STRONG START
In lamey's classroom, the mood was warm but industrious. All of the students were hard at work just a few seconds after hitting the door-even Mr. Merrick, who was soon settled, redirected, and ready for class, with Threshold setting expectations from the start. If it's not possible for you to greet students at the door (either for school policy reasons or because you float to classrooms), invent another ritual to signify the start of something formal. For example, you might walk the rows briefly greeting students during the Do Now. Whether or not you have a doorway is beside the point. What matters is that you leverage the power of ritual to help students see, from the moment they enter your classroom, that it is different from the other places they go.
STRONG START Design and establish an efficient routine for students to enter the classroom and begin class.
For many busy teachers, the time students spend entering class and working on a Do Now-the time before the main lesson starts-can be a bit of an afterthought. Some use it to complete clerical tasks - stapling packets, organizing instructional materials, writing lesson objectives on the board, or even briefly collecting their thoughts. In their eyes, the opening minutes of class are ideal for preparing for a lesson that won't begin until they start delivering new content. Of course there are times when they have to grab a minute to attend to some task, but champion teachers understand that every lesson begins as soon as students walk through the door. They intentionally design and reinforce a most efficient right way for students to enter the classroom, complete the Do Now, prepare their learning materials, and get to the heart of the lesson. I refer to the sequence of events from the moment students enter the room until the heart of the lesson begins as the Strong Start. The success of a lesson hinges on Strong Start for three reasons: •
It sets the tone for everything that comes after. Classroom culture is not static
from day to day. It is shaped by the opening minutes of a lesson - whether you
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intentionally engineer them or not. That's why champion teachers prepare to start their lessons on a high note by finding genuine opportunities to convey warmth and enthusiasm. • From a pacing perspective, a strong, energetic start to your lesson builds momentum. It socializes students to work with discipline, urgency, and efficiency as soon as they walk through the door. Get off to a slow start, and you could find yourself spending the rest of your lesson fighting to rebuild momentum you lost and may never win back. •
Strong Start sets the table for mastery by efficiently previewing or reviewing high-quality content students need to master. Strong Start isn't just about tight procedures and efficiency. These conditions should be in service of the overarching
goal: equipping students right off the bat with the academic tools they'll need to succeed. If you stepped inside a champion teacher's classroom shortly after the bell rang, you would probably find that you could divide the routine students use to start the day into three parts: (1) Door to Do Now, (2) Do Now, and (3) Review Now.
Door to Do Now The first component of Strong Start comprises how students get from the door to their Do Now. Unlike Threshold, which immediately precedes students' entry into the room and focuses on setting behavioral norms and expectations, Door to Do Now is about making a habit out of what's efficient, productive, and scholarly as students take their seats. A typical arrangement might look something like this: as soon as students cross the threshold of the classroom door, they pick up a packet of materials from a small table just inside. In some cases, especially at the lower elementary grades, packets might already be at students' desks. A couple of key points maximize the effectiveness of the Door to Do Now: • It's more efficient to have students pick up their packets from a table than it is for you to try to hand the packets to them at the door. The latter approach slows you down and forces you to multitask when your mind should be on setting expectations and building relationships. •
Students should know where to sit. Time spent milling around, looking for a seat, deciding where to sit, or talking about deciding where to sit ("Can I sit next to him?
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357
Will he think I'm flirting?") is a waste of learning time and energy. Assign seats or allow students to sign up for regular seats. •
Whatever students need to do with homework (put it in a basket, place it on the front left corner of their desk, pass it to a proctor), they should do the same way every day without prompting. This lets you collect it seamlessly, and collecting it at the start of every class tacitly underscores its importance. Put your Do Now (the second part of this routine) in the same place every day: on the board, on an interactive handout, or in the packet. The objectives for the lesson, the agenda, and the homework for the coming evening should be on the board already, also in the same predictable place everyday.
•
Narrate (a little bit of) the positive to show appreciation for the productive behavior you see and build momentum toward compliance (for example, "Thanks for getting right to work, James," "Lindsay is already copying down today's objective," and the like). Discipline your narration so that it's pithy and precise, and quietly reinforces industrious behavior. Once the opening procedures become routine, use narration with diminished frequency. The goal is to get to a point where you need to say very little-if anything-to set your Door to Do Now routine in motion.
