Tag: first days of school

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.

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.

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.

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.