Practice Makes Predictable: Teaching Routines, Procedures, and Collaboration from Day One
- Aug 4
- 7 min read
Posted by: Emily DesJardins, M.A., SpED, UDL/AT Consultant, Open Access
Last August, we explored how to set up your classroom with UDL in mind, designing the physical environment to proactively reduce barriers and create a welcoming space for every learner. But once the furniture is arranged, the labels are posted, and the calming corner is stocked, there's one more piece of design work that often makes or breaks the year: the invisible architecture of routines, procedures, and clear expectations.
A beautifully designed classroom can still feel chaotic if students don't know how to move through it. And the most thoughtful group work activity can fall flat if students have never been taught, and given the chance to practice, what collaboration actually looks, sounds, and feels like. That's where the first few weeks of school become some of the most important instructional time of the entire year.
One of the components of UDL I connect with most deeply is the idea of proactively planning rather than reacting in the middle of chaos. When we plan ahead for the challenges we know will arise, knowing the variability of our learners, we save ourselves and our students so much frustration down the road.
One of the biggest concerns we hear from teachers right now is the rise in contextually inappropriate behavior.* (See footnotes for a definition of this phrase). Our team gets asked the same question over and over again: how do we connect UDL to supporting desired classroom behaviors? When it comes to setting up your school year with that goal in mind, the most important place to start is by getting clear on your expectations.
What do you want group work to look like in your classroom? What do you want the beginning and end of the school day to look like? What about transitions from one activity to another? Who's in charge of what? Once you've sat down and mapped all of that out, then it's time to consider how you're going to teach those expectations to your students.
UDL reminds us that in order to learn something, humans need to be engaged, they need to perceive the information, and they need to be able to show their understanding. And because we know that every human learns differently, we need to build multiple ways for our students to engage with, perceive, and demonstrate their understanding of classroom expectations, just as we would for any academic content.
If you're reading this and thinking, "Oh my gosh, this is going to take forever," you're right. We're going to spend extra time up front so that expectations are crystal clear and so the classroom is full of visual supports that remind students long after the lesson is over. The payoff is huge: students who know exactly what's expected of them are students who can fully engage in learning.
Teach Procedures Like You Teach Content
It can be tempting, especially in the rush of the first week, to tell students how things will work in your classroom and assume the message landed. But expectations that are only spoken once are expectations that will need to be re-spoken, usually in the middle of a transition, often with frustration in our voice. Procedures and routines deserve the same intentional instructional design we give to any academic concept: a clear goal, a model, guided practice, feedback, and time to try again.
This is also where we get to lean fully into UDL. Setting expectations is not just a management task; it's a learning task. And like every learning task, our students come to it with variability. Some students will hear the directions and have them memorized by lunch. Others need to see it modeled. Others need to do it themselves before it sticks. Designing for that variability from day one prevents a whole host of "behavior" challenges that aren't really behavior challenges at all; they're access challenges.
See It, Hear It, Try It, Talk About It
When we teach expectations, we want our students to encounter them in multiple ways. Think of it as building four entry points into the same routine:
See it. Model the routine yourself. Show a short video of students doing it well. Post visuals: anchor charts, photos of students using the procedure correctly, icons next to each step. Visual supports placed around the classroom give students friendly reminders throughout the day, without you having to be the one delivering them every time.
Hear it. Narrate the routine out loud as you model. Talk through what you're thinking and why. Have students rehearse the steps verbally with a partner.
Try it. Give students the chance to physically practice: walking to line up, getting out materials, transitioning to groups, using the calming corner. Practice the procedure when the stakes are low so it's automatic when the stakes are high.
Talk about it. Build in time for students to discuss the expectations before they need to use them. A quick daily check-in: "What does our group work look like today? What's one thing you'll do to contribute?" turns rules from something done to students into something owned by students.
This is multiple means of engagement, representation, and action & expression in action, applied to something as foundational as "how we line up" or "how we share supplies."
Practicing Collaboration in a Group
One of the routines we most often forget to actually teach is how to work in a group. We assign group work and hope for the best, and then we're surprised when students argue over who does what, when one student carries the load, or when another disappears entirely. In a recent episode of the Open Access UDL Unlocked Podcast, Collaboration for All, Anne Grant talks about how much of successful group work comes down to how explicitly you teach the mechanics of talking to each other, not just the content of what students are discussing. Rather than a general pair-share where students negotiate who goes first, Anne assigns specific roles from the start: Partner A always speaks first, Partner B always responds. She also gives students sentence frames to lean on, so that even a student who isn't sure what to say has a scaffold to start from and can fill in their thinking as the conversation goes.
What Anne names is exactly the shift we want to make: instead of assuming students already know how to structure a conversation with a partner or group, we build the structure for them first. Give every student a defined role in the exchange (who talks first, who responds). Give every student language to fall back on (a sentence starter, a repeatable question stem). By the time real academic group work begins, students aren't guessing at how to participate; rather they already have both the structure and the words to do it.
Let the Walls Do Some of the Teaching
One of the most powerful, and most underutilized, tools we have for reinforcing expectations is the classroom environment itself. Once students have been taught a routine, the supports for that routine shouldn't disappear; they should live on the walls, on the tables, on the doors.
Visual supports do two important things at once. First, they hand a piece of the cognitive load back to the environment, freeing students to focus on learning instead of trying to remember what to do next. Second, and this is the part we don't talk about enough, they let teachers redirect without speaking. A quiet point to the "voice levels" chart, a tap on the steps of the group work poster, a gesture toward the visual schedule, all of these communicate the expectation without an auditory redirection.
For many students, especially those who carry shame around being "the one who always gets corrected," that silent redirect is a game changer. It preserves dignity. It reduces defensiveness. It keeps the relationship intact. And it builds learner agency because the student is the one reading the cue and making the choice, not just responding to an adult voice.
Build the Daily Habit of Naming Expectations
Even the strongest visual supports work best when paired with consistent, predictable opportunities to talk about expectations before they're needed. Before students start independent work, before they move into groups, before a transition, pause.
Ask. "What does this look like? What does it sound like? What will you do if you get stuck?"
This thirty-second routine accomplishes a lot:
It activates students' memory of the expectation rather than letting them discover it through correction.
It positions expectations as something the class holds, not something the teacher enforces.
It gives students whose strength is verbal processing a chance to rehearse, and gives students who learn by hearing peers a chance to absorb.
It surfaces misunderstandings before they become "a behavior issue."
This is what tier-one proactive support actually looks like in practice. Not a poster on the wall and a reminder when things go sideways, but a living, daily habit of co-constructing what the next ten minutes will look like.
Starting the Year With Intention
The first weeks of school are tempting to fast-forward through. The curriculum is calling, the pacing guide is real, and it can feel like we don't have time to spend three days practicing how to walk to the carpet. But every minute spent teaching, modeling, and practicing routines in August is a minute we get back, many times over, in October, January, and May.
When students see the expectation, hear the expectation, try the expectation, and talk about the expectation, we're not just preventing behavior problems. We're showing them, in the most concrete way possible, that this classroom is designed for them to succeed in it.
Wishing you a calm, intentional, and joyful start to the school year.
*We use the phrase “contextually inappropriate behavior" instead of simply "negative behavior" because no behavior is inherently good or bad; talking, moving, or seeking attention can all be perfectly appropriate in one moment and disruptive in another, depending on the context. Even something as extreme as tackling someone is expected and celebrated on a football field, but obviously not appropriate in a classroom.
References:
Grant, A. (Guest). (2025). Collaboration for All, UDL Unlocked Podcast Episode
