routine

As a teacher, you’re probably well aware that you can’t control everything that your students do outside of the classroom. If you’ve had to shift to a remote school model and back during the pandemic, this restriction on your influence likely feels more profound than ever.

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, as an educator, you still possess a powerful level of influence as you speak into your students’ lives. This authority doesn’t have to be limited to purely academic pursuits, either — you can also help advise your pupils regarding some of the more important parts of daily living.

One of the most important of these aspects of life is allow your body to rest and recuperate each day. Here’s a quick breakdown of why sleep is such a critical part of the learning process, as well as a few tips to help encourage your students to embrace their slumber.

Teaching the Importance of Sleep

Sleep is a normal part of everyone’s routine. In fact, the average human spends 26 years sleeping throughout their life. They also tack on an extra seven years just trying to get to slumber land. In other words, the pursuit of sleep, not even sleeping itself, adds up to nearly one-fifth of the entire bedtime experience.

Whether you’re in REM sleep or you’re just starting to drift off, the time every person spends sleeping is a very important part of their life. As such, students must be made aware of this critical activity.

This has never been more important to teach — from the front of a classroom as much as in the home — than during the modern, technological era. The use of digital devices has seriously cut into both the quality and quantity of most people’s sleep.

Children, who represent one of the largest demographics of tech users, are particularly prone to the impact of technology on their sleep. Studies have shown that the use of any device before bed is statistically linked to using multiple devices before going to sleep as well as increased screen time in the middle of the night.

By emphasizing sleep in your lesson plan, you can begin to highlight the urgency of prioritizing sleep over screens. This can help children in multiple ways:

It gives them a chance to begin learning and applying discipline in their own lives.
It shows them the value of adopting and maintaining healthy habits.
It pushes them to compare the value of short-term satisfaction (i.e. with a screen) and long-term health (by sleeping).

In addition to helping children mature, encouraging better sleep can help with neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to learn and grow and has effects even into adulthood. One of the first things recommended to help maintain neuroplasticity is to get not just plenty of sleep, but quality sleep as well.

From physical benefits like neuroplasticity to developmental growth and establishing healthy habits, there are many reasons to make sleep part of your curriculum.

How to Encourage Better Sleep for Your Students

As a teacher, you can’t directly impact your students’ sleep. However, you can certainly empower them to get better sleep. Here are a few suggestions to help you do so.

Foster a Sense of Self-Awareness

Teaching self-awareness isn’t just something reserved for serious counseling sessions aimed at uncovering deeper issues. It can also impact your sleep. Explain to your students that their sleep can be impacted by many different factors, such as:

Anxiety and depression
Napping during the day
Caffeine too close to bed
Excessive screen time and blue light exposure
Eating and dietary concerns
Sleep disorders

Some of these are covered in other recommendations below. However, simply explaining the variety of potential sleep concerns can help your students begin to grasp how vast and complex the concept of “a good night’s sleep” can be.

Highlight the Essential Nature of Sleep Schedules

A sleep schedule is a crucial part of quality sleep. It helps a person’s body stay in a steady circadian rhythm. This naturally allows you to drift off at the same time every night and even sets your body’s biological clock to wake up at a consistent time in the mornings, as well.

Encourage your students to go to bed around the same time every night. This doesn’t have to be a strict activity, either — it can simply be a window of time, such as between 9:00 and 11:00.

Teach the Timing of Activities

There are many different activities that, when done right before bed, can mess with your ability to fall asleep as well as the quality of your slumber once you doze off. A few tips that you can share with students in this area include:

Planning your meals to avoid ingesting heavy foods right before bed
Avoiding caffeine right before turning off the lights
Unplugging and generally avoiding bright screens an hour or two before going to sleep
Scheduling your exercise early in the day to avoid waking up your body right before bedtime

Many of these activities are perfectly fine to partake in at the right time of the day. It’s their proximity to bedtime that can make a big difference in how a person rests. This knowledge can empower your students to order their lives in a manner that enhances rather than hinders their rest.

