The Unteachables Podcast

#172: Starters CAN be your classroom management superpower (here's how to do them right)

• Claire English • Season 8 • Episode 172

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0:00 | 22:01

If you can grab them in the first five minutes, everything feels easier. That's the magic of a great starter activity — and this episode is Claire's full Q&A on how to do them well.

Starter tasks are one of Claire's absolute favourite things (her words). Done right, they communicate your expectations before you've said a single word, shift whatever energy students are walking in with, and create the kind of consistency and predictability that makes your classroom feel safe — for your students and for you.

In this episode, Claire covers:

  • Why starter activities are classroom management magic — not just a nice-to-have
  • The guard dog analogy — why routines are "friends for the amygdala" and what that means for your most dysregulated students
  • The most frequently asked questions about starter tasks: 
    • Do they have to relate to the lesson? Claire's honest answer
    • What if students don't take them seriously? How to get buy-in by explaining the why
    • What actually makes a quality starter? Claire's criteria — achievable for every student, no extra input from you, pen to paper, three to five minutes, no prior knowledge required
  • Five starter activities you can try this week: 

Resources mentioned:

  • 📦 [Routines Bundle]— entry routines, transitions, exits, early finishes, starters, and more — every routine your classroom needs in one place

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

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Welcome And Classroom Management Mission

SPEAKER_00

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 behaviour nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behaviour 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 teachers. Welcome back to the Unteachables Podcast. I am incredibly excited for today's episode because I'm talking about one of my favorite, favorite things, which is starter tasks. Don't tune off from me. I'm I am an absolute nerd for routines, especially starters and exits, because they're these beautiful bookends to the lesson. And whatever happens in the middle, whatever messiness happens in the middle, if you can grab it from the start and then you can finish strong, you'll feel a hell of a lot better when you walk out of that classroom and you'll feel like you're more empowered. You won't feel like you're totally out of control. Like teaching is so hard. So if you can just get them in that first five, everything feels so much easier. So that's what I'm talking about today. Starter tasks. I'm doing like kind of a QA on starter tasks because uh I get a lot of questions about them.

Why Starter Tasks Matter

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So I really wanted just to have like one place to direct people to if they had these kind of questions about starter tasks. If you have any questions, by the way, about anything, drop me a message. I would love to do a podcast episode on something that you're struggling with or that you're questioning or you're curious about. So just reach out, Claire, at the dashonteachables.com, send me an email or come over to Instagram and send me a little voice note or a message saying um, yeah, what you want to hear on the podcast, because this podcast is not for me. This podcast is for you. Um, that's the whole point of it, really. I don't just sit here and spend a bunch of time recording these podcast episodes because I love talking about it, although I do. But um, yeah, I need some ears to be listening to it. So, starter tasks. When they are done well, they are truly like a bit of classroom management magic. They communicate your expectations before you have said a single word. They create a beautiful amount of consistency. Students walk in knowing exactly what to expect from you and your lesson. Whatever the energy is that they're coming to the classroom with, you're shifting that from whatever happened outside to whatever they came from, lunch break, PE, a fight with their friends, like a really challenging morning. Like you're shifting that energy. You're grabbing that energy and you're transferring it into like a ready-to-learn upstairs brain switched on, we're good to go energy. It gives you your five, like that first five minutes, it gives you that time, whether it's to take attendance, which is my Achilles heel, because I never remember to do it, uh, to settle the room, to just breathe and watch the room just like be regulated and calm and just, you know, it's a lot

Consistency That Calms The Room

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of work getting students in, getting them sat, and then getting them like started. So that five minutes, three to five minutes, if you have them working on a starter activity, oh my gosh, it is just like I just want to bottle that. Like it's just so wonderful. Uh, and it just builds so much felt safety because it's accessible and it's predictable. I like to talk about routines like this as being friends for the amygdala and routines in general, they're just friends for the guard dog. And I don't know if you have like heard this analogy on here on the podcast before. I don't know if I've spoken about it, but I do in my book. Um, I will try to give you the version now off the top of my head, but I want you to imagine that there is a guard dog guarding the house. If a delivery driver comes up that driveway, that guard dog is going to be alerting its owner. I want you to think about this as like a little bit of a metaphor for the guard dog, the amygdala, and you are the owner, the the owner of the brain. So a delivery driver walks up, that delivery driver is super unfamiliar. Who the hell are you? The guard dog is barking. That delivery driver is a threat. That delivery driver needs to be like even if that delivery driver is not going to cause any harm, it's still a threat. That dog is going to be barking. Now think about a friend coming down that driveway, a family member, a cousin, someone that's always there, that's super familiar, that consistently comes at a certain time every week. That guard dog won't act in the same way. That guard dog is expecting that

