Next week we’ll be running our annual English Graduate Teachers’ Day Out, where we’ll be sharing lots of practical, classroom-ready ideas for new teachers. One of the key themes we’ll be emphasising is the role of routines, systems and procedures — repeatable structures that support thinking, discussion and skill development. Establishing clear routines helps reduce cognitive load for both teachers and students, builds classroom consistency, and frees up more time for deep learning.
For example, whenever students need to generate arguments for or against a proposal, we can use the Consider-All-Factors procedure to provide a structured checklist of things to think about:
We’ll be sharing plenty more strategies like the one above. The poster below shows the kinds of routines teachers can use at different stages of a lesson — all of which we’ll explore throughout the workshop. Together, these routines form a simple instructional toolkit teachers can draw on regardless of the text, topic or year level.
The poster was created using AI, and it highlights an idea that can be powerful for English departments: agreeing on a shared set of effective routines and publishing them as a poster like this so they can be used — well — routinely.
