💡 The Big Idea
“The lesson needed more pace.”
We have all been there and heard this phrase repeated to us during lesson observations and when we’re discussing teaching with senior leaders. But if you’re like me, I’m never quite sure that it tells us very much about how to get better at teaching. Are we asking teachers to talk faster? Are we wanting children to work more quickly? Are there not enough activities within my lesson?
When I personally think about pace, I tend to think about lessons not being rushed, but instead being sharp. After all, we don’t want rushed lessons or learning. We don’t want teaching to be frantic. We just want to reduce the amount of friction that inevitably exists within a primary classroom that can quite frequently slow everything down.
When a whiteboard pen doesn’t work, or someone doesn’t know where their book goes, or pupils aren’t quite sure what “turn and talk” means, or the teacher gives an instruction, then explains it again slightly differently, this adds friction to lessons.
None of these things are an absolute disaster on their own. Most of these interruptions will last less than a couple of seconds. But added up over time, they interrupt the flow of teaching and learning. Teachers’ attention starts to move away from the learning and begins to focus more on solving classroom problems that have appeared.
That is the friction. So, the more of it we can remove, the more smoothly the lesson can run.
A well-paced classroom, therefore, is not necessarily one where tasks are moving quickly from one to the next like a train that rumbles on. It is, instead, one where very little gets in the way. The lesson feels sharper because less time is disappearing into all the stuff surrounding the learning.
But is that really possible, and do we want a truly frictionless classroom?
👀 A Closer Look
🧊 Frictionless-ish...
I just want to be clear; I don’t think a genuinely frictionless classroom exists, particularly in the primary phase. After all, children are children. Noses are runny, and pencils do snap. Primary classrooms are wonderfully unpredictable places. That’s part of the joy of being a primary school teacher. I don’t believe any teacher has completed their full primary teacher initiation without a classic projectile-vomit-across-the-carpet-area type incident.
The aim isn’t achieving zero friction. It is trying to reduce friction as much as possible.
We cannot eliminate every interruption, nor do we want to be obsessed with doing so. What we can do is notice the recurring bits of friction that repeatedly take away time and attention from what we’re trying to teach. If whiteboard pens are always causing a problem, then we look to change the system and process of how children access them. If children aren’t sure how to start their independent practice, then we need to improve the way we communicate what they need to do. And if children are frequently not transitioning well from the carpet to the tables, then we need to tighten up this routine.
That’s where pace begins to emerge. Not from rushing everyone along, but from removing enough of those mild, frequent interruptions so that lessons run as smoothly as possible.
🔁 Remove Friction Through Familiarity
Familiarity is a key to pace. If children are unfamiliar with the routines and expectations, or how to participate within a lesson, we are allowing for unnecessary friction.
If we use mini whiteboards as an example. A teacher asks children to write an answer to a maths calculation on the whiteboard. Everybody starts, but she notices three or four children are copying the person next to them. One child finishes and waves the whiteboard in the air, declaring the answer to everybody else. Another one has taken it upon themselves to draw a little picture of a Pokémon in the corner of the whiteboard. The teacher asked the class to show her the answer. All the whiteboards get lifted in the air. One or two slap the children sitting next to them in their faces as they go up. Some whiteboards are facing the wrong way, so the answer can’t actually be seen. And the whole routine has taken about 3 or 4 minutes to get through.
And all the teacher wanted to know was what the answer to double 7 was.
We have all been there! And it is natural that the first few times we use routines like this, they won’t be perfect. They need teaching and reinforcing. But, eventually, familiarity with a well-thought-out routine removes the friction.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve developed the WAGOLL+ Primary Playbook. It codifies routines such as Show Me, Cold Calling, Turn and Talk, Do Now and Hinge Questions so teachers can explicitly teach pupils how these routines work, rather than repeatedly reinventing them. When pupils don't have to think about the routine, they have more capacity to think about the learning.
⭐ WAGOLL+: The Primary Playbook
If you like this post, you’ll love the Primary Playbook for WAGOLL+ members. An ever-growing, primary-specific bank of one-page teaching routines, each with a clear why, what, and how to do it tomorrow, plus KS1/KS2 adaptations.
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🗃️ Remove Physical Friction
Sometimes the barrier to pace is incredibly mundane.
“Sir, my pen doesn’t work.”
“Can I go and get a tissue?”
“I haven’t got a whiteboard.”
“Where does this sheet go?”
And there goes another minute and another small fragment of my hairline.
The physical organisation of any primary classroom has a large influence on the way the classroom works and the pace of teaching and learning. Frequently used resources need clear and explicit homes. Pupils need to know how to access these resources, replace them if they are no longer working, and how to put them away so that they’re ready to access again the next time they are needed.
Quick preparation can remove friction too. If pupils need whiteboards halfway through a lesson, perhaps they can be placed under or in the centre of tables in advance. A place where they’re not going to cause distraction when they are not needed, but a place where children can access them quickly when they are. If three resources are needed for an activity, perhaps they can be grouped together beforehand in a single tray for each table rather than distributed one at a time.