The Amygdala Guard Dog Explained

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person to be walking down the driveway. And when that person walks down the driveway, that person is familiar and known to the guard dog. So instead of barking, that guard dog rolls over and says, Hey, like, give me a little belly rub, like we're all good. The same is happening in your brain. And when I think about routines, I think about them as friends for the amygdala. We are creating friends for the student guard dogs. Some of our students, I'm telling you now, like they are constantly on high alert. Like their nervous systems are constantly ready to go because they have had to live lives where they have to be in a constant set of fight, flat or freeze because it's keeping them safe and it has kept them safe their whole lives, and they're absolute warriors for being able to do that. But it also doesn't really help us in the classroom. So things like starter activities, starter tasks, when done right, that is like creating a friend for our students, amygdala. So I hope I didn't butcher that analogy. I can't remember if that's how I said it in the book, but there it is again. Now, the first frequently asked question that I get about starter activities is whether or not they have to be related to the lesson. Because the kind of tasks that I create and, you know, give to people in the behavior club or I share on Instagram, all of the ones that I do share are ones that are not subject specific. They are just ones that anybody can pick up, anybody can use. They might be around like, you know, mindfulness, they might be around like growth mindset, or like, you know, like reflecting on the state of learning that we're in, but they're not related to the subject itself. They're not related to the lesson. So I know that we're often told that they should be like a conceptual into a lesson or relate to the learning outcomes. That's why people end up doing things like, you know, recall tasks from the previous lesson or something like that. If you're going to be doing a really quality

Must Starters Match The Lesson

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conceptual starter, having that happening every single lesson when you're prepping five lessons a day is actually a really big amount of mental load because it does take a lot of uh, it takes a lot of thought and it takes a lot of prep. And it is something that's really strategic. And if you want to use starter activities for not just teaching and learning purposes, I mean it does, even if they're not about the lesson itself, I would definitely argue that it's still supporting you to teach them whatever you're going to teach them that lesson in the best way possible because they're prepping the brain, like they're priming, you know, their prefrontal cortex to really get into learning, especially when they've struggled to kind of come through that threshold of the room and get into their learning headspace. But when it comes to classroom management stuff, the most important thing about routines is the consistency and the predictability of it. So whatever it is. So just say if you can't possibly think of a starter activity for those lessons that link to the learning and to hit all of the criteria that you need to make sure those starter activities actually do the work they need to do. And I'll talk about the criteria, you know, later in the episode, because that's also one of the FAQs. But the most important thing is that being consistent when it comes to classroom management. You are trying to create friends for your students' guard dogs. If you want the starter activity to be a friend for the student's guard dog so they can let that guard down and they can come in and they can be more regulated, then the most important thing is actually just doing the thing and just having that starter activity available. So being consistent is more important, and that's why I love doing starter activities that don't necessarily link to the lesson, but they do have some relevance to the learning. They prime the brain, they might be something, you know, mindful, they might be something that um, you know, requires them to think about like being in a growth mindset, because it's doing all of those things at once, right? So that is my take on does a starter activity need to relate to the learning? Is it best practice? Yeah. Like if you can come up with some starter activities that are conceptually linking to the lesson and they're fantastic and they're, you know, doing all those wonderful things, then do that. But if you want to use my starter activities as a way to prep them for learning, to prime their brains, to create that predictability and that consistency without you needing to do everything, then that is also fine. But again, check with your leadership team. Like I'm, you know, don't want to get sued over that. Um yeah, so just double check what your like if your clo if your school is doing like a big push for starters and they want them to be a certain way, like that's one thing. But I have found that doing these starters has been such a game changer for my classroom management with the toughest classes to engage. Gets buy-in from the get-go, amazing. The next question that I get often about starter activities is yes, that's all well and good, but I don't have time to read them all. Like, I don't do you read them, like do you check them? Do you grade them? Like, I am not a big believer in grading everything, reading everything. I don't like the amount of work that students produce, we are not 50 different people. And if you were to read every single thing that a student produced, like, no wonder teachers burn out, right? I get students to stick them in their books. I get them maybe to put them in like a turn-it-in tray if I want to have a look at them, but I do not read all of them. That is ridiculous because if I'm getting them to do them every single lesson, so I will have a class discussion. So just say if there's a um a starter activity and it's linking to like it's a bit of a conceptual runway into a lesson. For example, if I'm like teaching Macbeth and the concept is like conflict or something,

