to Wallas’ 4 step model of creativity and this allows a period of “incubation”). What should appear is a “collage” of who you wish to become as a teacher and will inform your philosophy of teaching. If you now arrange these adjectives into categories, you will have the draft of a philosophy of education – your teaching style. This will inform HOW you will teach, deal with students, and prioritise what is most important to you.
  2. High Expectations: With the above philosophy of teaching in mind, what expectations will you set for your students? The sage advice would be to keep your expectations high, especially at the beginning of the year. By practising procedures and routines with the children over and over (depending on their age) in the first two weeks of school, you will set the scene for smooth transitions and more effective classroom management. What will your discipline plan be? Is this in concert with the school-wide policy? How will you ensure your classroom management is consistent and fair?
  3. Ask questions: In some schools, you will be assigned a mentor teacher as your “go to” person. You go to them and ask for advice, inquire about procedures, ask about resources in the school, etc. If this is not the case, then you will need to find a teacher whom you respect and would like to emulate and informally have them be your “go to” person. It is the person who you can stick your head into their classroom to ask a question, who can show you how they establish reading groups, or whatever you need to know. Most teachers are caring and sharing people by nature, so this will not be seen as an imposition by them, rather they will be happy to assist.
  4. Organisation is the key: In order to be an effective teacher, you will need to be organised. Not only do you need to have preplanned how children will access all the things they need without having to constantly ask the teacher, but you also need to have all the resources you will need at your fingertips. There are many resources out there for teachers to purchase to help organise their planning documents and similarly, there are plenty of Pinterest pages and blog posts about how to set up your classroom. (This will be a later blog!) You need to have all the things you need to do your job properly at your fingertips – how will you store assessment records? Will you have electronic storage of lessons and plans (e.g. Google Drive)? You will have many tasks to perform and meetings to attend. How will you keep track of all of these – a synced task app/calendar on all your devices?
  5. Be kind to yourself!: There are times when you will experience the highs and the lows of the first year of teaching! Realise you cannot please all the people all the time (including parents). Realise not every lesson needs to be “OTT” (over the top lesson) as this is not sustainable. Similarly, not every piece of student work needs to be marked. When you do spend time planning your teaching program, ensure you have sufficient formative and summative assessment task that relate directly to the assessment of the objectives/outcomes/standards/content descriptors. Being a teacher requires a great deal of “administration” time – whether planning documents at the beginning of each term, marking and grading assessments or writing biannual reports for each child. Set yourself times to work and then reward yourself with mini-breaks as you achieve each small step towards the larget task completion. This might be 5 minutes walking around in the fresh air, or a coffee break, 5 minutes on Facebook or whatever re-energises you! The same applies in each school holiday period – apart from attending to all the home tasks that were not completed during term, you need some downtime as teaching is a physically and emotionally demanding occupation.
The lasting influence of a teacher — encouragement for new teachers

You have chosen to enter the teaching profession for all the right reasons and you want this to be a sustainable career so you can make the most difference to the most students in your care.