The First Days Matter: Building the Classroom You Want All Year

The first days of school are weird. Teachers have spent weeks arranging classrooms, labeling things that probably did not need labels, preparing materials, attending meetings about meetings, and convincing themselves that this will be the year they finally keep their desk organized. Then the kids arrive, and suddenly none of that matters nearly as much as what happens next.

We tend to think about the beginning of the school year as the time to establish procedures: where backpacks go, how students line up, when pencils may be sharpened, and exactly how many hand signals are required before a seven-year-old is permitted to use the restroom. Procedures matter, of course, but I think we sometimes confuse starting a well-managed classroom with starting a great classroom. Those aren't quite the same thing. In fact, one of my literacy pet peeves is confusing compliance with learning. A quiet classroom isn't necessarily a productive classroom, just as a busy classroom isn't necessarily an engaged one.

A classic study by Catherine Bohn, Alysia Roehrig, and Michael Pressley helps explain why that distinction matters. The researchers studied six primary-grade teachers during the opening days of school. Two were later identified as more effective based on student engagement and literacy growth, which allowed the researchers to look back at those first days and ask a fascinating question: What were those teachers doing differently from the very beginning? The answer wasn't simply that they had better rules or tighter procedures. They were deliberately creating the conditions for learning.

The more effective teachers conveyed greater enthusiasm, worked to involve all children, offered well-planned activities, listened carefully to students, communicated consistently high and positive expectations, used specific praise, encouraged self-regulation, and deliberately developed a sense of community. Bohn, Roehrig, and Pressley's study was small and observational, so we shouldn't turn it into the Ten Commandments of Back-to-School Teaching. One study rarely deserves that kind of treatment. But the patterns they documented are worth thinking about, particularly because they connect so well with what we know about engagement, belonging, expectations, and effective literacy instruction.

The First Days Are Already Instruction

Perhaps the most important implication is that the first days aren't something we have to get through before the real teaching begins. They are teaching. While we're explaining where folders go and how students should transition to the carpet, children are learning much bigger things about the classroom. They're figuring out whether their teacher knows them, whether their ideas matter, what happens when they make a mistake, whether reading is something people enjoy or merely complete, and whether this room contains a group of children who happen to share a teacher or an actual community of learners.

"The first days aren't something we have to get through before the real teaching begins. They are teaching."

That means I wouldn't spend the first week simply telling students about the classroom I eventually hope to create. I'd let them experience it. If collaboration will matter all year, let them collaborate on the first day. If discussion matters, give them something worth discussing. If reading matters, read something great. If writing matters, write. If creativity matters, create something. If laughter matters — and I think it should — give them a reason to laugh. The first week shouldn't be an orientation to the classroom that will eventually exist once we've finished going over all 37 procedures. It should be the first authentic experience of that classroom.

Let Them See That You Actually Like Reading

One of the simplest findings from Bohn and colleagues is also one of my favorites: the more effective teachers conveyed enthusiasm for reading and writing. Students are constantly figuring out what adults value, and we don't necessarily have to tell them. They watch us. If the first literacy experience of the year is a diagnostic assessment followed by a worksheet, children learn something about what reading is going to mean in our classroom. If we grab a book and say, "Okay, you HAVE to hear this," they learn something very different.

This connects directly to another of my literacy pet peeves: treating engagement as though it's something extra. Engagement isn't the cotton candy we hand out after children finish eating the vegetables of "real" instruction. It's part of effective instruction. Rigorous teaching and engaging teaching aren't competing approaches. Students are much more likely to sustain the difficult work of learning when they see some purpose, interest, curiosity, or joy in what they're doing.

So start that way. Read the book you love. Tell them why you love it. Share something strange you learned. Write something funny together. Let students discover during the first week that literacy in this classroom is going to involve thinking, talking, creating, laughing, and occasionally wondering what in the world their teacher is doing.

Build a Team, Not Just a Seating Chart

The more effective teachers in the Bohn et al. study also worked to involve all children and listened carefully to students' thoughts and needs. To me, that gets at something deeper than classroom management. Children need to feel that they belong to something.

When I taught elementary school, my students were the Youngenites. We had traditions, inside jokes, celebrations, and some things that probably made very little sense to anyone who walked into the room at the wrong moment. Occasionally we froze in the hallway because the principal was secretly a T-Rex and, as everyone knows, T-Rexes cannot see things that don't move. None of that appeared in my district curriculum guide. Somehow we survived.

I've written about this in 10 Easy Ways to Turn Your Classroom into a Team. Give the class a name. Invent a chant. Create a secret handshake. Celebrate small accomplishments. Give ordinary things extraordinary names. Establish one weird tradition. End the day together. None of these ideas is revolutionary, and none substitutes for excellent instruction. That's precisely the point. Creating community doesn't have to require an elaborate program, a purchased curriculum, or three days of team-building activities involving yarn.

The little things accumulate. They create shared experiences, and shared experiences create identity. Eventually students stop thinking only in terms of my desk, my work, my grade and begin recognizing that they're part of a group. That matters instructionally because learning requires risk. Students have to answer questions when they aren't completely certain, read aloud before they're perfect, share writing that isn't finished, ask for help, disagree with classmates, and sometimes fail publicly. Those things are easier to do in a classroom where students feel known and valued.

