Establish AND Practice Routines and Procedures
The time you invest early in the school year in processes and procedures will pay HUGE dividends throughout the year! Teachers often tell me,
“I just don’t have time to spend on procedures.”
I understand that we all want to perform the best that we can at concerts, and we want to have our students ready musically. For example, suppose students don’t know how to come into class from the hallway. They arrive disruptive and disorderly. You say to them…
“Class, we need to make sure we come in quietly and orderly.”
Day two, they come in rowdy, day three, they come in rowdy. You remind them every time, but nothing changes (except you get more and more frustrated). Let’s do some math:
180 school days
x2 minutes wasted daily
360 minutes wasted every year
That’s a lot of rehearsal time!
However, if those students come on that first day, and they’re rowdy, and they’ve wasted two minutes, and you say…
“Wait a minute, this is not how we come into the classroom. Let’s go back outside and practice how to come into the classroom.” You march them back out of the classroom, and you spend two more minutes, showing them the proper way to walk into the classroom. You haven’t wasted two minutes, you’ve invested two minutes and saved 358!.
Whether we are working on music or procedures, perfect practice makes it better.
Keep those early rules simple – and get them engaged from day one, even if they don’t have instruments yet. EVERY teacher seems to take the entire class explaining their rules – and they often have a list of 10-12. Young minds are overwhelmed! Keep it simple. I usually announce my 2 rules. 1) Come in orderly, immediately get to work. 2) No talking during instruction. I add some as we go along, but I address it when the need arises rather than overwhelming the students. For example, at some point I teach them the procedure for getting their music folders from the rack, but they don’t need to know that on the first day.
Getting them engaged could be as simple as listening and clapping easy call and response rhythms for them, or getting them started with breathing properly.
Grading Policy. After a couple of days, I will explain my grading policy to students. When we have a performance test, I only give two grades – an A+ or a retest. I expect and demand that all students are going to meet the minimum standard – and they rise to the challenge! Students from private schools, to suburban schools, to Title 1 schools have all risen to this challenge. Rarely do I have a student receive less than an A in my class. BUT! I explain to them it’s easy to get an A, but it’s not an easy A. There is a difference. More on that in the chapter on grading.
Greet students as they enter your room. I have observed classes where the teacher is occupied with busy work when students enter. The best thing you can do is greet students as they enter, give them a high five or fistbump and verbally say, “It’s good to see you” or another appropriate greeting. I’ve heard of teachers that had a special handshake for every student! That’s beyond my ability, but it seems like a cool idea. When I taught HS, many of them wanted a “special” handshake, but I let them create it and teach it to me. Some I never quite got the hang of. Since Covid, I mostly do fist bumps.
Be patient. It will often feel like students are not making progress. That’s when you need patience! It can often take 3-5 years to make a program your own. I know of band programs where the average tenure is 2 years or less. That group never has a chance to reach its potential.
Create a Seating Chart Different Than Others
If you’re creating a seating chart strictly for the sound of the group, that’s great in most cases. But I want you to consider that sometimes proximity can be more important than what sounds best. I once brought a squirrely 6th grade drummer to the front of the room right next to me. He needed about 20 reminders per class – usually a look or hand on his shoulder – to remind him of the expectations I had from him. The “deal” I had with him was that he could move back once he had more control over his actions. It took about two weeks of literally being right next to me!
Here’s a typical seating chart:
Here’s what I like to use even with high school students. The spaces allow me to move around the room and prevent most discipline problems from happening.
Create your own customizable and printable seating chart here
Organize Music BEFORE school starts
I’m very fortunate. In my current position, we get close to 10 teacher days before school starts – and admin usually gives us half of those days to get stuff done. Most of the schools I’ve taught in gave us three days (and most of those days were taken up with meetings). In those schools I often went in several days early just to get things ready and get things done. You have to decide for yourself if you are going to hold the school accountable for the actual hours you get paid to be in. I decided that most of the time I didn’t mind working a little extra because of the time and worry it would save me.
The day before school starts, all 472 faculty will be lined up to make copies, the machine will be out of ink, and there won’t be any paper. A week before that, there will likely be nobody in line. That’s when I liked to make any copies I needed, organize them all, etc. I once worked at a school that had 1:1 kindles for all students. That was nice because instead of making copies, I was scanning things and saving them as pdfs.
James is a retired band director who still enjoys teaching half time and speaking and creating content the other half. Invite him to present at your event – www.jamesdivine.net. This is an excerpt from his soon to be published book “Almost Everything I’ve Learned About Teaching Band.”