The Do Now - Tips for Teachers Top 5s

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The five tips are:

Tell your students why you are doing the Do Now
Make the first question easy
Consider not asking students to copy the question
Circulate the room
Consider how you will check for understanding

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Video and Podcast transcript

Hello, I’m Craig Barton. And welcome to this Tips for teachers top five all about the do now, just before we dive in a quick reminder that this is available both as an audio podcast and also as a video. So you can choose your preferred medium and share with colleagues accordingly. And you’ll find links to those either below the podcast in the show notes or below the video in the description or on tips for teachers dot code at UK write the do now.

So the do now is the name commonly given to that activity that you want students to engage in at the very start of the lesson. And I’m very lucky these days, I get to watch hundreds of lessons. And I’m obsessed with the start of the lesson. And what I’ve been trying to do over the last few years is to spot what actions teachers take that make that started the lesson as effective as possible. And in my book tips for teachers available in all good and evil bookstores, I’ve compiled together 15 ideas that I’ve learned from teachers far better than me to improve that start the lesson to do now. And in this video, I’m going to share five of those ideas with you.

So tip number one, tell your students why you are doing the due now. So I’ve got a bit of a theory. And that is out of all the parts of the lesson. I think it’s the start of the lesson that students take the least serious. And you can see this either from the child who’s kind of just slowly copying the title down not really engaging, or the student who’s just kind of sat off. And then whenever the lesson in inverted commas starts properly, they suddenly sit up and start concentrating. And I asked students when I see this, I said, What’s going on here? Why are you doing this? And they say, well, it’s just a start, the lesson is just a starter, as if it’s kind of something that teachers doing for a bit of a laugh. So if you want to get your students to engage in the do now one key thing is for them to understand exactly why you’re doing it. And there’s lots of different reasons you might be doing it. It might be a check for retrieval, it might be you’re quizzing students on things that they’ve done in the past, to make sure that you slow down the rate of forgetting. So if that’s the case, tell your students that, or it may be a prerequisite knowledge check, you may be asking them questions to check that they’re in the right place for to build upon the new idea to build a new idea upon later in the lesson. If that’s the case, tell them that while you’re doing that, all they do now might be a reaction to something you did the previous lesson, if so, tell them or it may be a direct response to homework, if so tell them if students don’t know why you’re doing what they’re doing, why you’re doing what you’re doing, there’s much less chance that they’re going to take it seriously and engage in it.

Tip number two, make the first question easy. Now by this I mean two things. Firstly, make me make it easy in terms of difficulty. And the reason for this is you want students to get off to a good start. You want them to be able to just settle down and crack straight on with the first question without saying sir, I’m stuck on this and so on. And you want them to get a sense of success and kind of flow that they then take through to the second question to the third question, and so on on the do now. So I think it’s quite a sensible idea to order your difficulty in your do now from easiest to hardest, but certainly make that first question accessible. But by easy what I also mean is you don’t want easy in terms of access. You don’t want students after certainly a mask to need specialist equipment for it. So imagine kids are sat down. Finally the settle they look up question while and they realise they need a protractor or a compass or even like a ruler or a calculator. Also the hands go up, sir, I don’t have this, sir. I need other rustling around their bags or somewhere like that. No, no, you can destroy that fragile silence or that fragile focus. So that first question easy in terms of difficulty, and no equipment needed, the kids can just crack straight on.

Tip three, this is a bit of a bugbear of mine, you know, consider not asking students to copy the question and saying the majority of do nails that I see. And I can only speak from my experience as a maths teacher. The kids are required to copy the question though, and I don’t I don’t see the point in this. And also what it opens the door for is what Adam boxer calls busy tricking? Where from the front of the room looking out you’ve got to see of kids who are all writing things down in their books. But what are they writing down? The writing the flipping question down. They’re not learning from that it’s slowing them down. And you just got to think why? Why are you asking kids to copy the question down? And often the responses it’s so they can revise from it in the future. But the kids revise from the do now random kind of retrieval do now scattered throughout the book. I’m not so sure so it’s just worth considering whether copying down the question is the best use of limited class time.

Tip Four circulate the room. I’ve been guilty of this, you know, the kids are working on the do now. So you take that opportunity to get yourself ready for the lesson whether it’s do the register handout books, whatever it may be. couple of problems with that. First is that you can’t pick up on this kind of busy tricking or kids sitting off from the front of the room as easily as you can if you’re around all the kids And secondly, what invariably happens when the teacher is kind of tied to the front of the room is they miss time the do now. So the do now is either cut or cut short before kids have got on to the last two questions and then the teacher is going through things on the board that the kids haven’t even had a chance to think about. All the due now lasts far too long. And kids are just sat there bored switching off and so on. The best way to time to do now is to circulate the room and get a sense of where your students are at by looking at their work. So circulate the room during the due now.

And the fifth and final tip. I love this one, you know, consider how you’ll check for understanding. So what tends to happen with the do now is it’s done in books, that’s absolutely fine. But the problem with working books is it becomes very difficult to get a whole class check of understanding and what tends to happen. So in math, so if you have you do now like this is the teachers Okay, let’s go through the answers. And they’ll pick a question like this question here about the regular polygon. And they’ll pick one or two students. So Tom, how did you What did you get for this? Erica, what did you get for this? Two problems with that as a check for understanding? Firstly, it takes quite a long time, because you’re having to hear from one child from another child. And to even if you do hear from two kids, you’ve only heard from two kids potentially two out of 30. So how do you know whether the rest of the students understood it? So what I think it’s much better is that the students do the due now in their books. And then when it’s time to go through the answers you say, right, okay, we’re gonna go through the answer to this question here. So very quickly, on your mini whiteboards Can you all write down not your work? And just your final answer nice and big. Put it on your boards, okay, have a three to one, show me. And then straightaway, you’ve got to very quickly, you’ve got a sense of whole class understanding. So with that understanding is there you can just crack on with the next question. Or if you see a load of problems, you’ve identified that as a problem, you can decide whether you’re going to sort it out there and then I’ll come back to it later. Either way, it’s a quicker and much more reliable check for understanding than simply asking one or two students so what I’m I’m obsessed with mini whiteboards, but one of their main benefits is to get book work out of books, so it can become a whole class check for understanding.

So there’s five tips to improve the do now let’s just go over them. Tip one, tell your students why you’re doing to do now. Tip two, make the first question easy and accessible. Tip three, consider not asking students to copy the question. Tip Four circulate the room. Tip Five, consider how you will check for understanding which of those you already do. And are there any of those that you don’t do that you feel are important that you can build into your practice.

Just as a reminder loads of other stuff. I’m checking for understanding responsive teaching in my tips for teachers, but along with loads of other ideas about loads of different aspects of teaching. And also my tips for teachers website is tips for teachers dot Kota UK, you’ll find the tips of teachers podcast, where I speak to the world’s leading educationalists and inspirational teachers who share practical ideas you can use the very next time you step into a classroom. I also record those conversations as videos so you can share them and use them in CPD sessions. I’ve also got the tips for teachers newsletter where you can sign up to receive a tip in your inbox every Monday morning to try out the very next day in classrooms. And finally, if you’re interested in more CPD, there’s online and face to face CPD available all at tips for teachers dot Coda uk. Thanks so much for watching.