Mini Video Training Series Ep 7: Importance of Structure and Routine

Hi, I'm Sasha from The Autism Helper. In this episode of the mini video training series, I'm going to talk about the importance of a structured and routine-based classroom. If you've been in this field a while, this is probably something you do very naturally. When you set up your classroom, you know that you need 46 chairs even though you only have 8 students, and you can't possibly spare one of those chairs because you need all of them. We need different centers in different spots in our classroom where different activities are happening. But just like our kids, sometimes we get very routine-based too much, and it's great to think about the why. Why is it essential to have that structure in place? Why is that routine so important for our kids? If we think about the why behind it, we'll get better at utilizing those strategies and making sure that we're using them to our full advantage. So when we have a classroom that's structured and routine-based, we're going to have less negative behaviors from students, less student anxiety, and more independence and more efficiency. That's something we can all get on board on— more independence, getting more done in less time. We all want that in our classrooms. Structure and routine will help get us there. So the silly alien example that I always give when I do PDs, I think, really illustrates this. So let's say that we were abducted by aliens. You don't speak the alien language. They take us to their, you know, foreign planet that we've never been to before. We have no idea what's going on. Every day they bring us into two rooms. The first day they bring us into a room that has all red tables. Life in red table room is awesome. You get to watch Netflix, you get to eat ice cream, you get to drink wine, you get to do whatever you want. It's great. Red table room, place to be. The next room they take us to has blue tables. Blue table room's not so fun. You have to do long division. You have to eat celery. No ranch, just celery. No one really likes celery. And you have to listen to the same Kid Rock song on repeat because again, who really likes Kid Rock? So this goes on for a few days. Red room, it's awesome. It's great. Blue room, Not so great, right? After 3 or 4 days of this, you know what's to be expected. As you're walking into the room with red tables, you feel kind of at ease. You know what's going on. You're maybe planning what Netflix show you're going to watch. When you walk into the room with blue tables, even though it's something you don't want to do, you know what's coming. It's not a surprise. If all of a sudden at the red table they pulled out long division, we'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not the deal. So even though we didn't speak the alien's language and there were no other cues of what's happening, just having that same routine and that same structure, we know what's expected of us and what's happening without any need for verbal language. That's what we want to think about in our classrooms. For our classrooms and for our schools, it might as well be Mars. For some of our kids, especially for our babies. For our preschool kids that come in on day one on mom's hip, 43 pounds, mom's arm is like super jacked on this side, not so much on this side. She always holds him here. And they come in and that kid has never left mom's side in the last 3 and a half years. And you as the preschool teacher now need to like wrench that baby away from her, and your classroom is a whole new world for them. It's, it's a foreign, it's a foreign planet. It's Mars. His familiar things aren't there. His familiar people aren't there. He doesn't know what's going on. So you have to provide that structure and routine to help them figure it out. Also, not just with our babies, but with our big kids too, with our high schoolers, our 8th graders that transition to high school. Oh man, that is a big transition. A lot of our, some of our 8th graders have been in the same building for 10 years, and then we're taking away all that familiarity and plopping them into high school, which almost every high school I've ever been at is confusing. Like there's always so many stairwells, and it's a whole new place with all these people and all these crowded hallways. It's scary. So we gotta make sure that we're utilizing these strategies of structure and routine to help make sense of this all. So we're going to utilize structure and routine for the goal of predictability. We want our classrooms to be predictable. No surprises. We go to the same spots in our classroom to do the same types of activities every day. So every time we come and sit at the carpet, we're doing stories. Every time we come and sit at this table, we're doing writing activities. Every time you go to the play area, you can do what you want. There's a clear expectation. The furniture and the part of the classroom is the cue. That carpet is the cue to sit down and listen. The play area is the cue to get out toys. The table is a cue to sit down and that work is coming. So we want to ensure that we're having that predictable nature set up even into our structure. It's routine. So within that structure, we want our centers or parts of our classroom to be visually defined. There's a clear start and a clear end. There's no gray area in between. You can't be like halfway in circle