Classroom Transition Paper

Setting: Our students are rising third graders (with a couple repeat third graders) and six students entered class in the morning. The video1 starts with me transitioning the students into the classroom through the threshold, and then transitioning the children to the carpet for Ms. Amat’s circle time. Mr. Aguila is primarily in charge of the morning transitioning, so we slightly adapted our normal morning routines so that I could facilitate the process. Mr. Aguilia is required by Gilmor to get the students from the cafeteria, but I took over the transition from the hallway. Since the first day, we have been using a threshold routine for our children in order to really set the expectation for the day and to prevent the children from storming …show more content…
Because this is a routine for me as well, I did not even think to mention it during my threshold transition. I think this shows the power of effective routines. We took the time to set up the routine, and now we are able to save time with our children in the morning because they are able to do it automatically. As Lemov identifies with engineer efficiency, this automatic procedure was both quick, simplistic and required very little narration on my part making it simply a background cog of our classroom culture (2015). Finally, I noticed that all students were confidently able to shake my hand and say good morning to me. While this is not a huge step, I think it represents that they understand the importance of the greeting and setting the expectations for the classroom on the first …show more content…
I was able to get him to come back to the threshold and greet me normally, but I do not think that I handle the situation in the most beneficial way. If I could go back, I would have had that student move all the way back into the hallway and greet me outside of the classroom to showcase the importance of the routine. Additionally, because I was anxious to move on with the rest of the class, I did not take the time to give the student a verbal warning/reminder about what the expectations were. I think it is imperative that I stress the seriousness of the threshold and hold him accountable to the expectations around those transitions. Additionally, I did not have strong MVPT directions established for these routines. Importantly, I failed to mention time for either of the two transitions that I used. Because the kids come in one at a time, I was unsure of how to structure the time limit. However, since I did not explicitly state the expectations some students took longer to do the transitions than is expected. In the moment I attempted to correct my mistake with positive narration, but I think doing more of the work upfront will help set a more exact expectation for the