The Unteachables Podcast

#139: The exit routine your class [and you] desperately needs

• Claire English

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Let’s talk about the part of the lesson where the wheels often fall off — the final five minutes.
 You know the one. The bell's about to go, some students are packing up early, others are zoning out, and you’re standing at the door doing your best nightclub bouncer impression. 🚪🕺

In this final episode of the Kickstart series, we're talking exit routines — specifically, how to manage early finishers so the end of the lesson feels calm, purposeful, and controlled (instead of sweaty chaos).

I'll walk you through the exact routine I teach students every time they finish early — no matter the subject, age, or task. Plus, I’ll show you how to build a self-sustaining structure that keeps students engaged right up to the bell… without needing 10 clones of yourself to manage the room.

Because classroom management isn’t just about how you start — it’s also about how you finish.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why the last 5 minutes of your lesson matter more than you think
  • What’s really going wrong when early finishers cause chaos
  • The exact self-assessment routine I teach to anchor students in reflection
  • How to set up a simple “What to Do Next” system students follow on their own
  • 6 low-lift early finisher tasks that actually work (and require zero tech or prep)
  • Why this structure reduces disruptions and raises the quality of student work

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

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Speaker 1:

Oh, hi there, teachers. Welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not bouncers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello, lovely teacher, and welcome back to the Unteachables podcast.

Speaker 1:

I have been for the last five weeks now going through five really quick, actionable things that you can do immediately in your classroom to sprinkle a bit of classroom management magic into every day, everything that you do. I started out with your teacher presence and we moved on to our entry routine. Then we spoke about how to task effectively so students aren't popping their hands up every two seconds saying, hey, what are we doing? Then we went on to building rapport and not in like a hey, build a relationship kind of way, like in a really genuine like how can we actually action that in the day to day? And now the natural conclusion of that is our exit routine. What do we do at the end of the lesson to have a really smooth and wonderful finish? Because it can be tough Like I feel like the wheels can really fall off at the end of the lesson.

Speaker 1:

So I am going to ask you a few questions now and I want you just to sit and reflect on what your answer might be. The first is do your students stay engaged right up until the bell, yes or no? Do your early finishes have a clear, purposeful routine they know to follow if they finish early, or are they kind of like just left to the wind? You know, like are they kind of packing up or one foot out the door? Do you feel calm and in control in those final five minutes? Or do you feel like you just kind of bounce like a bouncer at the door when the bell rings? Do your students leave the room feeling settled or are they kind of like busting out and you know, running out and doing so in a way that makes you feel kind of chaotic, and when the lesson ends, do you just feel like it ended well, like are you going, yeah, that was a good, that was a good end, or are you kind of sitting at your desk going, oh, that was really exhausting.

Speaker 1:

I'm asking you those questions because if you asked me to reflect on them at one point in my career, it would have exposed one thing, and that one thing is that I had no exit routine, and I guess the exit routine that I did have was not strong, it was not one that was helping me at all, and I didn't know where to start. I had no idea because there are so many moving parts to the exit routine that I now teach, and for day five of the kickstart I really wanted to zoom in on one bolt that starts to fall off the wheel when the end of the lesson nears, and that is early finishes. So one of the questions was do your early finishes have a clear routine? Do they know what to do If they finish something like five minutes earlier than the rest of the class? Like what is happening there? Are they starting to drift off? Are they starting to get chatty, disruptive? Are they just sitting there bored like not sure what to do? Not every student who finishes early is in the same boat, by the way. But understanding why they're finished early and giving them a bit of a routine to do when they do finish early is going to not only support them but it's going to help you a hell of a lot in that final five minutes but all through the lesson.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, students finish things early all the time. Of course this is an exit routine, like that's what I'm focusing on, but this particular routine is going to transform the way that you have those early finishes kind of like engage in the lesson. So, whatever the reason early finishes are finishing early, one thing is clear we do need a consistent routine that supports students in that moment without letting things kind of unravel, and the best way to do that is to start with some simple reflective questions for those students. So this helps students to pause and self-assess, stay anchored in that learning process before they decide to zone out or disrupt or start packing up five minutes early. We're kind of catching it before that happens. They're not just going done, flipping their book closed, popping in their bag and then they're out right Because they know that there's an expected routine to follow every time they finish early. And they'll know they finish early because if you've got like a task card there from day two or sorry, oh sorry, day three, you've got a good time of like, you've got a you know time there. They have to follow. Everything's really nice and clear from the task. So if they know they finished early, then they can do this.

