With many teachers facing the prospect of moving between classrooms again this term, there will be whole new behaviour management challenges to overcome.

If you’re new to nomadic teaching, this can cause a lot of stress; not only do you now have to worry about making sure that students follow one-way systems and wear their masks when they’re supposed to, but you also have to do it without the strategies that always worked well in your own classroom.

Behaviour management: How teachers can adjust to moving rooms

1. Start with silence

The chances are that you’ll be arriving at lessons after the students, unless the timetable gods have bestowed you a great honour. This immediately impacts on the classroom dynamic. 

Where students were previously entering your territory at the start of a lesson, it may feel more like you’re entering theirs. To combat any complications from this change in dynamic, we need to get ahead of the problem. This means that the starts of lessons need to be planned in explicit ways that are designed to reassert your control of the room. 

One way to do this is by making sure that your starter task is simple and allows you to enforce your expectations. Getting students to spend the first five minutes working on a silent retrieval task can give you time to get yourself sorted, whilst ensuring that your expectations are met. 

Requesting silence for the task makes things black and white, and means it is easier to manage behaviour. Use techniques such as Doug Lemov’s strategy of being seen to be looking and noticing to help portray an air of confidence and control, even if you’re still catching your breath after legging it up four flights of stairs and you’re not entirely sure which year group you’re even teaching yet.

Read more:

• Social distancing: How will practical lessons work?
• Guidance: Five tips for newly mobile teachers
• Covid: How to ventilate your classroom properly

2. Keep it simple

Now, more than ever before, teachers need clear, simple routines in their lessons. Now is not the time for complicated speed-dating activities (was it ever?). Think about the core aspects of your lessons and how you can ensure that they are simple, clear and will run smoothly. 

A silent starter, followed by some explicit instruction, some reading and then a knowledge application task, as a general lesson outline, will help you keep things calm and focused. Stress and anxiety are likely to be high in the coming months - for both teachers and students. Now is the time to make things as simple for yourself as possible to avoid fraught or stressful atmospheres that won’t lead to a conducive learning environment. 

3. Set routines for everything

There are key tasks that need to be completed in every lesson. When you’re teaching in unfamiliar environments, you need to consider how these will work in the different work spaces you’ll have, whilst also ensuring that everyone adheres to distancing guidelines.

How do you want students to hand out work? How do you want them to pack up? What about the way your lesson ends? What about when someone runs out of paper? These are all questions you will need to consider for each of the different environments that you’re in. 

Once you’re clear on what has to happen, you will need to clearly and explicitly teach and model these expectations regularly, in every lesson. Insist that every student follows them, and be meticulous in enforcing them. 

You might also consider what other things you want to happen in your classroom as routine. For example, students knowing that all written tasks are completed in silence, or that all paired tasks involve notes being made, can help you create a classroom environment where students behave in more routine ways. 

Make sure you take some time to check out each of the classrooms that you’ll be teaching in ahead of your first lesson so that you can plan for any unexpected problems. Trust me when I say this; I’m an English teacher and not realising that a room was a design and technology room until I arrived and found there was no flat space for students to write on was not a particularly joyful moment for me.

4. Be more consistent than ever

Being consistent with following up poor behaviour will be more important now than ever. Some students may seek to take advantage of the significant stress teachers may be under and test the boundaries more than usual. Equally, students have been out of education, and the rules and regulations that go with it, for some time now. They will need clear and consistent approaches to help them begin to regulate their behaviour within the expectations of your school.

Simple things like ensuring that you have a seating plan will help you maintain a sense that you’re in control of the classroom.

However you’re preparing for the return to school, make sure that you invest some time in getting key things in place in terms of behaviour. The demands placed on staff moving between “bubble groups” are significant and the coming months are going to be challenging. Take the time to get things in place now so that you can make life easier later. 

Amy Forrester is an English teacher and director of pastoral care (key stage 4) at Cockermouth School in Cumbria