Stop Reading Every Starter

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I might, you know, lead into the lesson by talking about what students have written on that starter activity, and then I'll go into the actual lesson on Macbeth. But I won't um I won't do that for like the mindfulness ones I create, or like I won't always do that. I might get a couple of answers depending on the task. So use your professional judgment, but I definitely don't read all of them or grade all of them. Like that's not something that I've ever done in my practice because that's just not a good use of your time as a teacher to read every single um do now activity, especially when the purpose of it is not to like develop certain skills. Um, it is just to like prime them for that learning and give them a bit of a runway. So that is the second question. The third question is what if they don't have the buy-in? So I got this question from one of my behavior clubbers, and she said, I've been using the starter tasks, but have trouble with pupils taking them seriously, especially anything that asks for some kind of self-reflection, it then becomes a distraction as silly comments are shared about the task. Do I just focus on less emotionally vulnerable starters or see the responses as information about my pupils and their current state of well-being? So, what I said to my behavior clubber was that if she's noticing that certain students or classes aren't responding well to more like SEL style starters, so like mindfulness, um, things about their emotional backpack, like those kinds of things, uh, I would probably try to do ones that are more about like preparedness for learning or something that's directly related to the subject. But it could also be a matter of buy-in. So if I had

Handling Poor Buy In

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trouble getting students to take things like that seriously, I would just give them a bit of insight into like why I'm strategically using them and talk to them about why those starters are going to engage their upstairs brain, how those starters will prep them for learning, how even though they can't see the explicit link between what they're doing and what they're going to be learning, I really try to explain the neuroscience in a really simple way behind why I'm bringing this into the classroom. You all know your learners better than I do, and at the end of the end of the day, you have to do what's best for you and your students. But when it comes to the buy-in for starters, giving them an idea about why you're being really strategic with it often does help students go, okay, well, she's not just giving us this because she's doing something fluffy and lame, like she's doing this because she knows it's going to help us with our learning and it's going to help, they're not gonna probably say that, but you know, like they're going to then see, okay, well, she's got a plan here. And if students know that you've been really strategic and planned something, they're more likely to buy into it, especially if they know that it's priming their brains and it's actually doing something to help them. And the final FAQ that I have got to cover is what is a quality starter help. So, a quality starter, I have a bit of a criteria for what I would put in a starter activity. It should be, and and I'm talking about it in terms of having the classroom management impact. Like, I'm your classroom management girly. I am really great at teaching and learning stuff as well. I have been the head teacher of teaching and learning before. Like, I've also done head teacher of learning support. Like I've had a variety of roles, whether it's like, you know, more classroom management behavior-based or um, you know, teaching and learning. So I am across it, but I am talking through the lens of classroom management when I'm talking about these starters. A quality starter should be a three to five minute pen to paper activity. It should be super clear that requires no extra input from you. You should be able to set it and then manage the regulation and transition and mark attendance and do all of those things. If students are putting their hands up asking what they need to do, it is not a quality starter. You should

