Weekly Teaching and Learning Email - Starting the lesson. Thank you Mr Ashley

I hope everyone is well at the end of another busy week. The teaching and learning email this week is courtesy of Mr Ashley.

Starting a Lesson; why is it important?

Getting students engaged from the offset can be a challenge; especially if you have to move from classroom to classroom. However, the importance of gaining student interest from the get-go is very important and highly beneficial to the student. It’s very easy to lose 5 minutes here and ten minutes there, which in actual fact leads to a lot of lost learning time with a class. Imagine: 5 minutes 3 times a week over the course of a term – that is around 2 hours – essentially 3 lessons completely gone!

There are many factors that can affect the amount of time we have to teach that are out of our control, but starting a lesson promptly isn’t always one of them. Below are a few suggestions that I would recommend to get students in and interested straight away without losing a vital minute.

1. Anagrams – simply display the key words for the lesson in anagram form. Dojo points for the ones who manage it first.
2. Open ended questions – could be based on an idea or topic you are studying. You could structure the questions to allow all abilities to answer and challenge the more able.
3. Display an image and ask how it could be related to the lesson.                                          a. Also: who would win in a fight? Or who is the best musician? Mozart or Eminem?
4. Ask students to write 3 bullet points to recap what they studied in a previous lesson.
5. Provide students with a crossword/word search which can be put on their desk – no need for a projector and can easily be differentiated.
6. Challenge students with a task as they arrive at your door by meeting them there and speaking to them individually or giving specific instructions to start with immediately. For the more hyperactive, this could simply be to hand out books. For the more able, this could be to think of a question they could ask to challenge the rest of the class and use that as your question at the beginning.

Put simply, there are a million and one ways to get a lesson started and I’m sure you all have new and varied ways of doing it. If you could add any new ideas to the blog then that would be great, as the Go Group are always looking to share and improve ideas.

I hope you find some of these useful, have a nice weekend.
Ashley