Episode 383: Fix Chaotic Transitions With One Simple Procedure

Today’s Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode is all about turning chaos into calm. If transitions in your middle school classroom feel loud, rushed, or all over the place, this episode is for you. We’re breaking down one simple, repeatable procedure you can put in place to bring clarity, consistency, and calm to your transitions—without adding more to your plate. Small shift, big impact. Let’s get into it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Today I am talking about how to fix chaotic transitions with one simple procedure. This is what I used to use in my classroom. I use it in fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, high school, all of the grades. And it works like a charm. So I know that this time of year can be difficult with behavior. And I think sometimes just simple classroom structures and having like not just boundaries, but um what's the word I'm looking for? Just containment in a in a capacity in place makes all the difference with your classroom management so that you have time to actually focus on doing what you want to do, which is teach and talk about literature and writing. All right, let's dive into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher digital planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. Okay, so this is gonna be a relatively short episode and will hopefully just be like a quick little fix for you in your classroom. And I'm just gonna share exactly what I did and hopefully you can do it too. So, first things first is that this procedure for transitions only works if you have some sort of whole class classroom management strategy in place. So I used to use the 15 minutes um classroom management strategy. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll include a link for you in the show notes to go watch my YouTube video on that. It's like six or seven minutes long, and it's my one of my most watched YouTube videos over the course of however many years we've been publishing to YouTube. And it's the simplest classroom management strategy. So if you don't have one, use mine. But you need to have a whole classroom reward system in place in order for this transition strategy to work. So essentially how it goes, the transition strategy is I will first let my students know exactly what we are going to do. So if, for example, let's say that I'm about to move them from whole class into small groups and I want them to get started working on a specific thing. Maybe it is classroom discussion posters that their group is responsible for answering one of the questions and presenting it to the class. So I will let them know before you head to your small group, I need you to have X, Y, and Z with you. When you get to your group, success looks like beginning your discussion, right? Or whatever it might be, whatever success looks like for that particular thing that you want them to go work on. So I'm telling them what they need. I'm telling them what success looks like so that once they get to that place, they know how to start and what my expectation is. And then I tell them, you have 30 seconds to make it happen. I don't care how loud the classroom gets, or sometimes I would say this has to be done in absolute silence. And then I would tell them before they even go do that, the reward for doing it exactly as I outlined is a minute towards your time, which would be like a huge reward in my 15-minute strategy, or maybe it's 30 seconds towards your class time. And I would say, okay, on your marks, get set, go. And then it's either chaos or a complete silence as they move into that next transition. And I let them know as the time is counting down, you have 15 seconds left, you have 10 seconds left, you have five seconds left. Now I know you might have a timer to put on your board, and that's fine. I just wasn't that fancy. I liked telling them out loud so that they didn't really necessarily know how much time they had left. It felt like it created a different sort of pressure for them. But I know that like a countdown timer like that really helps my son with transitions. And granted, he's eighth, but that doesn't mean that it's not usable for middle schoolers as well. And then once they get to their next activity that they're supposed to be working on and it's done perfectly, I will let them know that they earned their seconds towards their time, et cetera. Now, another easy thing that I do, easy procedure that I would use with transitions. So let's say that I want to get my whole class's attention. They're working in small groups, they've made the transition successfully, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, but I forgot to tell them something and I just need everybody's attention. Well, in our younger grades, right, we have like one, two, three eyes on me, one, two eyes on you. We can use that with our middle schoolers. However, what I did in high school and middle school that was extremely helpful is I would hold up my hand, um, my arm rather, with all five fingers up, and I would say you're quiet in five, you're quiet in four, you're quiet in three, you're quiet in two, you're quiet in one. And at that point, everyone would be quiet. If everyone is quiet, when I finish counting down, they also would get seconds towards their time. And what I like about that is there's a verbal reminder, right? So there's an auditory reminder for students, but then because I'm holding my hand up and I'm moving my fingers down from five, four, three, two, one, there's also a visual cue, too, for our students who need the visual cue as well. And that's extremely helpful for a lot of our students, even in middle school, that I think we don't necessarily think about or consider how much of a difference that can make to see that visual cue just on your hands. And what I love about that is I'm not asking the class to be quiet. I'm not asking them to repeat something back to me. Like it's just a very simple way to get the class to quiet down. And we're rewarding them, right, for the good behavior that we want them to do. And so those are two very simple, I know I said one. The main one procedure that I want you to do is the first one where you tell them what they need, you tell them what success looks like, you tell them what the reward is, and you say go, and they have that period of time and they get it done. That is how you fix the transitions. But to get our class to be quiet, that other procedure is extremely helpful as well. So it's a two-for-one little bonus piece of advice there. So I know this was a short episode, but I really hope that this helps you. It is so simple. Classroom management techniques or transition techniques or procedures that we use with our students do not have to be some crazy thing that takes forever to understand. Sometimes they're the simplest things that are just under our nose. And I know how important creating procedures around transitions is because I have a child who very much struggles with transitions in my household. And so we just have certain procedures in place that we always follow. And the consistency is what is key. I have to be consistent in order to ensure that this particular procedure around transitions is successful for him, because I need to set him up for success because I'm the adult in the room, right? Even though sometimes it's really hard to be the adult in the room. So I hope this episode helps you. And then definitely make sure that you listen to our bonus episode that's coming out later this week. If you are an EB teacher, or maybe you're not an EB teacher and you're thinking about becoming one, later on, I think Thursday, January 15th, I'm releasing a bonus episode about how to use EB resources with your district mandated curriculum. So I know a lot of teachers want to use EB, but they have a mandated curriculum that they have to use. And so it's like, how do you use and marry the two? That is what that episode is going to be about. So definitely make sure that you check that one out. All right, you guys. Here's to a great rest of your day, and I'll see you next time on the podcast. Bye, everyone.