None of this is particularly glamorous pedagogy, but it is still really important and often very much overlooked as a fundamental part of running an effective primary classroom. No, I don’t think professional development days should be dedicated to how to effectively organise your classroom. But, frequent opportunities to visit other teachers’ classrooms and observe how teachers run the physical environment, I would argue, is a very important part of laying the foundations of a successful primary teaching and learning environment.
🗣️ Remove Friction From Communication
The way we communicate as teachers can also cause friction too. With the intent of getting children started with their task, we sometimes can fall into the trap of giving of not communicating properly. We can give an instruction but forget an important part, then add another instruction, then remember something else, and then have to reclarify the instructions in a slightly different order. Then we may have to interrupt everyone thirty seconds later because we’ve forgotten to mention the success criteria.
The less clear we are in our explanations, communications, and instructions, the more ambiguous they become. Therefore, sharpening our communication is an important part of maintaining pace within a lesson. Being more economical with our language and removing unnecessary vocabulary can be part of this. If you’ve ever learnt a European language, you will have realised how direct other cultures are when communicating - particularly when it is related to instructions.
“Books open. Date and title. Start question one, please.” is sometimes enough.
Teacher presence and actions can play a part here too. Familiar gestures, positioning, eye contact and vocal cues can remove the need for additional words. Once pupils know that “3, 2, 1” means boards up, another explanation isn’t required.
🚀 Remove Friction With Visible Time
“You’ve got five minutes for this task, starting now.” But five minutes means something very different to a six-year-old than it does to an adult. Time is an abstract concept. Without a visible reference point, pupils can struggle to judge how quickly they need to work or how much time remains. Visual timers therefore make an abstract amount of time visible.
“In two minutes, I am looking for two reasons on your whiteboard.”
[Teacher sets the two-minute timer.]
Once the timer starts, pupils now have a clear endpoint. They’ve seen a time before. They know roughly how long they have to complete their task and therefore how much time remains. There is a positive urgency within the classroom. The red two-minute timer might set expectations around thinking and jotting time. The yellow five-minute timer might be appropriate for short, sharp calculation practice. And the blue twenty-minute timer signals a period of sustained independent writing.
Used consistently, timers can help pupils develop a better sense of what different periods of classroom time actually feel like and begin regulating their own pace. A bit like understanding how to run a 1 km, a 5 km, and a 10 km race. Each needs a slightly different approach. Some would define this as supporting self-regulation and metacognition, too.
The important part, however, is that the timer supports the completion of a task. A countdown should create positive urgency and not anxiety. It should create pace, not panic.
🧠 Don’t Remove the Useful Friction
This is where feedback on pace goes wrong. Just like in movies, where the narrative picks up pace and then slows down at important moments, the best teachers manipulate the pace of a lesson to maintain the engagement and attention of children. So, not all friction is something that we should be trying to remove.
Robert Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulties” to describe conditions that can make learning feel more effortful in the moment but ultimately support longer-term learning. The important word here is desirable. Missing a whiteboard pen is not desirable. Giving children an extra minute to retrieve previously learned knowledge and really unpick and wrestle with some key concepts and ideas, or to reconsider an incorrect answer, is a desirable difficulty we want to encourage. We should not fear slowing the pace down when it really matters.
There can be a temptation to equate quick, correct responses with a well-paced lesson. A teacher asks a question, looks for the correct answer, here’s the correct answer, and then moves on. When the answer doesn’t arrive immediately, it can feel as though the momentum has disappeared.
But sometimes that’s exactly the moment when we need to resist speeding things up.
”Oh, this is interesting. I feel like we need to maybe have a look at this question together!”
This is also why checks for understanding shouldn’t simply be a way of obtaining enough correct answers to give us permission to move on. If the response tells us pupils aren’t there yet, we should take a few steps back. Back to the whiteboards. Back to partner talk. Back to another modelled example or explanation. Perhaps another thirty seconds to think before answering again.
And as I said towards the beginning of this post, a generally frictionless classroom doesn’t and indeed shouldn’t exist. The aim is to deliberately remove the unnecessary friction surrounding learning while preserving and embracing the desirable difficulties within it. For it is the desirable difficulties and friction that are the catalyst for further learning to take place.
🧠 The Bits That Stick
✅ Pace isn’t speed. It’s sharpness.
✅ Remove unnecessary friction from the mechanics of learning.
✅ Familiar routines create flow.
✅ Clear instructions. Accessible resources. Visible time.
✅ Don’t rush the thinking. Some friction is desirable.
In a bit,
Coops 😎
📚 References
Kounin, J. S. (1970). Discipline and Group Management in Classrooms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Rosenshine, B. (2012). Principles of Instruction: Research-Based Strategies That All Teachers Should Know. American Educator, 36(1), 12–19, 39.
Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. P. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.
Love this - been thinking a lot about this recently and the ways we can reduce mental friction through shared language and routines.
I love this distinction between pace and speed. Sometimes the best teaching happens when we slow down and give children space to think, question, and make mistakes. How often do we mistake a busy classroom for a learning-rich one?