Back To School- How to Review Class Expectations in a Fun Way

Last Updated on August 16, 2022

Picture this; it’s 8:30 on a Thursday morning a few days before school starts. You have spent the last few days attending meetings and preparing your classroom. The bell has just rung, and you have a classroom of 30 students who have filed in and found their seats. Some enthusiastically, some not so much. You take attendance and move to the front of the room. You start by introducing yourself and discussing what you did over the summer. Some students are shocked to hear about how you spent a couple of weeks in your classroom during summer break preparing things for this day.

You then ask your students if they want to talk about what they did over summer break. A few hands shoot up immediately, and when everyone who wants a turn has had one, about a third of the class has shared what they did on vacation, which family members they saw, and which friends they hung out with.

Now it’s time to move on to classroom rules and expectations. As the room leader, this is one of the most important things you will do during the first few days back from summer break. You must make sure your students understand what you expect of them throughout the school year. This will allow each student to have the best year possible.

In this article, we will look at some of the common ways classroom expectations are reviewed with students.

Posters

You will likely be at the front or side of the room when using this delivery method, and you will read and discuss the expectations from a poster on the wall or the whiteboard. You might ask students to raise their hands and give examples or read the expectations aloud. This presentation of information works well with younger students because the teacher can easily reference the poster throughout the school year. However, there are downsides to having expectations only displayed on a poster, and one of them is that parents don’t see the posters or get the chance to go over the rules and expectations with their children. Parent participation is essential for student success, and if parents are aware of what you expect in your classroom, they can help reinforce that at home.

In classrooms like this, expectations are passed from teacher to student in a one-sided conversation that can quickly get uninteresting for the listener. This is the exact opposite of what you want as a teacher. The first few days of school are essential for setting the tone for the rest of the school year. If students get bored and distracted during the first week of school, they aren’t going to have much to look forward to for the rest of the year. This will make it challenging to keep them engaged, no matter how interesting the content is.

Handouts

This delivery method looks similar to the first, with two significant exceptions. This time, you pass out a paper to each student, and they are responsible for keeping these papers in their notebooks or binders. The handouts have the classroom rules and expectations printed on them for the students to reference throughout the year. As we saw in the previous section, you are still the dominant voice leading the conversation, which tends to get boring for some students. Conversely, giving each student their own copy does solve the problem discussed in the previous section about parent involvement. Students can now take their copy of the expectations home and share it with their parents or guardians. This will allow the parents/guardians to help reinforce your classroom expectations outside the school building.

Presenting the information this way also gives the teacher opportunities for more student conversation. Students can be put in small groups to read the expectations together and develop their own examples. Then, the teacher can bring the class back together and discuss what each group was able to come up with. Taking 5-10 minutes and breaking the students into groups is a great way to combat boredom by letting everyone get up and move while also allowing students to work on their speaking and listening skills.

Slideshows

This delivery method is probably what you see in most classrooms now, especially in middle and high school. With many schools choosing to go 1:1 with technology, these expectations can be pushed out via Google Classroom or Blackboard. You also have some flexibility with how the information is reviewed. As mentioned in the previous section, the discussion can be teacher-led, completed in student-led small groups, or as an individual activity. Another advantage of digitally delivering your rules and expectations is that students cannot lose the information. Organization is an issue for many students, so being able to send them digital copies of important documents can be extremely helpful for them.

The main drawback to this delivery method is the same as the other two; the assignment has a considerable amount of reading at its core. Whether the teacher or students do it, there will always be some students who find it uninteresting and become distracted by other things. One of the main areas of struggle for many students is reading comprehension. Finding ways to make activities fun can go a long way in helping students retain information that they otherwise might not comprehend from just reading it off of a page.

Game Generator

Walking into a classroom using a game generator for teachers would be very different from the previously discussed delivery methods. You would see students actively engaging in the content you have provided for them. In this scenario, you would not be at the front of the room leading the discussion. You would be circulating and touching base with each student or the small groups, depending on how you structured the time and allowing them to learn the material independently.

Using the game generator for teachers is a simple process. After entering your email address and password, you are brought to your manage tests page, where a blue button next to the menu says “Add New Test.” Clicking this button allows you to type your questions into a text box and then type the multiple-choice answers underneath the questions. Here is where you enter your class expectations in a multiple-choice format which then turns them into games to review your expectations.

After entering all the questions and answer choices, you are given an ID # that can be copied and pasted in Google Classroom, Blackboard, or whatever classroom management system you use in your room. An added plus is the different types of games students can choose to play to complete the assignment. There is a soccer game, a snowball fight game, and a taxi cab racing game, to name a few. This website is excellent because it can be adapted to be used with any age group, from kindergarten to middle/high school.

The beginning of the school year is an exciting time for students and teachers alike. Harnessing that excitement and adding to it by changing out the typically uninteresting activities for fun alternatives is a great way to start. Using the Game Generator for Teachers from Review Game Zone is one way to do that. There are 15-20 games/activities available, so the likelihood of a student being unable to find something interesting is slim.

When you step in front of your classroom this year, don’t have the same boring discussion about rules and expectations that you’ve had every other year of your career. Tap into your students' excitement and use the Review Game Maker to get your school year started right.