Speaker 1:

This routine here will make the last 10 minutes of the lesson just feel as intentional as the first and something that you feel like you can have more control over. My gosh. Honestly, like that last five, 10 minutes of the lesson, I felt like I was sweating. I'm like, oh my God, what am I going to do here? Because every lesson I'd have 30 kids kind of milling by the door.

Speaker 1:

So anyway, here are the simple questions that I get my students to work through every time they finish a task early. I've corrected any mistakes that I found. I've reread my work to check for mistakes, I've ticked off the success criteria and if you listen to day three task, that will be on the task card, which is why a task card is also so powerful. I've asked for help. If I was confused about anything, I've put my name and the date on the page and I think this is my best work. There's just some simple questions. They can tick through this routine and these questions do three really powerful things. The first thing is it re-engages early learners with the task, so they're not there just getting it done, they're reflecting and they're refining it. The second thing is it builds independence and accountability so students learn how to assess their own learning and take ownership of their work. And third, if students have rushed through their work, this process makes it crystal clear for you and empowers them to go back and make some tweaks. So, instead of letting students kind of float into chaos or start distracting others, we can build a self-assessment routine that gives them a meaningful next step. But it's also reinforcing your high expectations around task completion, quality of work and their behavior. Remember that everything we do in the day-to-day, in our practice, is reinforcing and sending messages about the expectations we have of our students, and this is definitely a huge example of that.

Speaker 1:

For day five of the kickstart, I have included two quick win resources. The first is one to help you with this particular part of the routine, which is an are you really finished slip. So it's a little slip that has those questions that I have just spoken through. Um, there's got that there. It's like a little slip that has those questions that I have just spoken through. It's got that there. It's like a little reflection how I felt about the work. So it's all embedded onto that one slip so you can give it to students when they finish early. You can have it in a central location so they can go and pick it up. Like it can just be like a totally autonomous like hey, I'm finished my work, I've got a bit of time on the clock. I know that I need to go and get the are you really finished slips. It consistently embeds the language of reflection to hardwire that skill. It encourages students to be independent in their learning and to really take accountability for their learning and it just gives you your time back.

Speaker 1:

So when I say that there's reflection questions there, I'm not saying you go up to each student who's finished early and ask them these questions. It should be something that students are autonomous in being able to reflect on. Like, if you have hardwired this particular routine, they'll know how I'm done. I'm going to grab the slip, I'm going to reflect and I'm going to make sure I've done this properly. Of course, in a perfect world, that is, we know that that's not always the case. So let's just say they have done their work and they've done it well, they've done their reflections and it's all great right. But there's still plenty of time remaining, like five, 10 minutes on the clock.

Speaker 1:

This is where you deploy your second early finisher routine, which is your early finisher tasks. Early finisher tasks it's just having some pre-prepared things for them to do in a central location so they can go and choose from when they have these things to choose from. Again, it reinforces your expectations of engagement with the lesson until the bell. It's just sending them the message that, yes, you've got five minutes left, yes, you finished your task early. But that doesn't mean that we're sitting there and zoning out and chatting to our friends or packing up or disrupting the lesson. It means that we're going to spend the next five to 10 minutes purposefully engaging in something. When we do that, we're mitigating challenging behaviors from boredom that do arise and is helping you remain calm and prepared and still present with the rest of the whole class. So instead of you having to, you know, then deal with behaviors that might pop up from students finishing early, students being bored students. I'm telling you, if we're not engaging our students, something else is going to engage them, like their brains are just going to attach to something else, right, so it just mitigates those challenging behaviors and makes your life so much easier.

Speaker 1:

You've got the reflection there. They do the reflection. Okay, I'm done with my work. You can tick it off for them. They go and they pick a task to do.

