Writing a Do Now that does its job

The Do Now is the first task of the lesson: five short questions, answered from memory before any teaching. In our lessons it opens Know, and with self-marking it takes the first eight minutes at most.

Its job is retrieval, pulling back what was learned last lesson, last week and last term so that it stays learned. Retrieval practice and the Do Now sets out the evidence and its limits. The first of Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of instruction is the same move, “Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning”, and he reports that the most effective teachers in the studies he drew on “began their lessons with a five- to eight-minute review of previously covered material.”

Mix the recent with the older

Spread the five questions back in time, so that older material keeps coming round. The Do Now from Lesson 7 of our A Christmas Carol scheme does this. The lesson that taught each answer is in brackets:

1. What does the first spirit hold under its arm? (Lesson 6)
2. Give one contradiction in the first spirit’s appearance. (Lesson 6)
3. Name two things Marley’s chain is made of. (Lesson 5)
4. Complete the simile from Stave 1: Scrooge is “… as an oyster”. (Lesson 3)
5. What happened to Dickens’s father when Charles was 12? (Lesson 1)

By Lesson 7 the class has met Scrooge, Marley and the first spirit, and the questions reach back to all three, plus the context from the first week. Once a text is finished, keep one question a lesson on it while you teach the next one.

Questions that take under a minute

Each answer should be a word, a name, a phrase or a completed quotation. Useful forms for English:

• a quotation with one word missing
• who said it, and when in the text
• a definition of a word taught in an earlier lesson
• the name of a method in a given line
• one fact of context, tied to the text
• a give-one question, with every acceptable answer listed in advance

Write the answers when you write the questions. Where more than one answer is right, list them: Lesson 3 of A Christmas Carol accepts any one of three things Dickens saw or read in 1843. Lists like this stop the marking turning into a debate.

What to leave out

• New learning. A question on something not yet taught tests guessing, and students who get it wrong have nothing to retrieve.
• Copying. Writing out the date, the title or the objective is not retrieval, however settling it feels.
• Long writing. A paragraph belongs later in the lesson. A Do Now that needs ten minutes eats into the rest of the lesson.
• Questions that hang on wording. If two students could argue about whether an answer counts, rewrite the question.

Going through the answers fast

Put the answers on the next slide and let students mark their own, in a different colour. Then ask for a show of hands on each question. Five quick counts tell you which question the class missed. Spend a minute reteaching that one, and put it back into a Do Now the following week.

Don’t collect the sheets or record the scores. The point is the remembering, and a Do Now that feels like a test invites copying from a neighbour.

Where the questions can come from

Each week of our deliberate practice booklets for the three set texts opens with a reading page and five check questions, answered from memory in a sentence each. The booklet tells students their teacher may use them as the Do Now, which saves writing a set that week. Lesson 3 of A Christmas Carol is free and shows the whole routine, from the Do Now on Lessons 1 and 2 to the exit ticket: download the lesson sampler.

After the Do Now, our lessons move on to vocabulary and the reading, then to Apply, where the teacher explodes one quotation and checks understanding with a hinge question.

Sources

• Barak Rosenshine, Principles of instruction: research-based strategies that all teachers should know, American Educator (spring 2012)