Do Now As part of Strong Start, establishing the routine of the Do Now is invaluable. A Do Now enables you to maximize instructional time, build industrious habits, and make use of a discrete block of time when your students can practice and thus sustain and build their proficiency with skills they've already mastered. This issue - making sure students don't lose through disuse what they'd once mastered-is one of the hidden challenges of teaching. My focus here is on how to make the greatest use of the Do Now after students have completed it. For more on the details of the what and how of the Do Now itself, check out the longer discussion of Do Now in Chapter Five.
Review Now To make the most of every minute of Review Now, highly effective teachers carefully engineer the transition after students have completed independent work on the Do Now so that it's crisp, efficient, and often energetic. The goal is to come out of the Do Now as quickly and orderly as possible and with the kind of urgency that signals: we've got a lot of important content to cover today, so let's get started. Before we discuss the elements
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that make for an exemplar transition to Review Now, let's discuss an example of what it looks like in action. In one example, Bridget McElduff, a fifth-grade math teacher from Troy Prep Middle School, circulates and observes while students complete the Do Now. She's using a timer to keep track of how long she's spent on the Do Now and starts to move to the front of the room as the last few seconds wind down. When the timer goes off, Bridget is already standing at the front of the room, smiling. She gives concise, observable directions: "Pencils down and tracking me in five ... four ... " The short countdown adds some productive urgency to her request, but gives students a bit of time to finish their last thought. Later in the year, she may not use the countdown as explicitly and will just rely on students to react quickly when they hear the timer go off, but for now she is explicitly building their skill and efficiency at coming to attention quickly. She swivels her head and scans the room with confidence and finesse as she gets to "one" on her countdown. When every student is with her, she asks them to celebrate their speedy completion of the Do Now with a Prop (described later in this chapter), and on her cue, students pound their desks once in unison with a loud "huhh!" Then Bridget moves swiftly into firing off a sequence of whispered questions - several of which are Cold Calls - to review the completed Do Now. Throughout the review, she keeps everyone accountable for tracking the discussion by requiring students to "check or change" their work. In other words, there's no reason not to pick up your pencil (either to correct or check off) at the end of each reviewed problem. Interestingly, she is also using a timer here. Even if she adds time when the four minutes she's allotted winds down, she wants to make sure she doesn't lose track of time and put herself in a bind for the rest of her lesson. Although Bridget does a lot of things effectively in that sequence, we'll distill her transition into two replicable components: • Three .. , two .. , one .. , Go! Bridget transitions students out of the Do Now with urgency and efficiency by Working the Clock and Brightening Lines between the Do Now and the Review Now. Her countdown signals to students that Bridget values Review Now time and thinks it is worth protecting. She then brightens the line between the Do Now and the Review Now by using the desk-pounding Prop. Her lightning-quick transition into asking questions makes the start of the Review Now pop crisply with energy. • Emphasis on accountable review. Students might potentially disengage during the review of the Do Now, but Bridget alternates between taking hands and Cold Calling during Review Now to keep kids on their toes and actively tracking the discussion.
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359
As she's reviewing answers with students, Bridget's timer goes off-she's used the time she allocated to reviewing and knows it's time to go on to the main lesson. She wraps up a last problem and, announcing that they have exciting things to do today, asks students to "flip the page" in their packets to the main part of the lesson. Thanks to her use of the Double Plan technique, everything she needs is right there in the packet, and she's able to start in on her main lesson just seconds after she's finished the Review Now. Other strategies teachers use to make the most of Review Now include Show Call (technique 39) and Show Me (technique 5). The latter is especially helpful in using the Review Now as an opportunity to collect data on student mastery; the former can make the Review Now an opportunity to review student work and to study and learn from both student errors and exemplary work.
STAR/SLANT Teach students key baseline behaviors for learning, such as sitting up in class and tracking the speaker, by using a memorable acronym such as STAR or SLANT.
Regardless of how great your lesson is, if students aren't alert, sitting up, and actively listening, teaching it will be like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Although many teachers practice lining up students for fire drills and making sure everyone knows the routine for finding the right bus at the end of the day, many neglect to teach behaviors that are more critical over the long run, those that help students concentrate, focus, and learn. To maximize students' ability to pay attention, teachers in top-performing schools and classrooms commonly use sticky acronyms to teach students key baseline behaviors for learning. One popular variation is STAR: Sit up Track the speaker Ask and answer questions like a scholar Respect those around you
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Teach Like a Champion 2.0
STRONG START Design and establish an efficient routine for students to enter the classroom and begin class.
