Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 20: Do now
Lesson structures

The way we start class sends a strong message to students about the culture, purpose, and expectations of the community they are entering, so teachers should be intentional about it. We want students to engage in productive and high-quality work that interests and challenges them right away, and over time we want to make a habit of this, so they expect to be actively and meaningfully engaged any time they enter our classrooms. We want them to know we are prepared and value their learning. They will not be passive; there will be very little downtime.

So consistently starting quickly and with a quality task is important. A predictable familiar activity that students know how to do lets them get started actively and with confidence.

The first step in a great lesson, then, is a Do Now—a short pencil-to-paper activity that is waiting for students as they enter the classroom and that they can and should start without any directions from you.

The secret is the “without directions from you” part. A procedure that does not require guidance from you beyond posting the task beforehand benefits you as well as your students, especially when you are teaching a full schedule. It gives you the chance to take a final glance at your lesson preparation document, make sure the classroom is arranged how you want it, connect with an individual student or two, or pass back some papers—perhaps even somewhere in there you manage a sip of coffee. All this happens, efficiently and smoothly, while students are busily and productively engaged. At the same time, it's a moment for students to mentally transition to your classroom. Regardless of what happened in the hallway or at the close of a prior class or at lunch, beginning with a few quiet, focused minutes can help students be ready to succeed.

An effective Do Now should meet three critical criteria to ensure that it's focused, efficient, and effective:

1. The Do Now should be in the same place every day so it becomes habit for all your students. You can write it on the board, post it on a piece of chart paper in advance, or put it on a sheet of paper you leave in a stack by the door. Wherever you put it, keep it consistent.

2. Students should be able to complete the Do Now without any direction from you, without any discussion with their classmates, and in most cases without any materials beyond what they always bring to class. So if the Do Now is to write a sentence interpreting a primary source document that is a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon, that cartoon should be copied into the Do Now materials or posted somewhere easily visible. Some teachers misunderstand the purpose of the Do Now and start by explaining to their students what to do and how to do it (for example, “OK, class, the Do Now is on the board. You'll notice that it asks you to do X and then Y. Please get started.”). This defeats the purpose of a self-managed routine to start class. If you have to give directions, it's not independent enough.

3. The activity should take about five minutes to complete and should require putting a pencil to paper. That is, there should be a written product from it. This not only makes it more rigorous and more engaging but also enables you to better gather data through Active Observation and reinforce students who've done good work.

In the great majority of cases, the Do Now is silent work. I can imagine an occasional exception for peer-to-peer quizzing with a Knowledge Organizer or some other form of retrieval practice, but only occasionally and for a class with a well-established routine.

With regard to the content of the Do Now, I favor three options. The activity can (1) preview the day's lesson (you are reading The Jacket, and the Do Now asks students to write three sentences about what they'd do if they thought someone stole their little brother's favorite jacket); (2) review a recent lesson (you recently introduced three new vocabulary terms and want students to review the definitions so they don't forget them); or (3) build background knowledge that will be necessary for the upcoming lesson (you are reading Number the Stars and want students to read a short nonfiction excerpt about rationing during World War II). Though all options can be powerful, I want to take a moment to highlight the particular benefits of using the Do Now as an opportunity for regular, low-stakes review.

In Small Teaching, James Lang notes that “a brief (and ungraded) multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of class and one additional quiz before the exam raised the grades of all students by a full letter grade.” These brief low-stakes “quizzes” (you can choose if you grade them or have students grade against a key) actually lowered students' anxiety on end-of-unit assessments, because they reported feeling more prepared. Of course, as I discuss in Retrieval Practice (technique 7), this is because, as Lang puts it, “Every time we extract a piece of information or an experience from our memory, we are strengthening neural pathways that lead from our long-term memory into our working memory, where we can use our memories to think and take action.” By using Do Now as a way for students to quickly review critical information from prior lessons, you are setting them up not only for increased engagement in the upcoming lesson, but also ensuring that they are able to retrieve that information at relevant moments later on.

Just as important as the content of your Do Now is how you review it with students. The most common downfall I observe is a teacher losing track of time while reviewing answers. Fifteen minutes into a Do Now the “opening” has replaced the lesson that was originally planned—or at least has crowded out all of the independent practice and pushed all the timings to the breaking point. Set a timer so you complete your review in about the same amount of time you give students to work on it: three to five minutes. This may require the art of selective neglect. If you give your students eight problems to complete, you may not be able to review all of them. You'll have to choose the two or three that are most important. This makes the period when students are working critical from a Check for Understanding perspective—you'll want to observe carefully to make sure you know which questions most require review, as well as which students can provide answers that are correct or contain useful errors. You'll only have a few minutes to decide this so be ready to draw on the ideas in Active Observation (technique 9).

You can see a great example of Sarah Wright debriefing a Do Now in the video Sarah Wright: But Esperanza. Here's a copy of her Do Now from a lesson on Pam Muñoz-Ryan's novel Esperanza Rising,

Do Now

1. Develop this sentence: Miguel warned to prove to Esperanza that “things would get better.”

·  Miguel wanted to prove to Esperanza that “things would get better,” but

·  Miguel wanted to prove to Esperanza that “things would get better,” because

·  Miguel wanted to prove to Esperanza that “things would get better,” so

2. Imagine Tio Luis discovers that Abuelita has disappeared. Write down what he might say to himself as he burns with unrelenting anger. Challenge: use two of our vocabulary words!

