A class of children line up outside a classroom while their teacher stands at the door. As they approach the doorway, they are each greeted in a different way. One child gets a high five; the next a fist bump. With some, it looks like the teacher and pupil are playing an odd version of rock, paper, scissors.
This is classroom greetings: the special handshake edition.
Search “classroom greetings” on social media, and there’s no shortage of videos of teachers around the world going beyond a simple “hello everybody” at the start of the day or lesson.
But, in reality, do greetings make a difference to teaching and learning? And if so, what’s the best greeting to use?
Research in this area is limited. However, there are a few papers that provide an insight into the effect greetings have.
In 2022, Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex, conducted research that looked at the benefit of recognising and greeting students, even if you don’t remember their names.
Students were split into three groups: the first were given name cards to display on their desks (so their names were learned), the second were verbally greeted at the door and the third had neither. Those in the first two groups reported a stronger relationship with Sandstrom, which in turn predicted greater interest, enjoyment, relatedness and belonging in the lessons.
“In the greeting group, I didn’t always know their name, but by just standing at the door and verbally welcoming them into the classroom, it made them feel like they were being seen,” Sandstrom explains. “With the name cards, I think they appreciated that I knew some names, even if it wasn’t theirs, because they saw that I was making an effort and that mattered to them.”
The research was conducted in higher education, and therefore we should be wary about applying the findings to primary and secondary classrooms. However, it does suggest there is a benefit to be gained from personally greeting students - and this finding is echoed by other small-scale studies.
For example, one paper published in 2018 by researchers in the US investigated the impact a “positive greetings at the door” (PGD) strategy had on middle school students’ (aged 11-13) classroom behaviour. The strategy involves a teacher standing at the door, positively interacting with students through either verbal interactions - “thanks for walking in so quietly” or “hello, how’s it going?” - or physical interactions: high five, thumbs up, pat on the back.
The research found that the PGD strategy led to “significant improvements in academic engagement time and reductions in disruptive behaviour”.
When surveyed, teachers said they found the PGD strategy to be feasible, reasonable and acceptable - meaning they were more likely to actually use it.
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There’s also evidence that greetings can benefit certain students in particular. Another paper, published in 2013 by researchers at Oklahoma State University, takes a case study approach to investigating the impact of teacher greetings specifically on students who have been identified as demonstrating “problem behaviours”.
The researchers looked at three such students and found that teacher greetings increased the amount of time they spent on on-task behaviour, from 45 per cent of the specified time to 72 per cent.
Going on the limited evidence that exists, then, greeting the members of your class individually before the lesson starts does seem to have a positive effect in terms of behaviour and engagement.
Many teachers would say that this chimes with what they already know; it makes intuitive sense that taking the time to greet students helps to strengthen the relationships that underpin teaching and behaviour management.
It matters that greetings happen, then. But does it matter what form those greetings take? Are the teachers delivering secret handshakes in those viral videos setting an example that others should be following?
Owning the threshold
It’s important to note one thing that most of these videos have in common: the teacher is delivering greetings while standing at the door to their classroom, as pupils enter one at a time. According to teacher trainer Doug Lemov, this positioning matters. As he explains in his book Teach Like a Champion, it allows the teacher to “own the threshold”.
“Ideally you will find a way to greet your students by standing in the physical threshold of the classroom - astride the door, taking the opportunity to remind students where they are (they are with you now; no matter what the expectations are elsewhere, you will always expect their best), where they are going (to college) and what you will demand of them (excellence and effort),” he writes.
Speaking to Tes in 2020, Clay Cook, a co-author of the 2018 US paper mentioned earlier, echoed the importance of positioning.
“Standing at the door provides the opportunity to connect with kids relationally and to get on the front end of things by providing reminders of expectations as students transition into the environment, and restore any relationships with students whom the teacher may have had a negative interaction with the previous day,” he explains.
He adds that, while greetings should always be about “connection, pre-correction and restoration”, there are really no hard and fast rules.
Other research, however, suggests that the way in which the greeting is delivered does make a difference.
Maureen Boyd is a professor in the department of learning and instruction at the University of Buffalo. She observed greetings in a 2nd grade (Year 3) classroom in the US over two years; the resulting paper distilled 140 hours of observed interactions and found that greetings were really effective when they were “joyful, dynamic and robustly varied”.
During her time in the classroom, Boyd observed a variety of different greetings, from verbal ones whereby pupils were asked to say their own name in a silly way to physical ones whereby a handshake or other movement was used. There was also a “what’s the news?” greeting, whereby pupils had to share one thing that had happened to them that day.
Every Thursday the class also performed a “class handshake”. This started out as a single handshake between both the teacher and pupils, and pupil to pupil, but grew each week as pupils added new actions to it.
This was really effective in building a sense of community, says Boyd, because the class handshake was repeated, developed and ritualised. In fact, she says, when the teacher bumped into a child outside of school, in the supermarket, for example, they would do the handshake.
The importance of authenticity
Boyd’s observations suggest that pupils should be encouraged to greet one another, as well as being greeted by their teacher.
However, when it comes to teacher-pupil greetings, despite the variety she observed, Boyd did not find any one style of greeting to be more effective than any other.
“It’s not about which kind of greeting is best, but how and when it’s delivered,” she explains. “Greetings need to be authentic; the child needs to feel seen by their teacher and seen by others. They also need to be consistent. There wasn’t always time for a long greeting with every student; sometimes it was as simple as a ‘hello’, but crucially, it was never missed.”
The best way to greet a class, then, Boyd says, is in whatever way the teacher feels most comfortable with.
“It’s about what works best for you in your physical context, in the time that you have that day, for your personality and for your students,” she says.
It’s also important to consider the age of the pupils in your class, as this will determine how well a particular type of greeting goes down, she adds: “Older students wouldn’t respond well to the silly voices greeting, for example.”
For any age group, though, the key to success, Boyd stresses, is that greetings “are routine, but not procedural”.
Boyd’s research is limited in that it is observational with just one class, but Sandstrom agrees that authenticity is the most important aspect to any greeting.
“One of the advantages of having a custom greeting for each child is that it’s just yours; it’s not something that the teacher says to everyone, and that makes it really potent,” she says.
Individualising your greetings doesn’t need to be taken to the extreme, though.
“Creating an individual handshake takes time, so instead, teachers could ask a personalised question about [a child’s] family or interests, or make a positive comment to add that authenticity,” she concludes.
So, is there a right way to greet your class? While the research doesn’t provide us with a concrete answer, greeting children at the door seems to be a good place to start.
Beyond that, teachers shouldn’t feel the need to start devising special handshakes for every pupil. They can rest assured that a simple ‘hello’ or a smile will do, as long as those gestures are delivered with authenticity.
