Action Research

Action Research >> Routine is Less Routine Than We Realize

By Allan Doel, International School of Ulaanbaatar

Last year, for the first time in my career, I did not start the year working as a classroom teacher. I first entered the workforce at the International School of Ulaanbaatar (ISU), I took over 60% of a teacher’s load 6 weeks into the year and the last 40% after the first semester. This late start to the year led to a weird situation where I had classes that were mine that were totally unaccustomed to my expectations for the classroom. It took a while, but the first three classes slowly adapted and adjusted to their new teacher. However, when I took over the other 2 groups, I was again reminded of how important it was to establish routines at the beginning of the year. The process of trying to teach routines when the students are already halfway through the year was a frustrating proposition for them and myself.

I also realized that even when I start the year in my classroom, the nature of my students and international schools in general is very transitory. The dominant employers of expat students in our school starts and renews contracts at the beginning of the calendar year. This leads to a lot of students coming and going during the school year. For those students, it must be very frustrating and difficult to adjust to a new school and learn the routines that their classmates have already been doing for months. It became obvious to me that some of the explicit teaching of routine that we do at the beginning of the year should continue throughout the year to be reinforced for the students and help bridge the gap for new students.

My research was based around using the ATL skills in the MYP framework to teach routine in the classroom. Like most teachers, I teach routine as the beginning of the school year. However, I found myself rarely making a concrete effort to re-teach specific skills and areas that got sloppy as the year progressed. My project was designed to see if a consistent effort to re-teach students important aspects of the classroom routine (entering, exiting, submitting of homework, organization, etc.) would help reduce disruption, late submissions, and wasted efficiency in the classroom. In short, was time invested in re-teaching ATL skills through concrete lessons going to save me classroom instruction time in the long run?

The fluid nature of the classroom environment and sheer number of factors outside the control of the classroom teacher make it difficult to evaluate a direct cause and effect relationship. Those limitations aside, both the quantitative and qualitative data suggests that teaching routine through the ATL focus is beneficial to both students and the classroom teacher. My own observations on my time showed that I was gaining classroom instructional time, despite scheduling in ATL skill time in specific lessons. Student surveys and interviews also suggested that there was a positive effect noticed by the students. As student H wrote, “when I look at my class they are ready for the class and we are learning more things.” Student D wrote, “learning to use our time more wisely was one of the most useful skills.” Student P put the following in her reflection, “it has helped me because I always just sit there and not get my things our and wasted (sic) like 10 minutes of class time that I could have used.” Students are showing the connection between efficiency and getting more out of their learning experience. Student W writes that, “this has helped us get started faster and be more organized. In other classes, I noticed we have started to be quicker as time goes by.” This shows that for some students the skills and attitudes that they are learning are transferring to other classes. Although, my research was concentrated on specifically my class alone, it is exciting to see the effort benefiting the students outside of my classroom.

The takeaway of my action research is that routines only become routines, if we practice them, make them explicit in our teaching, and continue to reinforce them throughout the school year and life of our students. This is especially important with student populations that have frequent migrations in and out and the ATL skills of the MYP program are an excellent way to do so.

my labyrinth Student Poem >>

some fear the prospects of wandering in the foreign mess, tangle, chaos–the lack of soundness ringing too loudly–but the labyrinth of your mind is everything i wanted to be trapped in. can one ever be confined in something more beautiful than the very existence of being and consciousness from which you stem?

maybe the growing mass of fallen petals will one day tell.