ASCD December 2, 2025 Catherine Cottingham
Teachers spend weeks planning for the first days of school— preparing classroom environments, labeling cubbies, rehearsing arrival routines, and dreaming up community-building activities.
Then the students arrive. Week one is all fresh notebooks and hopeful smiles. Students are still in their back-to-school best behavior phase, recharged from summer and eager to please. But like clockwork, the novelty wears off. Students’ social vortex opens wide, and fellow classmates become more magnetic than your seating chart. By week three, you may find yourself wondering if you only imagined that cooperative class.
Teachers hope first-week activities, such as classroom agreements and transition routines, will set the tone for the year, but if they don’t continue to reinforce community building and shared norms, that tone turns into background noise fast. Instead, teachers need to build a steady classroom culture that will stick around all year. The process of guiding a class into sustainable patterns of work and behavior is called normalization, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Normalization is slow, and sometimes it looks like regression. Students test limits, routines falter, and everything feels a little undone. This is completely normal. Building a functional classroom takes time, and progress is rarely linear. Normalization is the long game, involving repetition, redirection, and a good measure of creativity.
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