Practice: Classroom routines

Practice: Classroom routines

Main routines

Every lesson begins with checking the attendance. It might appear an easy task, but I saw few lessons when it took ten minutes to begin the lesson because students began to explain why their classmates are absent. I think that teacher shouldn't underestimate the importance of this part of the lesson. My next notice is that checking attendance looks differently depending on the relation between teacher and students, very important factor of teachers work. When they only tick the absence the relation is not deep probably. But more engaged teacher would comment that for example one student is missing a lesson for second time so she can ask the others if they know what's going on.

History lesson

After checking the attendance the history teacher usually poll one student to remind the whole class what were they talking about on the last lesson. I was shocked by this polling. Students are rather relaxed. When I was a student my whole class wold look into their notebooks or pretend they are invisible. But here the teacher says for example: Sam, why don't you volunteer? You don't have much grades and lat time you were very active on the lesson, I think you can do it. And the boy simply says: Well, why not? And starts answering the questions. I saw three students answering like this, two of them got really high grades, one of them was not prepared as he didn't managed to remedy the lack so the teacher let him try again next time as a second and last chance.

Other routine of the history teacher is to write a short but clear note on the lesson's topic. It usually look similar, so that after a year of learning student have valuable notes on every topic they've learned. The teacher not only gives a note to copy, she creates it together with the students and tries to make the students create it by themselves. This way not only the students have high quality note but they also really know what is it about and can learn from it at home or before the lesson. It happened once that the teacher forgot to write the note down on the board. A few students immediately remind her to write it. This means that they really find if useful.

Maths lesson

There are very few classroom routines on maths lessons. I can point only one, it's about the type of activities. Every lesson I observed had the same structure and very similar type of tasks. The teacher wrote some information about the task on the board, there were usually five points. If someone didn't manage to compete all of them he was told to finish at home. It has both advantages and disadvantages. It can motivate some students to work harder on the lesson but some might simply copy from other when the fastest student would finish.

While observing I didn't notice any other routines on this lessons. I think it's not a good solution as children in this age like routine and they feel safe thanks to it. In my opinion the teacher should take care of creating the routines together with the students. Not only would it create a stronger bond between them and make the learning process more efficient but also make it fun. This way children are more motivated to keep focus or for example remember about their homework.

That's why I'd recommend any teacher to have routines in his classroom and I am motivated to remember about it myself.