Top Ten Tips for TTOCs

If you’re like most teachers, you’ll spend at least a portion of your career as a TTOC (Teacher Teaching On Call—otherwise known as a substitute or supply teacher, depending on where you live).

I have TTOC’d a lot—from my very first weeks as a newly qualified teacher when I TTOC’d at my old elementary school in Prince George (my Grade 7 teacher was the principal!) to my three years in graduate school when I supported myself partly through TTOCing to the four months I spent TTOCing in London, England! And I’ve learned a few things along the way. Here are my top ten tips to ensure a smooth beginning, middle, and end to your day as a TTOC!

My first five tips are for the beginning of the day.

I. Figure out the technology before students arrive. 

If you don’t have a laptop or other device assigned to you by the board, it’s worth asking the school office if you can use a school-owned device for the day. Being able to project from a device onto the whiteboard will make your day a lot easier. 

There's nothing worse than standing in front of 30 bored 12-year-olds, drenched in sweat as you fruitlessly attempt to make your laptop project onto the screen, the clock ticking down the seconds until chaos breaks loose—spitballs and paper airplanes flying through the air, students performing impromptu renditions of TikTok dances, all hope of getting through the lesson lost. 

Avoid this situation by FIGURING OUT THE TECHNOLOGY BEFORE THE STUDENTS ARRIVE. First, make sure you can login to the device you’re using and access whatever you need. Then, turn the projector on and make sure you can airplay from your device, or figure out which cord you need to use. Remember to make sure the sound works, too! If you have trouble, ask the office for help. Then, once the students arrive, you will be able to jump directly into your lessons without stress.

II. Go to the washroom five minutes before the bell rings. 

If the bell rings at 8:45, go to the washroom at 8:40—even if you think you don’t need to. It could be close to two hours before you get another opportunity to go since you can’t leave the students unsupervised and there may or may not be another adult in the room at any point. 

III. Engage students right away. 

Make sure students have something to do immediately when they enter the classroom. Students should NOT be waiting passively, which will give them time to start goofing around. 

Engaging students right away communicates that, although the regular teacher is away, there is still someone (you!) who's in charge and has a meaningful plan for the day. 

A few options:

• Start reading a story as soon as one or two kids are on the carpet or at their desks/tables (wherever they usually start the day). The other kids can join and listen when they’re ready, after putting their backpacks, etc., away. 

• Play a video (since you figured out the technology before the bell rang!). Search “morning meditation for kids” on YouTube to find some peaceful options for starting the day, show a Storyline Online read aloud, or play a Mystery Doug science video. If the students are engaged by watching the video, you will be free to help other kids put their stuff away, check in with the EA, organize materials for your first lesson, etc. 

• For younger students, you can put out some materials for them to play with (e.g., math manipulatives). Make sure to choose stuff that the students are likely to be familiar with and that will be easy to clean up. 

• You can give students a coloring sheet or similar (if you had time to photocopy before the bell!). Make sure it is something they can do completely independently. 

IV. Name tags are your friend.

It’s ideal if you can give students sticky labels to wear with their names all day. Most school offices will gladly give you a sheet of sticky labels. If you want to be extra prepared, you could bring your own!  

Make sure to tell the students to put the labels the right way up on their shirt (not on their forehead!) and that they are not allowed to take the labels off and play with them. 

If you don’t have sticky labels, you can have students fold a piece of paper into thirds, write their name on one third, and prop it up on their desk. This also makes for a good “early finishers” activity throughout the day—students who have finished the assigned work can decorate their name tags! 

It is much, much more effective to say, “Hey Jane/Timmy/Susan, eyes on me,” then to say, “Hey! Hey, you back there! Eyes on me!” 

“You in the red shirt,” is for your first aid course, not for TTOCing!

V. Let the students know right off the bat that things will look different today. 

I usually say something like, “As you can see, I’m a different teacher from usual, so things will look a bit differently today. Please don’t shout at me ‘That’s not how we do things here!’ It’s your job to tune in to the instructions, be flexible, and go with the flow.”

Depending on the flow of the day and the vibe of the class, I sometimes implement routines in my own way (see, for example, the description below of the end-of-day routine), and sometimes ask students to explain how things are normally done in their room (for example, if I am unsure of whether I need to walk them to the gym for PE or whether the PE teacher will come pick them up). 

If I’m asking students for information about a particular procedure, I say something like, “RAISE YOUR HAND if you can tell me what the usual routine is for hand-washing in your class.” It’s much less stressful to choose one student to explain than to try to listen to 15 students shouting overtop of each other with great urgency in their attempts to explain how Mrs. Johnson usually does things. 

VI. Keep it teacher-centred. 

There, I said it.

It’s much easier to maintain control of the room when you’re up at the front leading an activity than when the students have long blocks of time to work independently. 

