Principals, The Honeymoon Is Over: What the First Six Weeks of School Reveal About Your School’s Systems of Regulation
There is something unique about the first few weeks of a new school year.
In many ways, they can feel chaotic. New staff members are learning the building. Teachers are settling into new classrooms and grade levels. Professional development is underway. Routines and expectations are being introduced. Students and adults are figuring one another out, and an entire school community is learning how to function together again.
But if we’re being honest, there is something else happening during those first few weeks too.
Everyone is paying attention.
Teachers are intentionally teaching routines. Administrators are highly visible. Students are learning expectations. New staff are trying to understand how things are done. And, to some extent, everyone is still on their best behavior. One could say that there’s a certain amount of ‘new-school-year energy’ holding everything together.
Then, somewhere around the six-week mark, the honeymoon starts to wear off.
The routines that were explicitly taught in August are now being tested by the realities of October. Students are more comfortable. Adults are busier. The novelty is gone. And the systems that felt solid during the opening weeks of school may—or may not—be holding.
This is where things get interesting.
Because the first six weeks haven't just shown you how students are doing. They've shown you how your systems of regulation are doing.
Six Weeks In, Patterns Are Becoming Visible
By this point in the year, most school leaders have collected quite a bit of information. Maybe lunch is consistently harder than expected. Or students return from recess ready to learn in some classrooms, while other teachers spend the first ten minutes trying to settle everyone. It could be that morning arrival runs beautifully until students reach a particular part of the building. Perhaps specials, dismissal, or certain transitions seem to generate the same challenges every single day.
At first, these moments can feel isolated. But when the same challenges continue showing up in the same places, at the same times, or under the same conditions, they stop being isolated moments. Those are patterns. And patterns are worth paying attention to.
Six weeks gives us enough time to begin noticing these patterns. How do students consistently enter into the various environments throughout the school? Are transitions smooth and supported throughout the day? How are adults responding when students become dysregulated? Do teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, counselors, and specials teachers approach dysregulation in relatively aligned ways? Essentially, the first six weeks can provide enough information to answer;
What are these patterns telling us about the conditions we've created to support emotional regulation?
What Strong Systems of Regulation Look Like in a School
A school with strong systems of regulation is not a school without dysregulation.
Students still get upset. Recess conflicts still happen. Kindergartners still have hard mornings. Teachers still become frustrated. There are still days when everything seems to go sideways.
Strong systems don't eliminate the need for emotional regulation. Rather, they make regulation more consistently supported when it is needed. And by six weeks, we can often begin to see whether those systems are becoming part of the way the school operates.
Consider new staff. During the first few weeks, a new teacher may be learning dozens of things at once. By six weeks, though, that teacher should be beginning to understand more than the bell schedule and where to pick students up from specials.
They're beginning to understand, this is how we support emotional regulation here. That doesn't mean every teacher has to run an identical classroom. A teacher can bring their own personality, routines, strengths, and professional judgment while still operating within shared schoolwide expectations around predictability, transitions, and adult responses to dysregulation.
Students begin absorbing those systems too. In fact, some of the youngest students in the building can tell us quite a bit. Think about your Pre-K and kindergarten students. Six weeks ago, many of them knew very little about how your school operates. What do they know now? Are they beginning to understand what happens when they enter the building? How lunch works? What happens when recess ends? How they move through shared spaces? What adults will do when they are overwhelmed or having difficulty? Are they beginning to internalize the regulatory patterns of the school?
Additionally, older students can become carriers of those same patterns. They know how things work within the school. They have the ability to model routines, transitions, expectations, and ways of moving through the school day for younger students.
When systems of regulation are strong, they begin to become part of the culture—visible in how students and adults move through the school day.
What Inconsistent Systems Begin to Reveal.
The opposite can also become clearer around this point in the year.
Students may still seem unsure about what happens next. Adults may rely heavily on repeating verbal directions for students. Transitions may require significant amounts of correction every day. Students may experience completely different responses to dysregulation depending on which adult is present.
This is where I find it helpful to look at three different conditions.
