Best Practice

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

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.

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