And in the Beginning: How Do We Start a Lesson?

I have signed up to take part in a staff peer mentoring scheme at school.  This was all well and good (a bit of peer mentoring can be a great thing in helping validate how great we are as educators), but when I was asked what I would like the focus to be, while I admit that there is always areas of improvement, I was stuck for an exact area to develop.  As a solution to this the mentoring coordinator suggested that he might come in and video a lesson and then we could see what develops from there.  

Of course the lesson we had arranged for the videoing to take place in was on a day where the HoD was bedridden with man flu (actually it might have been proper flu as nothing usually slows him down)!  This meant I was having to get cover work sorted for his classes, briefing the cover teacher and starting the lesson.  Even with these beginnings and rushing about, on reviewing the video I realised the area that I really needed to work on with my own class was right there - the starter.

I am sure there are many teachers like me who plan a lesson and impatiently want to get stuck into the main part as soon as possible.  This has resulted in me getting stuck into a little bit of a rut where there is a cursory starter (generally of the, "So what did we do last lesson?" kind) before launching into the main, usually practical bit of the lesson.  Having reviewed the video, even I had to admit that this left me having to go around and ask many of the same questions again and again as students had forgotten things, or I had not made my carefully planned lesson objectives very clear in the beginning. 

I have now spent a couple of months reviewing how we can start lessons, and I discovered that with just a little change here and there, I could make this important part of the lesson much more effective with very little effort.  The options that I have now been looking at have been are:

Developing the "So What Did We Do Last Lesson?" Questions to Include:

1. Whiteboard pair work, 
2. Scaffolded answer sentences to help the students verbalise their answers,
3. Extending the questions to include last lesson, last week, last topic, last term sentences.  This provides the students with revision of the class and subject as a whole rather than just remembering what we covered the lesson before,

Asking More Focused Questions

1. A lot of my outlining of lessons had become sharing the objective and plan of attack for the lesson, with less and less thought in how to develop a dialogue about this.  Now I am revisiting planning my lessons backwards (so deciding where we are hopefully finishing) so that the starter has the option of leading into this.  For example, my Year 8's had a lesson working on a piece that they have to learn for an assessment.  Previously I would have used the starter to outline how they were going to do this, and what I would be looking for.  This lesson I started with a question "How can we effectively evaluate a performance?"  This led onto a discuss about the points that we might grade and how, and so the class were more fully informed about what they needed to work on to get a better grade.

Setting a Challenge 

1. Some of my classes have a terrible habit of drifting in from their previous seated subjects, and so I have also looked at starters which are open ended so that the students who arrive first have something to work on while we wait for the stragglers.  This has included asking them to work in groups to develop the three areas they need to focus on this lesson to complete a task, reviewing the work from last lesson, working on a theory problem.

While I am still in the process of researching and developing these ideas, I believe my awareness of how uninspiring they were threatening to become has meant that my lesson staters are already better thought out and more relevant to the students I teach.