To Every Aussie Primary Teacher Holding the Room Together: We See You

Contents

The Look You’ve Already Perfected Predictability and Young Brains Catching Them Being Good – The Thing You Do Without Even Thinking Co-Regulating – The Most Underrated Skill in Teaching The Restorative Chat You’re Probably Already Half-Doing What We Wish Someone Said to You More Often Sources Twinkl Resources

If your Year 3s are more dysregulated than the cohort before them, your Year 6s less resilient than they used to be, and the strategies that worked for you five years ago don’t quite cut it anymore — you’re not imagining it. And it’s not you.

The 2025 AEU State of Our Schools survey confirmed what so many of us have been saying for years: 85% of Australian teachers say they spend too much, or far too much, time managing student behaviour. A Monash University study found teachers managing disruptive behaviour five or more times a day. The percentage of teachers feeling unsafe at work climbed from 18.9% in 2019 to 24.5% in 2022.

The data finally caught up to what we’re seeing in our classrooms everyday. The post-COVID classroom is genuinely harder. And if you’re getting through each day, building relationships, and still showing up for your students – you are doing extraordinary work in conditions no one prepared you for.

OECD TALIS 2024 confirmed something else, too: classroom management is now the #1 professional learning topic Australia’s beginning teachers ask for — third only to AI and special-education skills. So if you’re an experienced teacher feeling like you’re constantly repeating yourself, it’s not just you. It’s the whole system catching up to a new reality.

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Twinkl has gathered a few of the strategies the research keeps coming back to. Not as a checklist, and definitely not as a “you should be doing this” , but as a quiet nod to the things many of you are already doing instinctively, and a bit of evidence that backs you up.

The Look You’ve Already Perfected

When research on first-year Australian primary teachers asked which classroom management strategies actually worked, non-verbal body language topped the list, ahead of verbal corrections, rewards or consequences.

Many of you already know this in your bones. The raised eyebrow. The pause near a desk. The hand quietly placed on the corner of a workbook. These small gestures hold whole classrooms – and the research is finally saying out loud what experienced primary teachers have always known: in a room of 30 nervous systems, the loudest voice rarely wins.

Predictability and Young Brains

The NSW Department of Education’s guide to cognitive load theory reframes something most primary teachers already do beautifully. Predictable routines – entry, transitions, getting equipment, packing up – free up the mental bandwidth your students need to focus on what they’re actually there to do – learn.

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Children’s brains are still under construction. The prefrontal cortex – the part that manages attention, decision-making and self-regulation – won’t fully develop until adulthood. Every misfired instruction, every unclear expectation, every chaotic transition asks a child’s brain to do work it doesn’t yet have the wiring for.

When the classroom is familiar – when they know where the pencils are, what the morning looks like, what happens when the bell rings – their brains aren’t burning fuel scanning for threats or working out the rules of the day (or wondering if those rules are going to change on them unexpectedly). That energy goes where it should: on learning. Predictability isn’t restrictive. For a developing brain, it’s the runway that makes learning possible.

The teachers who run smooth rooms aren’t being rigid. They understand how young brains are wired.

Catching Them Being Good – The Thing You Do Without Even Thinking

AERO’s evidence on what works calls it “positive narration.” You probably just call it Tuesday morning.
“I can see Mia has her book open and her pencil ready. Jordan’s already started the first question.”

You do this dozens of times a day – quietly redirecting without singling anyone out, flooding the room with low-key recognition. The research says it shapes behaviour more reliably than any correction ever will. After several years of more correction than connection, it might be the single most important thing you’re doing.

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Co-Regulating – The Most Underrated Skill in Teaching

The National Guidelines for Trauma-Aware Education in Australia describe co-regulation as the foundation of trauma-informed practice: students borrow our calm before they can find their own.

Children’s nervous systems read ours first, and our words second. When a child is escalating, the part of their brain that processes language has gone quiet — they’re not really listening to what we’re saying. Logic doesn’t work in those moments; we can’t talk them out of it. What they’re tracking is our tone, our face, our posture, our breathing. They’re scanning to work out whether the adult in front of them is safe, in control, and steady. That answer – yes or no – shapes everything that happens next.

It’s why the same exchange can play out two completely different ways depending on how the teacher arrives in the moment. A calm teacher meeting a dysregulated child gives that child a way back. An overwhelmed teacher meeting a dysregulated child can amplify what’s already happening in the room – even when the words coming out of our mouths are reasonable. The kids feel the difference.

It isn’t only a classroom skill, either. As a parent, I had to learn this after having my own children. I was humbled. I had to relearn how to regulate myself before I could calm my babies.

That doesn’t mean we have to be perfectly regulated all the time. Of course we get pulled into the storm sometimes – we’re human, the day is long, the moment was the third one in a row. The point isn’t perfection. It’s that what you do in heightened moments lands on your students more powerfully than almost anything else you do all day. Your voice, your shoulders, the second of pause before you speak – those are the variables your students’ nervous systems are quietly running calculations on.

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When a child is escalating, you instinctively soften your voice, drop your shoulders, take an extra second before responding. That isn’t “going easy on them” – it’s some of the most skilled teaching you’ll do all day. And on the days you don’t manage it (because there will be days), the small repair afterwards – “I got loud back there. I’m sorry. Let’s start again” – teaches them as much about regulation as the calm moments do.

It’s what protects the relationship that makes everything else possible.

The Restorative Chat You’re Probably Already Half-Doing

Once everyone’s settled and words can land again, the conversation becomes possible. This is the partner skill to co-regulation – where what just happened becomes something the child can learn from, not just live through.

NSW Department of Education guidance on restorative practices describes a four-question script — What happened? What were you thinking? Who’s been affected? What can you do to make it right?

Many of you have a version of this conversation a dozen times a week – at the bag rack, in the hallway, walking back from lunch. The research just gives language to something experienced teachers already do – behaviour repair as relationship-building, not punishment.

What We Wish Someone Said to You More Often

You’re not failing. Your classroom has changed. Your kids have changed. Your job got harder. And you’re still here – still finding ways to make it work, still being the steady adult in 30 small lives.

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The honest message from the research isn’t “do more”. It’s that the small things you’re already doing – the look, the routine, the quiet praise, the soft voice, the second chance – are the things that still work.

Twinkl see you. They’re glad you’re still here.

They are here to help. Here are a few tools to help get you through.