Prepared Classroom: Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn
By Gail Boushey and Allison Behne
(Routledge/Stenhouse, 2025 – Learn more)
Reviewed by Stacy Haynes-Moore
One of the most enlightening moments for preservice teachers often occurs during K-12 field observations and post-visit debriefs. We discuss teachers’ classroom instruction, why a lesson worked (or didn’t), and the dynamics of working with students.
These post-visit conversations are clarifying for future teachers who come to realize there is a complexity to crafting an engaged classroom. It is not only a teacher’s subject knowledge or the energy they bring in lesson delivery that carries impact but the teacher’s behind-the-scenes efforts to plan thoroughly and thoughtfully that have real power to shape students’ experiences.
Purposeful planning is essential.
That’s the argument of authors Gail Boushey and Allison Behne in Prepared Classroom: Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn, an insightful and pragmatic resource that is immediately useful for any teacher, preservice through veteran status.
Prepared Classroom reads like a coaching conversation, and it is a welcome one, as Boushey and Behne encourage teachers to pause and take a breath, “It’s time to wave goodbye to feeling overwhelmed and say hello to a classroom where both you and your students can experience joy and excel.”
The first section of the authors’ 266-page spiral bound text focuses on teachers’ approaches to strengthen classroom relationships, foster a positive learning environment, and establish daily routines, independent learning, collaborative learning, conferring, effective lessons, and progress monitoring.
The second section of the text dives into each category with personal anecdotes and discussion, prompts, printable handouts, and 52 lessons with detailed strategies.
Modeling procedures step by step
In particular, I appreciated the “Daily Routines” chapter in which the authors describe instruction of classroom procedures through a variety of examples and step by step outlines to model what the procedures look like and sound like.
I selected several lessons for use with my preservice students to build their confidence and teach fundamental middle school procedures such as how to line up to leave the classroom, how to walk in the hallway, how to take a ‘brain break,’ how to observe a ‘quiet signal,’ or how to put materials away at the end of the school day.
Each routine description includes clear guidance from the authors about how to introduce and direct students’ learning: first, explain why the routine is relevant; next, specifically describe what students will learn; then conclude with actual practice so students understand what is expected and to help the class community develop this routine as a regular habit.
Throughout, Prepared Classroom highlights the importance of teachers’ efforts to take notice of the K-12 students actually “in front” of them, to recognize students’ strengths and needs as a step to designing meaningful instruction. In my reading and exploration of the text’s various sections, I found the authors’ philosophies and concrete applications relevant to my work with future teachers as well as my own professional development.
Boushey and Behne illustrate for us why a prepared classroom is a powerful tool for teachers to foster positive environments and support student learning. I recommend it to teacher educators and to beginning and novice teachers themselves.
Dr. Stacy Haynes-Moore is a veteran classroom teacher for K-12 schools and has served district colleagues in various leadership roles, including that of instructional coach and curriculum facilitator for grades 6-12 English Language Arts. She currently carries forward her passion for teaching, learning, and leading as Assistant Professor and Chair of Education Department at Coe College.
