Reset Your Room after a Tough Start

You mapped out your expectations. You knew which routines and procedures you wanted to teach on the first day of school. After all of the work, you thought you were ready. And then maybe things didn’t go according to the plan. Perhaps some student behaviors were more unexpected and challenging than you were prepared for. Maybe time constraints in the first few weeks of school prevented you from teaching everything you wanted to teach. Maybe it was something else entirely. Perhaps you need to totally reset your room.

No matter how rough of a start your year may have had, it’s not too late to get back on track and have the classroom you want to have this year. Today, I am sharing three tips for resetting the environment of your room when things get off to a bumpy start.

Get Back to the Basics

If you are a few weeks in your school year, and you are looking around seeing chaos in several areas of your room, make a list of those problem areas. Then, take it back to the basics to reset your room. The way to solve any chaotic corner of your classroom is to make your expectations clear and explicit, and give students plenty of opportunities to practice.

Give yourself some extra time throughout the week to re-teach routines and procedures for different areas of your room. Take it back to those first days of school lessons where you model and students practice. Don’t be afraid to start everything from the beginning all over again. It’s better to start over now than to try late in the school year when the work will be much harder.

Repeat & Reinforce

If your students did not learn the routines and procedures the way you wanted them to at the beginning of the year, they may have formed some bad habits. Unfortunately, this means that teaching a lesson on how to walk in the hall one time is not going to cut it. You are going to need to find ways to re-teach these lessons for several weeks. Create visual cues so students can see what their behavior should be as they are lining up. Model it often. Remind students of your expectations right before you leave the room.

And, to truly solidify what you expect of students in a given moment, be prepared to reinforce your expectations through praise. Positive reinforcement is such a powerful tool in modifying student behavior. Point out students who are completing a routine exactly the way you taught it. Praise them with specific language so the other students know exactly why you are so proud of them. If you have a token economy or another positive behavior system in your room, reward those students. Always be looking for reasons to point out what’s going well to encourage all students to stay on track.

Give Yourself Grace 

Finally, if you are having to reset your room, please give yourself grace. Be patient with yourself and your students. Not every class is made exactly the same. Maybe you taught expectations a certain way last year and it went just fine, and this year I didn’t go the way you hoped. Some groups of students will need extra reinforcement or more time to solidify their behaviors.

Whatever the reason or circumstances behind the situation you are in now, just remember that you are only one human. You can’t do it all perfectly all the time. Some things need to be retaught, and that’s OK. Just in the way that we don’t expect every student to master every academic skill the first time they hear it, we can’t expect students to perfect behavior expectations without plenty of practice. You and your class will get there. You are a great teacher, and you are enough.

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