time and halfway in playtime because then it's unclear. Should I be listening to the story or can I pull out some Legos? We can't be halfway in our independent work time and halfway at computers. So you want to use extra furniture, dividers, masking tape on the floor. I love to to visually define the areas. Have shelves separate different centers. I've seen a ton of teachers make dividers with PVC pipe. Apparently it's super easy. I've never done it myself, but you can make some really cool cheap dividers using PVC pipe and cloth in between. But you want there to be a clear definition of when the center starts, when the center ends. That also, that separation and those dividers help students attend and get less distracted from what's going on in other parts of the classroom. In a center-based classroom, it's likely that different groups of kids are doing different things at different times. So yeah, Johnny and Susie do get computers now, and sorry Alex, you do have to do your center work now. But we can kind of lessen seeing what other people are doing and lessen that distraction by making sure things are visually defined and visually divided. The question I always get right after this part is, well, my classroom is teeny tiny. It used to be a janitor's closet, and now they've given me 8 students and 3 staff and expect me to teach in here. If you have a very small classroom, there's a few little tricks you can do. You can definitely use the same center, the same table, etc., for more than one activity, but you want to add in a lot of other cues. So maybe the time of day, So that would be in the morning when we sit at circle, at the carpet, it's circle time, but in the afternoon when we sit at the carpet, it's story time. So there's some type of time-based cue. You can change up the staff member. So, hey, when you sit here with Miss Long, this is what we're doing, but when you sit here with Miss Jackson, we're doing something different. Using visuals is huge. I could do a whole other talk just on visuals, which probably probably will. Using visuals is key as well, but some of those other— playing around with those other cues like where you sit or the time of day or the teacher can also help indicate that there's a change. We're not doing what we did here before. So you definitely in a small room can still provide, provide that predictability utilizing that structure. You just want to add in other prompts. So why is all of this necessary? Why do we need this many cues and prompts and structure and routine and visuals, it's because a lot of our students struggle with receptive language processing. Something happens between the ear and the brain. They're hearing our language, but they're not processing it and understanding it. So just like in our alien example, even if the aliens were talking to us, we didn't understand. We weren't able to process and understand and make sense of their language. With us, even though some of our kids understand our language, they might not understand all of our language. We talk a lot, and we talk fast, and we give multi-step directions. We're not just saying 2 things, we're saying 6 things. We're like, "Come on in, sit down, take out your pencils, take out your homework, get started on your reading, pick your lunch choice." Our kids just can't keep up. We're giving these laundry lists and we're like mini drill sergeants saying, "Do this, do this, do this, do this," our kids are still processing step 1, we're way past step 6, and we're moving on to the next activity. So by providing structure and a predictable routine, students don't need to rely on just verbal language. Yes, you're gonna still be providing verbal cues, but that structure of be— this table being a cue for what's expected and the routine of 'When I go here in this order, these are the things I'm doing,' is going to help provide that cue so they don't have to rely just on verbal language. Visuals also really help this. We need to think of visuals on the same level as the, the structure and routine on how important both things are in our classroom. We really need all of this so we're giving our kids as many tools to understand what's going on as possible. So thinking about why you're setting up your classroom in such a structured and predictable way is important to make sure that you're doing it right. So like I said, we get routine-based too. We put the same centers in the same spots in our class because that's just what we do. But if we start to really think about, okay, is this a clear cue for my student? Is going to this part of the classroom going to be enough of a cue of what's expected expected of him. What other prompts can I add in? Can I add in visuals? Can I change up staff? Can I change the seat? So there's— it's very, very clear what's expected of the student when he gets here. So when you're approaching your classroom setup, or if you're in the middle of the year and thinking about switching things up, make sure that you're applying these strategies so your classroom is a predictable place where our kids don't need to rely just on verbal language. They have other tools as well. So thanks for watching this episode of the mini video training series. We have a few other ones on YouTube, so please check them out. If you're not a video person, come over to Facebook or Instagram where we share all kinds of ideas for working in an autism classroom.