Establishing daily procedures and routines
Procedures or routines are specific ways of doing common, repeated classroom tasks or activities. Examples
include checking daily attendance, dealing with students who arrive late, or allowing students to use the bathroom
during class or go to their lockers to get materials which they forgot to bring. Procedures also include ways of
turning in or retrieving daily homework (e.g. putting it on a designated shelf at a particular time), or of gaining the eacher’s attention during quiet seat work (e.g. raising your hand and waiting), or of choosing and starting a “free
choice” activity after completing a classroom assignment.
Procedures serve the largely practical purpose of making activities and tasks flow smoothly and efficiently—a
valuable and necessary purpose in classrooms, where the actions of many people have to be coordinated within
limited amounts of time. As such procedures are more like social conventions than like moral expectations. They
are not primarily about what is ethically right or ethically desirable to do (Turiel, 2006). Most procedures or
routines can be accomplished in more than one way, with only minor differences in success at the outcomes. There
is more than one way, for example, for the procedure of taking attendance: the teacher could call the role, delegate a
student to call the role, or simply note students’ presence on a seating chart. Each variation accomplishes
essentially the same task, and the choice among them may therefore be less important than the fact that the class
coordinates its actions somehow, by committing to some sort of choice.
For teachers, of course, an initial task is to establish procedures and routines in the first place. Because of the
conventional quality of procedures, some teachers find that it works well simply to announce and explain key
procedures without inviting much discussion from students (“Here is how we will choose partners for the group
work”). Other teachers, however, prefer to invite input from students when creating procedures (asking “What do
you feel is the best way for students to get my attention during a quiet reading time?”). Both approaches have
advantages as well as disadvantages. Simply announcing key procedures saves time and insures consistency in case
you are teaching more than one class (as you would in high school). But it creates a bigger responsibility to choose
procedures that are truly reasonable and practical. On the other hand, inviting students’ input can help students to
become aware of and committed to procedures, but at the cost of taking more time to establish them, and at the risk
of creating confusion if you teach multiple classes, each of which adopts different procedures. Whatever approach
you choose, you and the students of course have to take into account the procedures or rules imposed by the school
or school district as a whole. A school may have a uniform policy or expectation about how to record daily
attendance, for example, and that policy may determine, either partly or completely, how you take attendance with
your particular students.