The following article is a guest opinion piece submitted to AWSP and does not necessarily reflect AWSP’s views, positions, or beliefs.
A few years ago, I watched a teacher do in thirty seconds what I’ve seen entire assemblies fail to do in forty-five minutes.
It was a Tuesday morning — you could feel it was a Tuesday morning — in an elementary school gym in Michigan. The kids filing in were wiggly in the particular way kids get when the week has already been long and it’s only day two. Their teacher walked to the front, waited for quiet the way only a veteran teacher can wait for quiet, and said:
“This is Mr. Scheer. He’s come a long way to be with us today. Your job is to be the kind of audience that makes him want to come back. Show him what our school is made of.”
Then she smiled at me, sat down with her class, and stayed.
I have performed nearly 8,000 assemblies over almost forty years, in gyms, cafeterias, auditoriums, and one very memorable library. I have the best seat in the house — on stage, facing out — and from that seat, I can tell you the honest story that nobody puts in the assembly brochure: the best-run assembly days don’t just support students. They support teachers. And the schools that understand that get more out of the day than the schools that treat an assembly as a hole poked in the schedule.
Here’s what those schools do.
They let the assembly be a purposeful (and often restful) perspective change for teachers
A well-planned assembly gives a teacher forty-five minutes in the middle of a long week where somebody else holds the room. That’s not a luxury; that’s recovery time in one of the most demanding jobs there is. And it isn’t empty time, either. Teachers tell me afterward that some of the most useful minutes of their week were spent watching their own students from the audience — seeing which child who never raises a hand in class is suddenly volunteering, which class leader quietly helps a younger student find a seat, which wiggly kid is completely, unexpectedly locked in. You learn things about your students from the back of the gym that you can’t learn from the front of the classroom.
The supportive schools make this possible on purpose. They don’t schedule assemblies as rewards dangled and withdrawn, and they don’t pull teachers into hallway meetings during the show unless it’s urgent. They let the assembly time be set apart and protected.
They use the shared vocabulary for months
Every assembly performer worth booking leaves phrases behind. Mine include things like “be a good audience” — which sounds simple, and is, and is also a universal reminder about positive behavior. Teachers have told me, months later, that they’ll be in the middle of a math lesson and say, “Remember what Doug said about being a good audience? That applies to math, too” — and the whole class settles, because the phrase carries a shared memory with it.
When an entire building has heard the same message at the same time — about including others, about handling big feelings, about sticking with a hard problem — teachers can reference it in the cafeteria, the principal can reference it in the morning announcements, and nobody has to explain it. It becomes part of the school’s culture.
Smart schools lean into this. Before the visit, they ask the performer what phrases or ideas the show will plant. After the visit, they use them — on bulletin boards, in newsletters, in the classroom — while the memory is fresh.
They nail the 30-second introduction
If I could give every school one piece of advice, it would be this: the introduction matters more than you think.
I’ve been introduced every way imaginable. I’ve had principals read my entire biography while six hundred children slowly vibrated out of their chairs. I’ve had a principal — a nice man, genuinely — wave in my general direction, say “Good luck,” and sit down, which the students correctly interpreted as the starting gun for chaos.
And I’ve had that teacher on that Tuesday morning.
The great introductions are short, warm, and clear about expectations: who this person is, why they’re here, and what a good audience does. Thirty seconds. That’s all it takes to hand a performer a room that’s ready to learn — and to hand every teacher in that room a calmer next forty-five minutes. When the introduction is an afterthought, the performer spends the first ten minutes of the show rebuilding the room instead of teaching, and the teachers spend it doing crowd control from the bleachers. Everybody loses the same ten minutes.
They brief the performer instead of surprising him
The smoothest assembly days I work are at schools where somebody spent two minutes telling me what I needed to know: the fire drill scheduled that morning, the class that’s had a hard week, the student who uses a wheelchair and wants to volunteer so I can plan for it, the pep rally in the same gym right before my show that means setup starts late.
None of that is a problem. The problem is when it comes as a surprise.
Supportive schools treat the performer like a short-term member of the staff — because for that day, that’s what he is. A two-minute email or a quick word at check-in turns potential landmines into non-events, and it tells me something bigger: this building communicates. Schools that communicate with a visiting performer are, in my experience, schools that communicate well in general.The assembly just makes it visible.
They treat the visit as a tool, not a headache
Finally, the schools that get the most from an assembly schedule it like they mean it. They put it in the hard weeks — mid-winter, the stretch before spring break — when teachers most need forty-five supported minutes and students most need something to look forward to. They tell the staff it’s coming early enough to plan around it. They take the follow-up activities the performer leaves behind and actually use one in class the next day, while the show is still alive in the kids’ minds.
In other words, they treat the assembly the way they treat any other instructional tool: on purpose.
I am, in the interest of full disclosure, a vendor. I make my living in school gyms, and I’m grateful for it every single day. But this piece isn’t about my shows. It’s about what I’ve watched great elementary schools do, from the best seat in the house, for nearly forty years: they remember that an assembly day is a staff day, too. The students get a show they’ll talk about at dinner. The adults — the ones who hold the whole building together — get a breather, a fresh look at their kids, and a few good phrases to carry into next week.
Support the adults who support everyone else, and the whole school stands a little straighter. I’ve seen it from the stage, thousands of times. It works.
Doug Scheer is a Michigan-based educational performer who has presented interactive assembly shows in elementary schools for nearly 40 years. Learn more at assemblyshows.com.
