As we begin a new academic year, many teachers are thinking about what particular boundaries need to be set in the first few weeks to ensure an appropriate learning environment exists.
As can be seen in Figure 2 below, which shows how I share my expectations with students on the first day, punctuality is particularly important to me.
Despite setting these clear expectations, I’ve found that student lateness – whether classes start at 9 am, 11 am or 2 pm – remains a persistent issue, disrupting the flow and causing students to miss valuable starting points for learning. At 9 am, though, the challenge felt even greater, as attendance builds slowly over the first hour rather than within a few minutes.
To combat this trickle of arrivals to my 9 am class, I tried everything from quiet conversations about the importance of punctuality to light-hearted deterrents such as threatening to make them sing “I’m a Little Teapot” on entry (a strategy borrowed from a former colleague). Additionally, I experimented with fun tasks to begin the lesson and created mini-tests that depended on punctual attendance. However, none of these strategies had any real impact. Come my observed lesson, I began with only two students in the classroom with the rest arriving in dribs and drabs over the first hour. The feedback? I needed to provide “tougher love” to get students to arrive on time.
Reflecting on this feedback, my feeling was that a more disciplinarian approach just did not suit my teaching persona. My strengths as a teacher lie in creating an open space in which students feel comfortable asking questions and admitting confusion. I also did not want genuine latecomers, delayed by a bus or the weather, to feel too anxious to join at all.
Instead, I decided to try and understand why students were late. Using Microsoft Forms, I asked six questions concentrating on the value students attributed to punctuality and attendance, reasons for not attending and being late, and what might help them improve.
Whilst I was reasonably certain the results would not reveal that students were late because like Julia Donaldson’s Tiddler (a story about a fish who creates fantastical stories to explain his perpetual lateness) they’d been captured by a squid, I was a little fearful that results would show that students just did not value the class enough to be on time.
On this front, I needn’t have worried. Answers revealed that most students agreed that attending the class and being on time mattered (10/12 and 9/12 respectively), citing reasons such as understanding instructions, exam preparation and being prepared for learning (see Figure 3 below).
When asked what would help, 7 students admitted the biggest issue was simply waking up in time for a 9 am class. One even confessed that they were considering using medication to help them fall asleep at a suitable time after having tried “everything else”!
Whilst I do not advocate distributing sleeping pills to students, this student’s response does highlight the importance of pastoral support in helping students adjust to independent living, manage sleep patterns, and take responsibility for their own schedule. From a classroom perspective, it also gives us a point from which to attempt troubleshooting issues with lateness before they even begin.
More interesting though for me, were two requests for me to provide weekly overviews in class to clearly signpost what each session would cover and the significance of this content. While course outlines and Blackboard do provide this information, students don’t always engage with them. Frequent reminders by the teacher of what’s ahead could be a simple yet powerful motivator, allowing students to understand what they stand to gain by attending the lesson from the start.
So, in future, I’ll be focusing less on tough love and more on clear signposting, combined with honest conversations about challenges like sleep and time management. Students might not stop spinning their own excuses entirely, but perhaps with the right motivation, they’ll be less like Tiddler, and more like the classmates who hear the whole story.
Because after all, it’s hard to learn much if you only catch the last five minutes – unless, of course, you really were riding on a seahorse. 🐠
Link to NHS webpage: How to fall asleep faster and sleep better in case your students could do with support in this area.
References
Donaldson, J. (2008). Tiddler (A. Scheffler, Illus.). Alison Green Books.
This shows how useful a simple piece of classroom assessment can be to guide us in our teaching decisions. Thanks for sharing, Hannah.