Why do I have to repeat where we turn in paper… again?!- LET’S FIX THAT

Somewhere around my third year teaching, I noticed I was explaining the same twelve things, out loud, from memory, multiple times a day — once per class period, then again for every kid who transferred in mid-semester, then again after every long weekend when everyone conveniently forgot how the room works.

So I built a deck. One deck, twelve slides, every procedure I actually need students to know — and I’ve reused it, lightly edited, every semester since. Here’s what’s in it and why it’s the thing that finally stopped the re-explaining.

The problem with explaining procedures “as needed”

Most of us don’t skip teaching procedures — we just teach them verbally, in the moment, which creates three problems:

• It’s inconsistent. The version you explain to 2nd period on a good day isn’t quite the version you explain to 6th period when you’re tired.
• It disappears. A verbal explanation on day one is gone by day thirty. There’s nothing for a student to reference when they forget.
• It doesn’t transfer. New students, sub days, and post-break resets all require re-explaining from scratch, because there was never anything written down to fall back on.

A slide deck fixes all three, for one reason: it’s the same every time, it’s visual, and you can put it back up any day you need to, in ten seconds, without re-explaining anything from memory.

What’s actually in the deck

I keep it to the procedures that come up constantly, not everything I could theoretically explain. Twelve slides, roughly in the order a class period actually needs them:

1. Entering the room — where materials go, what’s expected before the bell finishes
2. Bell ringer / do-now — the non-negotiable first five minutes
3. Turning in work — the exact steps, digital and physical
4. Hall pass procedure — sign-out process, one student at a time
5. Group work expectations — what “good” looks like versus what doesn’t
6. Technology & device use — screens-down moments, charging expectations
7. Absent work — where to find it, how long students have
8. Academic integrity — collaboration versus copying, AI tool boundaries
9. Cell phone policy — this is where the pocket-chart system gets its own slide
10. Emergency procedures — fire drill and lockdown basics, kept calm and clear
11. Dismissal — how class actually ends, not just when the bell rings
12. A closing slide — because ending on “questions?” beats ending mid-sentence when the bell cuts you off

That’s it. Not forty slides, not a slide for every possible scenario — the twelve things that come up every single day, explained once, the same way, every time.

How I actually use it

• Day one, full walkthrough. I go through the whole deck slide by slide, out loud, with time for questions. This is the only day it takes more than two minutes.
• First two weeks, quick call-backs. If something’s slipping — say, phones aren’t making it into the chart — I pull the relevant slide back up instead of re-explaining verbally. The visual does more work than my voice does at that point in the year.
• After every break, I run through it again in about five minutes. Long weekends and holidays reliably reset expectations, and five minutes of review is cheaper than three weeks of chaos.
• Sub days. The deck goes in the sub folder. A substitute pulling up a slide labeled “Hall Pass Procedure” gets a class that runs the same way it does when I’m there — no guessing, no relying on students to explain it accurately (they won’t).
• New student transfers. Instead of a rushed, incomplete explanation on their first day, I can pull up the deck during a quiet moment and actually walk them through it properly.

Why it holds up across a full semester, not just week one

The honest answer: it’s not really about the slides. It’s that having something consistent to point back to changes the whole dynamic. Instead of “we talked about this already” — which every student will argue with — it’s “here’s the slide, same as day one.” That’s a fact, not an argument, and facts are a lot easier to enforce calmly than memory is.

If you’d rather not build it from scratch

What’s the one procedure you find yourself re-explaining the most, no matter how many times you’ve covered it? That’s usually the one worth putting on a slide.