Proceduring Process

Whew.

Let me begin with this: I'm finally ready to start. Having moved in from Jersey the week before school began, it has taken me until now to finally get situated, organized and to get rid of that terrible fog of not knowing where everything was or what I needed to do next. It is truly a relief.

I was, interestingly, startled with a simple idea as I was finally putting giving everything a place and putting everything in them. Something many of you know and have known for years (as I have, to a degree) and perhaps some of you have even implemented with success. As I was trying to motivate myself in the usual way to "keep myself organized" with the same bored self-talk and rhetoric, admonishing, threatening and encouraging myself to "just keep it clean," I began to feel that same dread that always comes in a clean room. I remember life will happen, tired and apathetic days will come, and two or three weeks from now I'll have to start all over again.

But, this time there was something new. In observing classrooms this semester, both the good and the works in progress (hopefully), one theme continues to resurface again and again: Procedures are important. Teachers who have them seem to be able to move effortlessly from lesson to lesson, student to student, and task to task. Those who don't (or haven't found a way to implement the ones they have) are struggling and sometimes begging for the students attention and cooperation.

Procedures are important. That was the thought. If they are so important in the classroom for classroom management, teacher success and (thus, in theory) student success, why not start trying a few on now? Why not start making some procedures for my life so I can learn what it's like to live and work with them?

I'm still at the start and I haven't written any down yet (that's on my to-do list), but I have noticed that my initial reaction is to pull away from them. Procedures and protocols are tiresome and oppressive, at first. They sometimes tell me that I can't do what I want to do right now and ask me to look further down the line. For instance, I sometimes want to walk into my room, kick off my shoes, toss my bag down and go straight to Hulu (online television), but my procedure is to empty my bag, hang up my keys, put away my shoes and check my to-do list. That's not what I want or what is natural at first. But, I have hope that given time and practice, they eventually will become easier and more second-nature (plus, when I break a protocol, I have to give myself 10 pushups -- which is kind of a win - win, when you think about it).

Learning how to implement procedures that I have to follow is fun not only because I'm learning how to look for situations that require them and then creating them, but I'm also learning how it feels to follow them. It takes time. It's hard. It's uncomfortable. If this is what we are going to be asking our students to do, I am thankful to be figuring out the kinks now. I am seeing how important it is to have procedures, how hard it is to adopt them and understanding why it is so important for students to own them -- if I didn't have the intrinsic motivation to keep them, I wouldn't. It would be easy to let them go. For now, I'm learning how to see the need and fill it with procedures. Hopefully I will learn how to encourage student ownership and the development of intrinsic motivation as I go along.