Notice Sarah's Show Call of exemplary answers, which socializes students to work their hardest at written work. She also makes explicit reference to her purpose in designing the Do Now as she has: She wants students to review key events from the previous day's reading and reflect on important characters' motivations to give context to the final scenes of the book. She uses rich and engaging Because, But, So questions—a method I discuss in Art of the Sentence (technique 41) that comes from Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler's book The Writing Revolution—to build the complexity of students' thinking. You can see how engaging students found it in the enthusiasm and rigor of their comments in the discussion. But notice how briskly Sarah moves through the review. Her goal is an attentive and enthusiastic discussion but not a long one. It's so easy to assume that the discussion deserves more time given all the enthusiasm, but by keeping her discussion tidy Sarah transfers energy to the next task.

Since the Do Now is a consistent procedure we want students to follow every day, it's important to reinforce process and expectations. In the video Christine Torres: Silently to Seats you can see Christine Torres do this, appreciatively and quietly naming students as they meet expectations in completing this Do Now. Here's what her students are working on, by the way. It's designed to build background knowledge for the passage from the novel Number the Stars that students will study in class that day (in which the protagonist journeys through the woods).

Christine reminds us, as Tom Bennett observes in Running the Room, that the best time to reinforce expectations is when students are doing things well. “One of the most underused strategies is to reinforce norms when they are happening,” he writes. Especially when they're going well. “Calm, quiet, and settled” is the ideal emotional state for receiving guidance on how to do things.

Do Now

1. Consider the final line of this text: “Sometimes it is also a place of opportunity and transformation—the hero enters the forest and discovers something about him- or herself.”

1.  What does the pronoun “it” refer to?

2. What might Annemarie have discovered about herself during her journey through the forest?

2. Why might Lowry have chosen to have Annemarie journey through a forest, instead of, say, through a town or a field? Underline any words or phrases in the text above that support your thinking.

Finally, some of the masters of the Do Now, in my opinion, are effective because of the speed with which they transition from completing the Do Now to reviewing it. They might count down the end of the Do Now with something like, “OK, pencils down when you hear the beep, and we'll talk about some of these questions.” Or when the timer starts to beep, they might immediately start in with a Cold Call (technique 34) or a Show Call (technique 13), not wasting a second of time. This creates a strong sense of momentum from the outset. The sensation of “flow,” which, as I discuss in Chapter Six, is a state of mind in which people lose themselves in a fast-paced and engaging activity, is among the most pleasurable experiences you can create in the classroom. The pace of a good Do Now can get a lesson flowing right from the outset.

Online Lessons: The Remote Do Now

The start of a lesson is especially important online. When students are far from us and the classroom it's often doubly important to remind them of familiar routines and habits—providing comfort and continuity in a topsy-turvy world.

We loved watching Joshua Humphrey do this with his students at KIPP St. Louis High School in the video Joshua Humphrey: Pause It Right Now. Joshua starts his online lesson—it's asynchronous, meaning students will watch the recorded lesson later—with a Do Now and the phrase “just like we always do,” reminding his students of the familiar moments and habits of their in-class life. Of course he's made some adaptations too: in an asynchronous lesson he can't just leave his Do Now passively on the screen and assume students will complete it, so class begins with a short greeting before the Do Now, for example. And he has to be direct and clear about pausing the video to complete the task. But Joshua's review of his Do Now afterwards is instructive to both remote and in-person instruction. His tone is perfect—his emotional constancy in describing errors makes it safe to struggle. His pacing during the explanation of the answers is crisp but not rushed, and most of all he uses colored highlights to guide students' eyes through the review of right and wrong answers to help them focus on and attend to the most important things. Students learn about what they attend to. The difficulties of online learning caused us to see the value of guiding students' eyes to focus on key details, but this lesson is surely applicable everywhere.

Another Do Now that we learned from online was Hasan Clayton's at Nashville Classical Charter School. Hasan's lesson in the video Hasan Clayton: Two Noses is synchronous—his students are with him live—so he greets them warmly but quicky and then asks them to complete their Do Now task “in the chat.” They can send their answers to him and he can instantly review. And of course this way he'll know who's completed the task when. Notice that the substantive part of his Do Now in an online setting is reduced to just one question: “In one artful sentence, summarize the nature versus nurture debate. Include a word that shows contrast….” You can read more about Hasan's decision to have his students respond in “one artful sentence” in technique 41, Art of the Sentence. Hasan has students chat their answers just to him so he can choose a few thought-provoking or exemplary answers and share them with the class (a sort of an online Show Call) to prompt a rich discussion and honor students who've done quality work. Notice also, though, that Hasan adds a second, more playful question to his Do Now (Would you rather have one eye or two noses?). The purpose is in the playfulness. Hasan is using the question to build community and connection among students when they are isolated and separated by circumstance. He's careful to spend only a little time on this but he and his colleagues did it regularly when teaching online to build positive culture, and you can imagine how the occasional playful Do Now question could be a bonus, even in a brick-and-mortar classroom.