What Makes A Quality Starter

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not have to do any extra input. It should be achievable for every student, which I guess leads on from the last thing. It should be something that every student, no matter whether they were there last week, they've just arrived to the school. It should be something that every single student can achieve. Because if it's not, then it's not great for classroom management because the students who you need to settle the most are going to probably be the ones that struggle the most with a starter activity. Uh, the next one is that it should be conceptual. Um, and that is more if it's going to be something related to the lesson, because you don't, again, it's just it all flows on from it being simple and achievable, but still meaningful. So if it's conceptual, then every single student can apply that to a concept that they are aware of and it reduces that mental load and it helps them connect to it on a real world level. The next thing is that it shouldn't like hinge on any prior learning. Like, as I said, if a student was away that previous day, week, month, like you shouldn't have to then go around and explain, or if a student was sick, they shouldn't have to then be able to be like, okay, well, I've missed all of this stuff and I feel, you know, bad about that. So it shouldn't hinge on prior learning or assume skills or understanding. Um, it should just be a doorway to the lesson. Like it should just be opening that door and helping them step through that door in the easiest way possible. So throughout this episode, I've spoken a lot about starters that have more like an SEL base or, you know, are appropriate for any, like kind of, you know, can be adjusted for any lesson or can be used across all subjects. So I thought I'd just share five with you that you can try this week. Again, like if you can create starters that are related to your lesson, do that. But here are five that um you can use this week. The first one, and I get why someone would say, like, my students don't really want to um like be vulnerable in that way, or like you don't have to use these ones. These are just examples of ones that you know I've used in the past and that can relate to any subject. So the first is honest insight. What's one thing your te you wish your teacher knew right now? This could be about the subject, about your day, about how you feel, etc. The next one is calm and ready. Think of a place where you feel really relaxed, the beach, your home, under a blanket. Write five sentences describing it using your five sentences. Um, sentences, describe it using your five sentences. Write five sentences describing it using your five senses.

Five Starters To Try This Week

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All of these are just really grounding exercises. So if they've been really struggling with their regulation outside of the classroom, these will get them ready. They'll be activating their prefrontal cortex and getting them ready for learning. Uh, the next one is proof of progress. Think of something you used to find hard that's easier now. Describe what it is. What did you do that helped? How could you use that same approach in today's lesson? That's more of a growth mindset based one, which I really like using. Same as the next one. So growth and grit. What's one personal quality you bring you want to bring into this lesson today? Example, perseverance, patience, curiosity, focus. Why did you choose this personal quality or words? And the last one is three-minute dump. Spend the next three minutes dumping everything out of your brain onto the page. Don't stop to think this can help you approach the next lesson and this lesson with a clear mind and really get into the learning. So those are just five that I really enjoy. Like, I mean, I've got so many in um the I've got my starter doors. So that has 40 different activities behind each of those doors that you click and it takes you there. I've got lots of printable starters, I've got dozens and dozens of like SEL starters. If you're in the behavior club, then go and you can download those and use them immediately. If you're not in the behavior club, all of those are in my huge resource, um, my huge routines bundle. Every single part of your lesson, the entry routines, transitions, exit, early finishes, all of it. Like it just covers all of those routines. And every single one of those routines is like a friend for the student's guard dog. And the more friends you can make for your students' guard dogs, the less low-level disruptions you're going to have because it's going to spread that felt safety into your classroom and create, like make your classroom, I like to call it an island of safety. And it is because we're holding our students with those

Resources Routines Bundle And Wrap

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routines. We're reinforcing our expectations. We're super clear about our expectations. So when I'm talking about like creating this beautiful felt safety in our classroom, I'm not talking about like wishy-washy, like let's talk about our feelings all day, like not actually holding them to any standard. These routines are what does it, and it actually holds them to a really high standard and it creates so much consistency and predictability for them. It sprinkles so much classroom management magic through all of your lessons. So every single one of those kind of like routines is in that bundle. Um, and yeah, it's so good. It'll just take so much of the pressure off. So I'll pop that, um, I'll pop the link in the show notes for that. But either way, like just try those starter activities, give them a go, let me know how you get on with those. And I hope that you enjoyed that little uh starter activity QA. As I said, like if you've got questions about anything, just drop into my inbox and I'll be so happy to either guide you in the right direction of where you can get that support, or I will do a podcast episode about it. Why not? Um, okay, wonderful teachers. I will catch you next time on the Unteachables podcast. Keep sprinkling that classroom management magic and creating all of those friends for your students' guard dogs. By the way, create some friends for yours as well. That really does help when it comes to us trying to stay regulated in the classroom. Okay, wonderful teachers. Bye for now.

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Claire English

Host