Environmental Predictability
Do students understand the environments they're entering and what those environments ask of them?
Six weeks into the year, are students still regularly unsure about routines or expectations? Does everything work when the classroom teacher is present but fall apart when someone else takes over? Are adults constantly communicating information the environment or established routine could eventually be communicating for them?
Predictability reduces the amount students have to figure out in the moment, creating conditions that can make emotional regulation easier to access for students.
Transition Readiness
This is slightly different from environmental predictability, but equally important. A student can know exactly what is expected during math and still struggle to move from recess into math. Transitions ask students to shift from one set of demands to another. After recess, running transitions into sitting. Social interaction becomes independent attention. High physical activity becomes cognitive engagement.
So the question isn't simply, Do students know what happens next? It's also, Have we created a pathway that helps them get there and meet the next demand presented to them?
Adult Responses
And then there is what happens when regulation becomes difficult. How do the various adults throughout the building respond to a child’s emotional dysregulation?
Does one adult immediately escalate while another responds with curiosity? Do expectations disappear entirely when a student becomes dysregulated? Does every adult use completely different language and practices? Or is there a shared understanding of how to maintain expectations while helping students find their way back?
Again, consistency doesn't require identical adult responses. But students shouldn't have to relearn the school's approach to regulation every time the adult in front of them changes.
By six weeks, these differences can become much easier to see. And there is one question I think is especially worth considering: If a system only works while everyone is thinking hard about maintaining it, is it really a system yet?
What Strong Systems of Regulation Give a School
It can be tempting to measure strong regulation systems by how quiet a hallway is or how quickly students sit down. But the goal isn't to create a school full of perfectly calm children.
Emotional regulation is dynamic.
Students are going to experience excitement, disappointment, frustration, embarrassment, conflict, fatigue, uncertainty, and joy throughout the school day. We don't need to remove those experiences. Children need opportunities to learn how to move through them.
Strong systems create conditions where students increasingly understand what different moments require of them, recognize when they need to adjust, access support when necessary, and find their way back after dysregulation.
And when those conditions exist across a school, the impact extends beyond individual students. Transitions become smoother and more effective. Instructional time is protected, and students become regulated for learning faster. Teachers don't have to reinvent the response every time regulation becomes difficult. Students experience greater predictability across classrooms, adults, and parts of the school day. Regulation becomes something students practice repeatedly rather than something adults introduce only after behavior has become a problem.
Ultimately, these conditions support the outcomes schools care deeply about: stronger engagement, greater instructional readiness, fewer unnecessary disruptions, and more instructional time available for learning.
But those are the outcomes. The work underneath them is the systems that support regulation.
The First Six Weeks Have Already Shown You Where to Look
The good news is that you probably don't have to search very hard for a place to begin. The first six weeks have already been giving you clues. As a school leader, think about the moments that have repeatedly caught your attention.
- Where does dysregulation seem to show up again and again?
- When are adults working hardest to get students back?
- Which parts of the school day look dramatically different from classroom to classroom?
- Where do students consistently struggle to move into what comes next?
Choose one of those moments and look more closely. Before deciding on the solution, try to understand what you're actually seeing. The goal isn't simply to identify what's going wrong. It's to understand what the pattern may be telling you about the system underneath it.
Take a Closer Look at Your Systems of Regulation
The first six weeks have already given you the data. The next step is learning how to read it. One helpful path for this is The Regulation Walkthrough for elementary school leaders.
Choose one transition—perhaps morning arrival, the return from lunch or recess, or another moment that has consistently caught your attention—and observe it across several classrooms.
The walkthrough is designed to help you notice patterns in how your school systems are supporting student regulation, without turning the process into an evaluation of individual teachers.
Six weeks into the school year, you aren't looking for perfection. You're looking for what is beginning to repeat. The moments that continue to require significant adult energy. The environments where students seem less certain. The transitions where readiness repeatedly breaks down. Those patterns aren't just telling you something about your students. They're telling you something about your systems. And six weeks into the year, that's incredibly useful information to have.