Speaker 1:

How I do this is through a menu of early finisher tasks. It might be a little bit hard for you to visualize this if you haven't seen one before, which is why I encourage you to come into the kickstart. And I encourage you to come into the kickstart as well, because I hand over a Canva template that you can use to create your own. So I give you my template and then you can just change the wording. You can change the um the tasks that they have to do. You can change the routine up. It just depends on what your context is. But my menu of early finisher I'm going to try to explain this in the best way I can so you can visualize it right Um, up the top there it just says what to do next when I'm finished. It says first, and it has like two boxes First thing is go through your am I really finished checklist. So they go through a checklist Am I really finished this. When they're done, they pop their hand up.

Speaker 1:

Teacher will check your work and then you can move on to the below. So that's the first part. That's like the first early finisher routine part. That's really clear. First early finisher routine part. That's really clear for them up the top there. Then underneath that I've got six tasks for students to choose from.

Speaker 1:

The tasks that I use are first, choose one of your early finisher activities from the folder. So what I do is I keep a folder of you know really easy tasks for students to grab. They might be like creative tasks, writing tasks, something that's related to other lessons, something that they can. You know, just anything that they can grab and go Like. Just anything that I can print out in a folder that's going to be purposeful, that I'm going to. You know that's going to be good for students to do. So that's one option. The next option is read a book of your choice, practice a mindfulness strategy, finish off some classwork or get some homework done, design a poster to summarize the lesson, tidy up your resources, so make sure everything's labeled or glued, et cetera. Those are the things that I have there as an option on the menu for students to choose from. That's, if they've got three minutes, they might just tidy up their resources. If they've got 10 minutes, I might encourage them to do one of the early finisher activities or read a chapter of a book. It just depends on how long they have. But these options here super flexible Look.

Speaker 1:

You can, if you've got really great tech in your classroom, you could embed other things on here, which is why the template that I'm including for the kickstart is editable and you can just, depending on your context, just pop other things on there. But I like to keep it as low risk as possible for me. I don't want to have to be mucking around with technology. I don't want to be having to then manage another thing in the room. I just want to keep it as simple as humanly possible. But you know what's going to be least disruptive and easy to do immediately for you and your context. So that is the early finisher routine.

Speaker 1:

So first up, have students reflect by themselves. They've got like just have something somewhere in the room whether it's like an anchor chart where they look up and they do those reflective questions, or whether it's the included um am I really finished slip where they can reflect on their work. Have that somewhere where they can do it without needing to ask you, without needing to you know, without needing you to go through and do a bunch of extra things when you're already trying to manage a class. Just like I spoke about when I was talking about um tasking in day three. The goal for you is because we don't have a lot of resources, we don't have 10 of us in a room and sometimes it can feel like we need 10, 15, 20 of ourselves to be able to support our class. These strategies here it's just the best way that we can support every single body in that room in the best way we can possibly. With just us there, we're just creating scaffolds and strategies to take the pressure off our shoulders. So, in the moment where we're managing so many people in a single room and it's our job to be doing all of those things, we've got structures and routines and strategies that work for us, not against us. So please implement something like that.

Speaker 1:

If you're struggling with early finishes, if you would like those resources, make sure you're popping in and joining the kickstart. Remember it's the dash on teachablescom forward slash kickstart. The podcast is a great way to listen to the kickstart on the go, but if you want to like watch the training sessions and grab the resources, then definitely come in and cause. I go into a little bit more depth and you'll see everything visually and it might just the penny might drop just a little bit more for you. So that's that for the kickstart.

Speaker 1:

Lovely teachers, I hope that no matter who you are, no matter where you're teaching, who you're teaching, you got a nugget of classroom management gold from the last five days. If you have, if you've listened to the kickstart, whether it's on the podcast, on the go, in a more, like you know, a loosey, goosey way, or if you've actually jumped into the kickstart at any point and gotten the resources and implemented things. I want to hear about what you have done to sprinkle that classroom management magic into your practice. So I would love to hear from you. Reach out, come and chat to me on Instagram I'm at the dot unteachables or you can send me an email claire, at the dash unteachablescom. It would be brilliant to hear from you and hear about all of the beautiful things you're doing in your practice. And that is all for the kickstart. I'll be back next week with more classroom management, goodness, and I look forward to seeing you there. Bye, lovely teacher.

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Claire English

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