Nine experienced university pre-service teacher educators used a collaborative autoethnography method to reflect on what they say to students on the first day of new classes and how their performance sets up the semester. Our group exchanges provided an opportunity to express long-developing values and practices embedded in individual's teaching craft. The exchanges were often revelatory to other participants unfamiliar with the performative day-one interactions for start-of-semester classes that their colleagues had developed in different teaching specialities. Narratives of practice, experience and philosophies of class management are present in these conversations about applying pedagogical strategies. The shared accounts revealed skills developed experimentally over many semester-starts to achieve successful class management. The accounts demonstrated a range of interwoven practices individual pre-service teacher educators emphasised in engaging students: what the educators said and how they positioned their opening statements and actions for students at the start of each new semester.