Why a well-run classroom doesn’t run on stickers
Before I was a teacher, I was a Child and Youth Worker.
I spent years in self-contained classrooms working with students whose behaviour most teachers had never encountered — and I was good at it. I understood escalation, de-escalation, trauma responses, and how to keep a room from blowing up. I had the training, the experience, and the confidence to back it up.
So when I made the transition into classroom teaching, I walked in certain of one thing: behaviour wasn’t going to be my problem.
I was wrong.
January of My First LTO
It was Grade 4. My first real classroom. And by January, I had lost them.
I was using a clip chart — that classic behaviour management tool where students move their clip up for good choices and down for bad ones. I thought I knew what I was doing. I’d set expectations on day one. I’d been consistent with consequences. I had all the pieces.
Except it wasn’t working. The clip chart was giving bad behaviour the most attention in the room. Students who were struggling were being publicly called out, over and over. And the rest of the class? They were watching. Learning that disruption got a reaction.
By mid-year things had fallen apart badly enough that I asked for outside support. Behaviour specialists came in, observed my classroom, and sat down with me to debrief.
What they told me stopped me cold.
It wasn’t my behaviour management that was the problem.
It was my systems.
The Real Problem Nobody Tells You About
Here’s what I hadn’t done: I hadn’t trained my students.
How do you line up? How do you get paper? What do you do when you finish early? How do you signal that you need help? How do you transition from one activity to the next without the whole room unravelling?
I had described these things — maybe once, in September. I had assumed that because I’d said the words, students knew what to do.
They didn’t.
And when they did things wrong, I reacted. But I had never actually taught them the right way in the first place. I was managing behaviour that my own lack of systems had created.
The clip chart came down. And I got to work building something that actually worked.
What Systems Actually Are
A system isn’t a rule. A rule tells students what not to do. A system tells them exactly what to do — and makes the right choice the obvious, automatic, easy choice.
Systems are the routines that govern every transition, every procedure, every repeated moment in your day. They answer the questions students are silently asking dozens of times a day:
What do I do when I walk in? Where do I put my finished work? What does getting started look like? How do I get a pencil without interrupting the lesson? What happens when I’m done before everyone else?
When those questions have clear, practised answers, students stop improvising. And when students stop improvising, you stop reacting.
That’s the shift. And it changes everything.
The Lesson I’ve Carried Ever Since
I’ve thought about this a lot beyond the classroom too. In running Madly Learning, I’ve had to learn the same thing all over again — that in order for a business to run well, you have to define the systems and processes that govern how things work. Without them, you’re managing chaos every single day. With them, the work runs itself and you focus your energy on the things that actually need you.
The classroom is no different.
When your systems are working, you stop managing the day-to-day. The systems manage the day-to-day for you. What’s left for you to manage are the genuine exceptions — the hard moments, the unexpected situations, the individual students who need something more. Not whether kids know how to get a pencil.
That’s not a small thing. That’s the difference between a classroom that exhausts you and a classroom that energises you.
What This Looks Like in Practice
So what does it actually take to build systems that work? Here’s what I’ve learned:
Teach the routine, don’t just describe it. There’s a massive difference between telling students what a routine is and actually teaching it the way you’d teach a math concept. Model it. Show them the right way and the wrong way. Talk through your thinking out loud. Then practise it — not once, but many times, until it’s automatic.
Be specific enough that a substitute could run it. If your routine only works because you know what you mean, it’s not a system yet. Write it out step by step. If step three is “students get settled,” that’s not specific enough. What does settled look like? Where are they sitting? What’s in their hands? What are their eyes doing?
Plan for re-teaching. Routines drift. They drift after long weekends, after report cards, after anything that disrupts the normal rhythm of the week. The teachers whose classrooms run smoothly all year aren’t the ones who set routines in September and never touched them again. They’re the ones who noticed the drift early and re-taught before it became a problem.
Acknowledge when it’s working. This sounds obvious but it gets skipped constantly. When your entry routine is running beautifully, say so. Students need to know what right looks like just as much as they need to know what wrong looks like — maybe more.
Start with your highest-priority routines. You can’t build everything at once. Look at your day and ask: where does things most often go sideways? That’s where your first system needs to go. Transitions between activities, entry from recess, and independent work time are usually the biggest culprits in Grades 3–6.
A Note on Rewards
I want to be clear about something, because I know a lot of teachers reading this use Kudos Club or other classroom reward systems — and I do too.
Rewards are not systems. They support systems that already exist. A classroom reward program works beautifully when students know what they’re being rewarded for — when the expectations are clear, the routines are established, and the reward is recognising students for meeting a standard they genuinely understand.
When rewards are doing the heavy lifting because the systems aren’t there, they don’t work. They become transactional, inconsistent, and exhausting to maintain. The clip chart was my version of this. I was reacting to behaviour instead of building the conditions that would prevent it.
Build the systems first. Then let your rewards celebrate the fact that they’re working.
Your Next Step
If any of this is resonating — whether you’re heading into September or you’re mid-year and something isn’t working — I want to make this as concrete as possible for you.
I put together a free Routine Planning Template that walks you through building an explicit teaching plan for your highest-priority routines. Not just what the routine is, but how you’ll teach it, how you’ll practise it, what feedback you’ll give, and exactly what you’ll do when it starts to slip.
It’s the kind of planning tool I wish I’d had in that first LTO. The one that would have saved me a very humbling January.
👉 [Download the free Routine Planning Template here]
Because here’s what I know now after years of teaching, and years of building a business that runs on systems: when the systems work, they manage themselves. And when the day-to-day manages itself, you get to focus on the parts of teaching that actually need you.
That’s what a well-run classroom feels like. And it’s available to every teacher — not just the ones who seem like they were born to do this.