You’ll have plenty of time in your career for student-centered inquiry, engaging hands-on activities, and meaningful collaboration on deep-thinking tasks. A random Tuesday morning in Mrs. Smith’s Grade 4 class is not necessarily that time. Your job is to get the students to complete the assigned work with the minimum of chaos, which is often much easier to accomplish when you’re standing in front of the board talking them through the assignment step-by-step. It might seem old-fashioned, but it’ll get you through the day.

VII. Just say no.

Are the students allowed to work in the hall? Can they have iPad time when they’re finished the assignment? Can they use the colored Sharpies that are in a jar on the high shelf behind the teacher’s desk? No, no, and no.

“But,” they’ll say, “But Mr. Jones always lets us!”

Well, guess what? Mr. Jones isn’t here. You are. And the answer is no.

Only say yes to requests like this if you are absolutely 100% sure that it’s something the students are normally allowed to do. You can always change your mind later if you get more information. It’s much easier to turn a no into a yes then to turn a yes or even a maybe into a no. 

In particular, I recommend against letting students work in the hall or other spaces, even if they tell you they’re normally allowed to. One of your main responsibilities is to ensure that students are supervised at all times. So if they ask, say no.

VIII. Move on to the next activity when about half the class has completed the assignment.

My rule of thumb is this: if there are 28 students in the class, and the assignment is to complete pages 112-113 in the math book, I let the students work on it until 14 of them are finished. At this point, I tell the students who haven’t yet finished to put the work in their catch up boxes/folders/bring it for homework/whatever their usual routine is. Then, I transition the whole class into the next activity.

If more than 50% of the class is doing catch up/reading/drawing/whatever their usual “early finishers” choices are, there is too high a risk of students disengaging/getting bored/off-task, and this is when the shenanigans start. Don’t let things get to that point. No shenanigans! 

IX. Have some backup activities ready. 

A few ideas:

• artprojectsforkids.org: A lot of the lessons you’ll find on this site require NO materials other than blank printer paper. 

• DPA: Take the students outside to play or project a YouTube movement video (Cosmic Kids Yoga or similar). If you project a video, make sure that you are very clear about expectations: each student stays in their own space bubble; and the noise comes from the video, not from the kids. 

• https://tangmath.com/wordproblems: Use this website to generate math word problems that the students can complete on their small whiteboards.

• Read aloud a fiction text, then have the students fold printer paper into thirds and draw pictures and/or write a summary to represent the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Alternatively, you could read aloud a nonfiction text and have students record the main idea, which you can work as a class to identify, and three or four supporting details of their choice. (Note: students often struggle to differentiate between the TOPIC, which can often be expressed in one word [e.g., frogs] and the MAIN IDEA, which must be expressed in a full sentence [e.g., Frogs live in many places around the world], so you will likely need to provide some guidance around this.)

• Have students write a journal entry. Make it meaningful by modeling, brainstorming, providing sentence starters, and identifying criteria (e.g., they must write at least 5 sentences; they must use adjectives; they must state their main idea in their first sentence; etc). A few ideas for topics students can write about:

  • what they did on the weekend

  • 6 senses of whichever season it currently is

  • show The Best Part of Me on YouTube and have students write about their favorite body part

  • their favorite place or an imaginary place 

  • instructions for something they know how to do

Students love to share their writing; you can fill more time by giving students who would like to an opportunity to read their work aloud to the class. Reading their full compositions might be too time-consuming, but you could have each kid share a sentence they are particularly proud of. 

X. Get ready for dimissal 20 minutes before the bell rings.

One school where I worked had a 20-minute window built into their schedule at the end of the day when teachers and students could wrap things up in their homerooms. There were no “specials” (PE, French, music, library, etc.) scheduled for this time. I found that this worked really well, and have carried this practice with me as I’ve moved to other schools. 

If dismissal is at 2:45, I stop whatever we're doing at 2:25 and tell the students that, just as I let them know first thing that morning, the routine will look different from normal today. 

I have the students tidy up what they're doing and make sure everyone is sitting at their own desk. I then send one group at a time to the cubbies to get their backpacks, etc. Then, Primary students sit at the carpet (which allows the chairs to be stacked), while Intermediate students sit at their desks again. 

“But,” you might be thinking, “it often only takes five or ten minutes to clean up and get backpacks on. So don’t you end up being ready ten or 15 minutes early?”

Yes—and that’s the point. This allows you to end your day on an unhurried and (relatively) stress-free note. You can use the extra time to read one last story, show a video that’s relevant to one of the lessons that was covered that day, play Wordle (for older students) or CVC hangman (for younger kids), play a class game, sing a song together, or any other activity of your choice. It can feel great to end the day by doing something positive and, dare I say it, fun as a class community instead of rushing through the dismissal routine and then having to clean up the classroom yourself because you ran out of time for the students to tidy.