Promoting Healthy Habits

The digital age has made sleep more than just an important activity — it’s become an essential part of education. With infinite tech-based activities offered as a tempting alternative, students must be proactively taught the importance of prioritizing a good night’s sleep.

As a teacher, you have limited influence in your students’ lives. However, you have authority nonetheless. Make sure to do your part in the fight for sleep for each and every one of your students as they learn how to navigate the unique activities of the digital age.

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Routines are an important way to establish norms, set expectations, and otherwise build positive relationships in the classroom environment (and the workplace). They help everyone involved be on the same page.

Of course, these established patterns of behavior can also become ruts. Many know the dangers of approaching something “the way we’ve always done it,” especially in institutional situations like schools and districts. Even in our own individual classrooms and teaching practices, taking time to reflect on, and potentially renew, our practices can be powerful and can help revive your personal passion and energy and your teaching practices.

So let’s look at some ways to refresh our teaching by reviewing (or re-establishing) our routines, a skill that should be considered as you finish out the spring semester, reflect on your successes, and plan for next fall.

Defining the Why and How of Routines

At the outset of any project, it’s important to define why we undertake it and how we put it into practice. For classroom routines, that means analyzing our routines with this question in mind: Does this help students reach their full potential and reach it most efficiently? After all, routines are all about saving time, managing expectations, and making behavior choices easy for students.

Making the right choices easy for students also raises an important consideration. By defining procedures, are you teaching students a routine or are you simply announcing the rules?

Investing time in the teaching of classroom procedures is a classic example of proactive versus reactive management. As always, prevention is cheaper than remediation. But prevention is not free. You must invest “up front” if you want to reap the dividends for the remainder of the semester.
Dr. Fred Jones. “Rules, Routines, and Standards in Elementary and Secondary Grades.” Education World.

Managing Behavior and Investing Responsibility

By approaching routines, either established or new, by teaching your expectations, you save time trying to control a class later. For that reason, defining why you have routines and how to convey them is important. This way you can remove the guesswork and rely on students to take active responsibility for their own learning.

Behavior management is perhaps the most obvious “why” when it comes to laying out behaviors. In fact, there are many sources of inspiration for managing behavior specifically. But when it comes to reviewing those routines, make sure you take the “how” to heart.

Types of Routines

While setting expectations can happen through student-teacher agreements, syllabi, and more, routines come in many forms, beginning before students even set into the classroom.

Consider these questions. Do students have routines they follow?

How should students manage their traffic flow in and out of the classroom, library, or other learning space?
How should students behave when arriving to class?
How do students access learning materials? How are these materials kept or managed, online and off?
How is the class dismissed?

These seem like obvious functional questions, but the goals of each portion of the class period may be different, activities have different levels of commotion, and even the time of day might affect how you approach behavioral and procedural expectations.

All that is to say it’s vital to consider the type of routines you establish once you’ve defined your reasons behind them. Are the start and end of the class session the same? Should students behave the same way throughout? Are some routines solid and others flexible? A number of individual and student-centered considerations should be made to make routines well-understood and effective.

Revising the Rules

When thinking about rules versus routines, many argue that broad rules can be kept to a minimum, thus increasing a reliance on the active feedback of a routine.

Rules have consequences, and routines have reminders. What worked for me was far fewer rules and many, many more routines and procedures. …
All the other students are watching and expecting the follow through. If we just sigh, shake our head, and let it slide, students will not see being on time as a rule. We need to be selective when choosing that small handful of rules because those will need to be enforced.
This selective and thoughtful use of rules is one reason why applying a critical, active, and evolving lens to our routines is so useful. That way you can focus time and energy throughout the semester on what matters: Encouraging behaviors that lead to learning.
Rebecca Alber. “Rules and Routines in the Classroom.” Edutopia

Data Tools and Self Assessment

A number of tools exist to help you review and reignite your routines.

The Classroom Check-Up includes a full suite of worksheets and tools to help you complete and review your routines.

Check out three ways to bring data to bear on your routines here.

How you establish, review, and teach routines in your classroom. Sound off in the comments!

Image by Stefan Meller from Pixabay

Why Getting Sleep Is Important for Everyone