For many busy teachers, the time students spend entering class and working on a Do Now-the time before the main lesson starts-can be a bit of an afterthought. Some use it to complete clerical tasks - stapling packets, organizing instructional materials, writing lesson objectives on the board, or even briefly collecting their thoughts. In their eyes, the opening minutes of class are ideal for preparing for a lesson that won't begin until they start delivering new content. Of course there are times when they have to grab a minute to attend to some task, but champion teachers understand that every lesson begins as soon as students walk through the door. They intentionally design and reinforce a most efficient right way for students to enter the classroom, complete the Do Now, prepare their learning materials, and get to the heart of the lesson. I refer to the sequence of events from the moment students enter the room until the heart of the lesson begins as the Strong Start. The success of a lesson hinges on Strong Start for three reasons: •
It sets the tone for everything that comes after. Classroom culture is not static
from day to day. It is shaped by the opening minutes of a lesson - whether you
356
Teach Like a Champion 2.0
intentionally engineer them or not. That's why champion teachers prepare to start their lessons on a high note by finding genuine opportunities to convey warmth and enthusiasm. • From a pacing perspective, a strong, energetic start to your lesson builds momentum. It socializes students to work with discipline, urgency, and efficiency as soon as they walk through the door. Get off to a slow start, and you could find yourself spending the rest of your lesson fighting to rebuild momentum you lost and may never win back. •
Strong Start sets the table for mastery by efficiently previewing or reviewing high-quality content students need to master. Strong Start isn't just about tight procedures and efficiency. These conditions should be in service of the overarching
goal: equipping students right off the bat with the academic tools they'll need to succeed. If you stepped inside a champion teacher's classroom shortly after the bell rang, you would probably find that you could divide the routine students use to start the day into three parts: (1) Door to Do Now, (2) Do Now, and (3) Review Now.
Door to Do Now The first component of Strong Start comprises how students get from the door to their Do Now. Unlike Threshold, which immediately precedes students' entry into the room and focuses on setting behavioral norms and expectations, Door to Do Now is about making a habit out of what's efficient, productive, and scholarly as students take their seats. A typical arrangement might look something like this: as soon as students cross the threshold of the classroom door, they pick up a packet of materials from a small table just inside. In some cases, especially at the lower elementary grades, packets might already be at students' desks. A couple of key points maximize the effectiveness of the Door to Do Now: • It's more efficient to have students pick up their packets from a table than it is for you to try to hand the packets to them at the door. The latter approach slows you down and forces you to multitask when your mind should be on setting expectations and building relationships. •
Students should know where to sit. Time spent milling around, looking for a seat, deciding where to sit, or talking about deciding where to sit ("Can I sit next to him?
Systems and Routines
357
Will he think I'm flirting?") is a waste of learning time and energy. Assign seats or allow students to sign up for regular seats. •
Whatever students need to do with homework (put it in a basket, place it on the front left corner of their desk, pass it to a proctor), they should do the same way every day without prompting. This lets you collect it seamlessly, and collecting it at the start of every class tacitly underscores its importance. Put your Do Now (the second part of this routine) in the same place every day: on the board, on an interactive handout, or in the packet. The objectives for the lesson, the agenda, and the homework for the coming evening should be on the board already, also in the same predictable place everyday.
•
Narrate (a little bit of) the positive to show appreciation for the productive behavior you see and build momentum toward compliance (for example, "Thanks for getting right to work, James," "Lindsay is already copying down today's objective," and the like). Discipline your narration so that it's pithy and precise, and quietly reinforces industrious behavior. Once the opening procedures become routine, use narration with diminished frequency. The goal is to get to a point where you need to say very little-if anything-to set your Door to Do Now routine in motion.
