Two Intentional Minutes: A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
Looking for a Better Beginning
For years, my mornings were defined by hustle.
I wasn’t someone who woke up early to exercise, journal, or meditate before work. I admired people who had those routines, but I knew myself well enough to know they weren’t realistic for me. If I was going to change my mornings, it had to be something simple.
More importantly, it had to be something I could stick with. I started paying attention to the advice people shared about building better habits.
One suggestion came up everywhere:
Make your bed.
At first, I dismissed it. How could making the bed possibly influence the rest of my day? It felt too simple to make any real difference.
Eventually, curiosity won, and I decided to try it.
What surprised me was that making the bed itself wasn’t what changed my mornings. It was what happened during those two minutes.
Instead of rushing from one task to the next, I found myself slowing down just enough to think. As I straightened the covers, I began considering the day ahead.
- Was there a conversation I needed to approach differently?
- Was I already carrying stress into a day that hadn’t started yet?
- What attitude did I want to bring with me?
- What mattered most today?
Making the bed gave me a reason to pause, but it was the pause that mattered. Those two minutes became intentional. Rather than reacting to the day from the moment I got out of bed, I was choosing how I wanted to enter it.
Making My Bed in the Classroom
If making the bed had become my way of beginning the day at home, what was the classroom version of making the bed?
In theory, classroom mornings are for preparation. In reality, mine were a dash against the clock: copies, duty, missing materials, and a colleague with a quick question before I ever reached my desk.
I could manage the hustle. What I could not manage was the way it followed me into the room. I had prepared the lesson: the Learning Goal, the questions I would ask, the way students would show me what they understood. What I had not prepared was myself, and I walked in running on reactive energy before the first bell rang.
For a long time, I read those mornings as proof that there was no room for one more thing. But making the bed had never been one more thing. It was two minutes I already had, spent differently.
Once I looked for it that way, I found it. There was a short stretch after the last errand and before the first student, when the room was quiet, and I spent it on one more task. I had been treating it like leftover time, when it was an opportunity. And it was there on more mornings than I had ever noticed.
A View from a Student’s Desk
The view I had been walking past every morning.
One morning, in those last few minutes, I looked around the empty room. I thought about the two intentional minutes that had become part of my mornings at home. I wanted something just as simple before my students flooded in, something to help me set the chaos down, pause, and focus.
Something about sitting there shifted my thinking immediately. For the first time that morning, I wasn’t looking at my classroom as the teacher. I was looking at it through the eyes of a student.
I watched myself greet students by name, offer praise to a pair working well together, and hold silence after a question instead of filling it. And I watched myself meet a wrong answer with another question instead of a correction.
As I sat there, I realized I wasn’t visualizing the lesson. I was visualizing the teacher I wanted to be during the lesson.
After all, athletes mentally rehearse before competition. Musicians walk through a performance before they ever step onto the stage. Teaching asks the same of us. Planning the lesson is where I made my instructional decisions, but not every decision can be made in advance. Some arrive in a second, and they shape the learning as much as anything I planned. Those were the ones I had never practiced.
Mental rehearsal prepares the athlete, the musician, and the teacher.
From that point on, those few quiet minutes became part of my routine. Most mornings I asked myself the same three questions.
- How did I want students to feel in this room?
- What did I want them to hear from me?
- What did I want them to believe about themselves as learners?
I wasn’t trying to predict how the lesson would unfold, because teaching rarely goes exactly as planned. I was preparing myself to respond with patience, curiosity, and purpose, no matter what happened once students filled the room.
What Changed
Did those few quiet minutes guarantee a great lesson?
Of course not.
Students still surprised me. Discussions went in unexpected directions. Technology occasionally failed. Some lessons were better than others, and some had to be adjusted on the fly.
What changed was how I entered it.
- Instead of hoping I would be patient after a stressful morning, I had already reminded myself to be patient.
- Instead of reacting to student thinking, I had already pictured myself extending it.
- Instead of walking in consumed by everything I needed to accomplish, I walked in thinking about the experience I wanted to create.
Over time, I noticed something else. The visualization wasn’t changing my plans nearly as much as it was changing my habits. Little by little, the moves I rehearsed before the lesson became the moves I made during it.
Saying a name at the door. Waiting a little longer. Asking one more question. Meeting a mistake with curiosity instead of an answer.
Those moments didn’t happen because I remembered a checklist. They happened because I had practiced becoming that teacher before the lesson ever began.
The Power of the Pause
Looking back, making the bed was never really the point. What mattered was discovering the power of a small, intentional habit. Two quiet minutes each morning taught me that how I begin something often shapes what follows. That lesson didn’t stay at home. It found its way into my classroom and changed the way I prepared to teach.
Some mornings are too busy. Some days go sideways before my feet ever hit the floor. But whenever I catch myself rushing into a day instead of beginning it, I know exactly what I’m missing.
I’m missing the pause.
Teaching is filled with moments that shape us, the ones we share with our students and the ones that happen in empty classrooms. Most of them are small enough to go unnoticed. Two minutes is enough to notice one. Practiced day after day, it becomes a teaching habit.
And over time, our teaching habits shape who we are.
Two Intentional Minutes
A Series on the Teaching Habits That Shape Great Teaching
Today’s Habit: Beginning with intention.
“Making the Bed Didn’t Change My Teaching... Until It Did” is the first article in Two Intentional Minutes, a series exploring the small habits that shape great teaching. Each reflection examines one intentional habit that has influenced my own practice, not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’m still learning from it. My hope is that these reflections encourage you to discover the habits that are shaping your own teaching.
