In many schools, the sight of teachers greeting students at the classroom door is as much a part of the daily routine as the chiming of the bell or the opening of the register. Having never before worked in a place where this was a whole-school policy, yet having heard many educational researchers singing its praises, I decided to try it in my own classes this term.

The first reason such a practice is advocated is behaviour management: your presence at the door hurries dawdlers, instructs shirts to be tucked in and dials the volume down from corridor to classroom.

Secondly, as practitioners such as Doug Lemov argue, it promotes good relationships. If you follow Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion religiously, then every student crossing your threshold should be greeted by their name, ideally a personal comment and possibly a handshake.

Thirdly, it goes hand in hand with a readily available “do now” starter (recapping prior learning or introducing the topic of today’s lesson), which students complete individually when they enter the room.

This all sounds wonderful in theory, especially if, as at my school, students travel huge distances between lessons and arrival times are staggered. But in practice it proved tricky. For starters, I faced as many issues with my own arrival time as with that of my students. To implement the policy effectively, it needed to be clear that they had to wait for me to arrive before entering the room. That’s asking a lot if the same is not prescribed by every other teacher.

The issue of time also fed into the practice itself. I couldn’t bring myself to embrace the American-style handshake of Teach Like a Champion, and even greeting every student by name felt overly lengthy in a class of 25.

Also, I found myself questioning when I should leave the door. Do the real latecomers still get the same personalised greeting at the expense of time for those students who have already been there for seven minutes, and who have already completed the do-now starter and extension thinking? In my classrooms, where the door is at the back of the room, at which point should I move to the front and begin the lesson?

It turned out that my younger students were consistently the most receptive to a greeting at the door and being directed towards a clear starter task. It definitely helped to make the beginning of their lessons more purposeful.

However, overall, my experience has indicated that if teachers are serious about the potential for routine greetings to transform classroom culture, then a whole-school embrace of the policy seems the only way forward. As a lone experiment, it hasn’t made quite the impact I had wished for, and I reluctantly waved it off into the rather crowded intervention sunset.

Katherine Burrows is an English teacher in Oxfordshire

This article originally appeared in the 6 December 2019 issue under the headline “Wave goodbye to greetings at the door”.