Recently, I watched a second grade teacher walking her class to lunch.
She was leading from the front and extremely active. She would stop often to guide her students with her hands, fuss with their lunch boxes, and remind them to stay in line.
The students were relatively well behaved but distracted—staring off into the distance, bumping into each other, lost in thought.
The line was moving at a snail’s pace, taking five minutes to walk just 100 feet. Given the teacher’s animated behavior, an observer would assume that her students needed all of that attention.
But they didn’t.
In fact, they didn’t need the teacher at all. Second graders are perfectly capable of walking to lunch, or performing any other routine, without any teacher input whatsoever.
Yet, spend a couple of hours on any school campus and most routines look just like this, even with much older students. The teachers are talking, directing, and bustling about and the students bored and daydreaming.
Or worse, they’re misbehaving.
—Which is a bright red flashing sign that the students are very effectively learning how to be helpless and dependent on others, even for the simplest things like walking to lunch or opening a laptop.
The truth is that routines are one of the best opportunities teachers have to impact students and change them for the better.
Done right—with the teacher modeling how to perform routines and then allowing students to carry them out independently—they produce maturity.
They give students purpose and responsibility. They teach them to become more detailed, more aware, and more focused on finishing tasks, chores, objectives, and responsibilities.
Furthermore, students love doing for themselves.
Well-performed routines transfer excellence to everything they do—from study habits to attentiveness to academic performance.
The teacher I watched that day seemed to enjoy her job. She seemed to care about her students and clearly took pride in her reputation (mentioned again and again by several on campus) as an excellent teacher.
But her approach, her aggressively doing and doing for her students, was hurting them. It was holding them back.
It was steeping them in learned helplessness, stifling their independence and motivation, and removing from them a golden opportunity to grow in maturity and responsibility.
Routines are a means to an end. But the end isn’t the lunchroom or their seats after a transition. It’s the lessons they offer, which when allowed and nourished by the teacher, can be profound.
Even life-changing.
If you haven’t done so already, please join us. It’s free! Click here and begin receiving classroom management articles like this one in your email box every week.