Set the Bar High and Then Help Them Reach It

The more effective teachers also communicated high, positive expectations. Both words matter. High expectations without adequate support can become frustration. Support without meaningful challenge can become lowered opportunity. Good teaching lives in the space between the two: I believe you can do difficult things, and I'm going to give you what you need to do them.

That principle connects directly to our work with struggling readers that I discussed in What If Struggling Readers Need Harder Books?. The conventional response to a student who struggles with reading is often to make reading easier: easier text, easier task, easier vocabulary, easier everything. But easier isn't always the same as better. In our work, struggling readers successfully engaged with considerably more challenging texts when those texts were surrounded by deliberate instructional support, including modeling, echo reading, choral reading, partner reading, and performance.

"We do hard things here, but nobody is expected to do them alone."

I think that's a powerful message to establish during the opening days of school. Students should learn very quickly that struggle isn't evidence that they don't belong in the task. It simply tells us that support may be needed. That's a much healthier classroom culture than one in which the strongest students consistently receive the most interesting work while struggling students are sentenced to years of simplified texts and remedial-looking worksheets.

Praise Something, Not Just Someone

Another difference documented in the study involved praise. The more effective teachers used specific praise and recognized concrete examples of students doing things well. That's a small distinction with important instructional consequences. "Great job!" is pleasant, but it doesn't tell a child very much. "I noticed that you went back and reread when that sentence didn't make sense" identifies a behavior that the student can understand and repeat.

The opening days provide countless opportunities to do this because every specific acknowledgment also helps define the culture. You can point out that someone gave a classmate time to finish an idea, disagreed respectfully, tried a difficult word again rather than giving up, found evidence before answering, or noticed that somebody needed help. In those moments, praise becomes more than encouragement. You're publicly teaching the class what this community values.

Teach Self-Regulation, Not Just Obedience

The more effective teachers also encouraged students to become self-regulated, and I think this is one of the most important distinctions in the study. Compliance asks whether students will behave while the teacher is watching. Self-regulation asks whether students understand what to do when the teacher isn't.

That changes how we think about procedures. Yes, students need to learn routines, but they should also understand why those routines exist. We don't transition efficiently because teachers have a strange personal fascination with orderly movement across the carpet. We do it because ten wasted minutes means ten fewer minutes available for reading, talking, creating, or learning. We listen when someone else speaks because their ideas matter. We take care of books because another reader deserves to enjoy them. We work independently because sometimes the teacher needs to give someone else extra support.

This is where my irritation with compliance masquerading as learning becomes especially relevant. Students can sit silently, complete worksheets, raise their hands at precisely the right angle, and look wonderfully "on task" without doing much meaningful thinking at all. The goal isn't to create the quietest classroom in the hallway. It's to create one in which students increasingly understand how to participate responsibly and productively without the teacher controlling every second.

Make Joy Part of the Architecture

And yes, I think children should laugh at school. That shouldn't be a controversial pedagogical position, but here we are.

Joy doesn't require turning every lesson into a game or spending Sunday night creating something elaborate for Monday morning. It can be a ridiculous class tradition, a terrible joke, a ten-second victory dance, invisible confetti, a funny read-aloud, or a name for something ordinary that only your class understands. In my classroom, I occasionally stood on my desk with a guitar and sang Weird Al songs. I cannot produce an effect size for this intervention. I also have no regrets.

These little moments connect back to the idea of building a team. The chant, handshake, nickname, celebration, or ridiculous tradition isn't really the point. The message underneath it is: You're one of us. When children feel that way, they're more willing to participate, take risks, struggle publicly, and try again. Joy and belonging aren't replacements for strong instruction. They help create the conditions in which strong instruction can work.

So, What Should Happen on Day One?

I wouldn't begin the year with a 47-item classroom-management checklist. I'd begin with a few larger goals in mind. Learn students' names and listen to them. Teach routines, but explain why they matter. Give students something genuinely interesting to do immediately. Let them see that you enjoy reading and writing. Create something — a name, tradition, joke, ritual, or shared experience — that begins turning a collection of students into a community. Set high expectations and provide the support students need to meet them. Notice specifically when students do things that strengthen the community. And make room for some joy.

"Start becoming the classroom you want to have in October on the first day of school."

Don't spend August performing an elaborate dress rehearsal for the classroom that will eventually appear once all the procedures have been mastered. If you want students discussing, collaborating, reading, writing, thinking, creating, laughing, and tackling difficult things in October, those things should already be visible in August.

Eventually you'll teach phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and everything else students need. You'll assess them, group them, regroup them, intervene, differentiate, reteach things you were absolutely certain everyone understood yesterday, and wonder how 23 pencils disappeared before lunch.

But before all of that, students are trying to answer a much more fundamental question: What kind of place is this?

The first days provide the answer. Show them that this is a place where reading matters, hard things are possible, help is available, their ideas count, people laugh, and they belong. Show them that their teacher expects a lot because their teacher believes they're capable of a lot.

Build that classroom first. The routines will follow.