A high proportion of the lessons I watch from the beginning begin with a Do Now or lesson starter. Most often the instructions or questions are on the whiteboard and students are expected to get going with the task on arrival while the teacher takes a register and settles the class. Quite often this is a ‘silent Do Now’ – so students are meant to work in silence for that calming effect after a lesson transition and to create a period of intense focus.
My honest evaluation of this very common practise is mixed: the Do Now routine usually achieves the goal of creating a calm lesson start but, in terms of learning, quite a lot of the time it doesn’t work very well at all, especially for the least confident students. Why is this?
I think, largely, it’s because the purposes of a DNA get conflated.
- A behaviour management routine to create an ordered start to lessons
- An opportunity to consolidate prior learning – a warm-up practice.
- An opportunity for routine retrieval practice – essentially a mini test.
