Teaching is a complicated skill, or rather a huge set of skills.

Here’s some straightforward things you should know about teaching a short lesson to a group, skills that work from kindergarten to college: Use your routines and rules, introduce the lesson, activate prior knowledge, teach directly, do group practice, do individual practice, review the lesson, restate the main idea, and dismiss the class.

Routines: You have already taught routines early in the year, and reinforced them. This is how you line up. This is how you sit down. This is how you listen to the teacher, and to other students. This is how you talk to the teacher and to the other students. This is how you work with others. I don’t care how dumb you think it is, people don’t automatically know what you expect. Each new classroom is a new world to students and they often start with a lot of assumptions that are wrong. You think your expectations are obvious. They are not.

Rules: Establish a set of simple basic rules. Human beings don’t read signs, no matter what their age, unless you have taught them to look at the signs. So okay, put up classroom rules signs, but don’t expect people to follow them unless you have taught them to look at the signs. Keep them short and simple.

Introduce the lesson: Now, to actually teaching the lesson: Get people’s attention, with a picture, a short video, a stuffed animal, the cover of a book, a mysterious piece of paper, or an outrageous statement. It should be related to what you are going to teach. Get them engaged and active as fast as you can. People don’t take in a whole lot of information in big chunks. They zone out. However, resist the temptation to talk too fast. Slow down.

Activate prior knowledge: Ask questions of individuals and of groups about what they already know, try to avoid “cold calls” so that you aren’t putting kids on the spot, and wait for the answer. Count to five in your head if necessary while waiting, so that you don’t talk over students. They need time to think. Get everyone used to the fact that you do that.

Ask questions that don’t have a yes/no answer. Collect responses from all the students before you weigh in, and try not to evaluate answers as wrong or right. You want your students all to feel they have a role in what’s going on. Restate what you hear students saying.

Direct teaching: Then tell them the one fact you want them to remember, write it down so they can see it (if they can read), get some of them to repeat what you just said, get someone to repeat what the others just said, and discuss what that fact means. Show them what the fact means, whether it’s a reading trick, a math fact, or the main elements of a lesson plan.

Group practice: Get them to answer some questions or practice the skill as a whole group. Use the “turn and talk” routine, which you have already taught them, right? to share their answers with each other. Don’t spend too long on this, just long enough that you’re pretty sure most of them know what you’re talking about.

Individual practice: Tell them to do some practice work at their desks or tables that reinforces the fact, making sure once again that they understand the directions as a group. Send them in an orderly way to their seats to work, using a routine you have taught them already. Walk around, spending a few seconds with every kid and hopefully correcting the misunderstandings that still exist. That work will not necessarily be in writing. It might be working with blocks, for instance, or just having a conversation.

Even if it looks like all your students are on task, what “on task” means is complicated. Look at what your students are doing, ask them questions, be aware of what’s going on everywhere else in the room, and be prepared to put out fires. If there is a student who is profoundly confused, you aren’t going to fix it right now, because the rest of the class is going to get wildly off task. You’re going to find a time when you can find out why the student doesn’t understand, and hopefully circle back when the situation is less volatile.

If a small group starts giggling, gravitate toward them because they are doing something they shouldn’t be doing. This especially applies to college students. Don’t shame them, just gently redirect by asking a question or asking if there’s something they don’t understand. If they have caught a beetle, trap the beetle with a clear plastic cup and put it into a jar to release later. If someone has a nosebleed, alert the nurse’s office and send them to the nurse with a buddy. Remember to reteach what they missed when they come back.

Have something handy for students to turn to when they’re finished, and teach them how to turn to it. Be explicit about where they can find it. It should be work they already know how to do, maybe related to this lesson or maybe work related to a previous lesson.

Teach them where to hand their work in, or have a student collect the work and hand it to you. Don’t let them all hand it to you because you’ll get mobbed, and don’t collect it yourself or you will end up looking for a sheaf of paper that you just had.

Review: When most of them have had enough time to finish the task, use a routine to get them to turn to you (or get them physically back in their seats), review what you taught them, and get them to repeat it back to you.

Closing: Tell them what they just learned. Seriously. Because next class, when you tell them, “You learned how to (a) (b) and (c),” they will look at you as if you just farted and wonder what you are talking about unless you tell them what you told them. This was by far the most common thing my student teachers forgot to do.

Dismiss: Now, since you have already taught them how to clean up and how to switch from one set of rules to another, give them time to transition to the next class, topic, subject, or lesson and catch up on their conversations quickly.

Congratulations. You have “taught a lesson.”

I didn’t mention that you better make damn sure the fact or skill you are teaching is correct, and that the practice you’re having students do is directly related to what you taught.

The last and most important thing to remember is that as the teacher, you don’t get any down time. You can’t look at your phone, talk to a friend, or just sit back and stare into space for more than maybe ten seconds.

Not even when you have dismissed class and they are being supervised by someone else?

No, now you have to look at their work, if it’s written, check it off, note a few individual misunderstandings you didn’t catch, notice that almost all the students misunderstood one particular facet of the lesson, and decide what you are going to have to reteach when you do a review.

Because you are going to have to review everything you taught, and everything every previous teacher taught. Human beings forget things. It’s what they do.

Also, you are now going to have to make some phone calls or send some messages about that student who was weeping uncontrollably the whole time you were teaching, or throwing chairs, or who was shut down because community college didn’t prepare them for university or because their son got shot the day before. And you have to get up and find out where the school counselor took the student who ran out of the room while you were teaching. Because of course you interrupted your lesson to call the office, when they did that, right?

Also, during the lesson, you had a fire alarm, and your classroom PA system doesn’t work well, so the principal came to the door and interrupted you to tell them tomorrow is a dress down day.

Note: This is only for direct teaching. “Discovery learning” is a whole other lesson plan. And a lot of the time, your “lessons” will just be reviewing things you already taught them so they can remember it.