Top of the Classroom

Watch a secondary classroom for one period and count the switches: warm-up to notes, notes to partner work, partner work to materials, materials to cleanup, cleanup to the bell. Each one takes a minute or two. Some take five. Across a week, those minutes add up to real instruction time, and they are also where most of the off-task behavior starts. Transitions are rarely what anyone thinks of as "teaching." They are, though. A class that moves between activities smoothly has been taught how to do it. Why transitions go sideways with teenagers It is usually not defiance. It is uncertainty. When students do not know exactly what happens next, where the materials are, or how long they have, they fill the gap with conversation and phones. Older students also do not like being herded. A transition that feels babyish, such as a clapping pattern built for younger kids, can get more eye-rolls than compliance. The fix is to make transitions predictable and to treat students as ...