Best Practice

Ready? Steady? Go! How to start your lessons effectively

Pedagogy Lesson planning
How can we best begin and end our lessons? In two articles, Adam Riches offers ideas and advice for opening lessons and bringing them to a close. Here he focuses on lesson starts


Getting the start of your lessons right is one of the keys to success when it comes to delivering engaging teaching and learning. As Joel Wirth said, writing in SecEd in 2019 about how to manage the first seven minutes of your lesson: “You can get a lot right in seven minutes. It can go just as disastrously wrong.” (Wirth, 2019)

For me, if learners are suitably challenged, stimulated and curious from the start of their learning, they will have a better experience and the level of productivity in your classroom will be increased significantly.

Lesson openings are not all about the activities, however, it is also about the learning habits that are established by the teacher.


Positioning

Meeting students at the door is a powerful way to start your lesson. It says that you are ready to accept them, and it gives you the advantage of being able to control the threshold – you can welcome the class in and also subtly remind them that they are entering your space.

As they enter, you can build positivity from the start – it is an opportunity to celebrate work from the previous lesson or to have that informal chat and build those relationships.

At the same time, if learners entering the classroom do not meet your expectations you have the chance to intervene and give them time to get ready to learn before the lesson gets underway.

If you are standing inside your classroom when students arrive, or busy distributing resources, you can quicky find yourself on the back foot. Controlling the threshold empowers you to actively address any unruliness, improper uniform, or lateness without it disturbing those inside. It also allows you a chance to spot any students who may be struggling for whatever reason.


Routines

Starting your lessons in the same way each time means that learners can build habits. These habits are helpful in a number of ways.

First, they help reduce the extraneous load on learners so that they have less information to take in as they start the lesson – this in turn enables you to build challenge more quickly and effectively.

Second, routines also give you, as teacher, the space to prepare for the main lesson, circulate to address any misconceptions with opening tasks, or to provide learners with a bit of support to get started.

Finally, routines can help learners to regulate and feel safe. In secondary schools especially we are often cursed by the success of the previous lesson or the fallout from lunch or break, but with a good routine you can “reset” the learners as they enter your room, meaning they feel safe and are aware of expectations and what is going to happen.

Each teacher will need to establish their own routines, but it may be that you always have a task ready for the students as they arrive, it may be that they work in silence for the first few minutes, you might even have a sheet or activity on the desk. What is important is consistency, lesson-in, lesson out.

If you teach a practical subject, you may build in a routine that is linked to equipment. If you teach in a room with no chairs, you may decide that learners enter and sit in a certain space – it’s up to you, the key thing is that you make your routines clear and you teach children what you want them to do – don’t just expect then to innately understand what to do.

Routines can also be introduced for common lesson activities, such as handing out resources, peer-marking, tidying resources and so on. This saves you time and negates the need to direct pupils. Keep the expectations the same each time so that learners know what you want to see.


The first activity

I am a big believer in having a task for students to do as they sit down in my classroom. I know it isn’t everyone's cup of tea, but for me it simply means that from the start of the lesson there is a purpose.

I suppose that traditionally these activities have been branded “starters” and they might now be called “Do now” activities – whatever you call them, there needs to be some aspect of utility to the task.

Simply putting three questions on the board that link loosely to previous learning will not be enough for you to gain the attention of the class.

A task of value can take a number of forms. Proper recall tasks (last week, last month, last unit) that are interweaved and interleaved can be a powerful way to stimulate learning.

Tasks to pique curiosity or perspective tasks are good for metacognition and reflective tasks are a strong way to build self-efficacy.

  • A perspective task may ask a student to consider a viewpoint other than their own – essentially getting them to start to think about ideas from different individuals, building their understanding of empathy and influence.
  • A curiosity task simply gets students to consider a more open, wider topic or viewpoint, giving them free scope to express their thought patterns and idea’s metacognitivally.
  • A reflective task would get a student to commentate on their views or the views of others in order for them to better understand why something may be the way it is.

The more confident teacher may wish to try something more active and get students discussing with one another from the outset!

Whatever your approach, so long as it has purpose in terms of previous learning and the new learning that is about to take place, the first task will be successful. Remember: this activity allows you to establish the tone for the lesson.

It is also important that students are afforded some level of success in the first task of the lesson. As always, this doesn’t mean that they need to get everything right, but it means that they must have the opportunity to successfully understand something or the chance to overcome a barrier.

For this reason, it is always a good idea to incorporate some aspect of teacher input towards the end of the task so that you can provide feedback to learners on what they have completed.

A simple two-minute feedback phase means that you can build confidence and celebrate success from the outset.


Where we are going

There is a lot of discussion and changing opinion about effective teaching and learning, but one constant for me is ensuring that students know and understand what the point of the lesson is.

If you want them to be engaged, they need to know the purpose of the learning or, quite rightly, they will be asking you “why” they are doing this.

When we take time to explain the why at the outset, we empower learners to succeed from the outset.

However, I am not a fan of coloured learning objectives or gimmicks where learners choose how hard they will challenge themselves – what I am a fan of is learners having confidence in what they are covering and seeing where, why and how they are going to progress.

Whether this is a clear title, a well-worded objective, or a big question style statement, this is one of the most important signposts in the lesson as it shows learners where they are going and gives the teacher an opportunity to tell them how they can get there.

There is no feasible advantage to learners not knowing what is happening in the lesson – why keep it a secret?

Having dialogue around what is going to happen in this lesson, or the next few lessons is also an ideal opportunity for teachers to link new learning to previous learning. Not only is this beneficial in terms of knowledge it is helpful when it comes to transferable skills.

Having this intricate knowledge of a subject prepares learners to be more resilient, giving them a holistic overview of your subject and the learning journey they are on.


Final words

A successful start means that you can concentrate on maintaining the momentum of learning instead of battling to catch up or worse fighting your class for control.

Focus on your positioning, your routines, and your explanations of learning and you will find those first few minutes are really fruitful and far less stressful. In a second article, which you can find here, I will discuss how we might end our lessons effectively.


Further information & resources