Do Now As part of Strong Start, establishing the routine of the Do Now is invaluable. A Do Now enables you to maximize instructional time, build industrious habits, and make use of a discrete block of time when your students can practice and thus sustain and build their proficiency with skills they've already mastered. This issue - making sure students don't lose through disuse what they'd once mastered-is one of the hidden challenges of teaching. My focus here is on how to make the greatest use of the Do Now after students have completed it. For more on the details of the what and how of the Do Now itself, check out the longer discussion of Do Now in Chapter Five.
Review Now To make the most of every minute of Review Now, highly effective teachers carefully engineer the transition after students have completed independent work on the Do Now so that it's crisp, efficient, and often energetic. The goal is to come out of the Do Now as quickly and orderly as possible and with the kind of urgency that signals: we've got a lot of important content to cover today, so let's get started. Before we discuss the elements
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Teach Like a Champion 2.0
that make for an exemplar transition to Review Now, let's discuss an example of what it looks like in action. In one example, Bridget McElduff, a fifth-grade math teacher from Troy Prep Middle School, circulates and observes while students complete the Do Now. She's using a timer to keep track of how long she's spent on the Do Now and starts to move to the front of the room as the last few seconds wind down. When the timer goes off, Bridget is already standing at the front of the room, smiling. She gives concise, observable directions: "Pencils down and tracking me in five ... four ... " The short countdown adds some productive urgency to her request, but gives students a bit of time to finish their last thought. Later in the year, she may not use the countdown as explicitly and will just rely on students to react quickly when they hear the timer go off, but for now she is explicitly building their skill and efficiency at coming to attention quickly. She swivels her head and scans the room with confidence and finesse as she gets to "one" on her countdown. When every student is with her, she asks them to celebrate their speedy completion of the Do Now with a Prop (described later in this chapter), and on her cue, students pound their desks once in unison with a loud "huhh!" Then Bridget moves swiftly into firing off a sequence of whispered questions - several of which are Cold Calls - to review the completed Do Now. Throughout the review, she keeps everyone accountable for tracking the discussion by requiring students to "check or change" their work. In other words, there's no reason not to pick up your pencil (either to correct or check off) at the end of each reviewed problem. Interestingly, she is also using a timer here. Even if she adds time when the four minutes she's allotted winds down, she wants to make sure she doesn't lose track of time and put herself in a bind for the rest of her lesson. Although Bridget does a lot of things effectively in that sequence, we'll distill her transition into two replicable components: • Three .. , two .. , one .. , Go! Bridget transitions students out of the Do Now with urgency and efficiency by Working the Clock and Brightening Lines between the Do Now and the Review Now. Her countdown signals to students that Bridget values Review Now time and thinks it is worth protecting. She then brightens the line between the Do Now and the Review Now by using the desk-pounding Prop. Her lightning-quick transition into asking questions makes the start of the Review Now pop crisply with energy. • Emphasis on accountable review. Students might potentially disengage during the review of the Do Now, but Bridget alternates between taking hands and Cold Calling during Review Now to keep kids on their toes and actively tracking the discussion.
Systems and Routines
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As she's reviewing answers with students, Bridget's timer goes off-she's used the time she allocated to reviewing and knows it's time to go on to the main lesson. She wraps up a last problem and, announcing that they have exciting things to do today, asks students to "flip the page" in their packets to the main part of the lesson. Thanks to her use of the Double Plan technique, everything she needs is right there in the packet, and she's able to start in on her main lesson just seconds after she's finished the Review Now. Other strategies teachers use to make the most of Review Now include Show Call (technique 39) and Show Me (technique 5). The latter is especially helpful in using the Review Now as an opportunity to collect data on student mastery; the former can make the Review Now an opportunity to review student work and to study and learn from both student errors and exemplary work.
STAR/SLANT Teach students key baseline behaviors for learning, such as sitting up in class and tracking the speaker, by using a memorable acronym such as STAR or SLANT.
Regardless of how great your lesson is, if students aren't alert, sitting up, and actively listening, teaching it will be like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Although many teachers practice lining up students for fire drills and making sure everyone knows the routine for finding the right bus at the end of the day, many neglect to teach behaviors that are more critical over the long run, those that help students concentrate, focus, and learn. To maximize students' ability to pay attention, teachers in top-performing schools and classrooms commonly use sticky acronyms to teach students key baseline behaviors for learning. One popular variation is STAR: Sit up Track the speaker Ask and answer questions like a scholar Respect those around you
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Teach Like a Champion 2.0
