Strategic Do Now Tasks
How we make the start of every lesson as impactful as possible
Do Now tasks have been common practice in most subjects in most schools since I began teaching. It makes sense to begin with an introductory task before the ‘main’ part of the lesson begins. Around five years ago, we introduced ‘5-a-day’ tasks as our Do Nows in English – an idea I saw shared on Twitter around the same time (if I could remember who to credit the original idea to, I would! I do know that @Mathew_Lynch44 has done some great work on 5-a-days). Our Do Nows became five questions that pupils would independently answer in their books at the start of the lesson to assess what they could recall from the previous lesson or few lessons.
For many years, we used our 5-a-day tasks for two main reasons: to settle students on entry and to activate prior knowledge. And for many years, this worked for us: the 5-a-days were doing their job. This was until we got some worrying mid-year data and decided we needed to go back to the drawing board and consider how to use our lesson time more effectively, especially as revision culture outside of school was rocky. We needed to make the most of every minute that students were in the classroom. So, after some in-depth discussions with my team, we realised that we were missing a vital opportunity with our Do Now tasks. To make our 5-a-days as impactful as possible, they needed to become a form of data-informed intervention. The teacher would then assess, at the beginning of every lesson, whether or not these skills were developing and address any misconceptions that were arising before they became entrenched.
We spent some time deliberating what we thought students were struggling with and what skills they needed to practice, and we came up with a common ‘formula’ for the type of questions that should be included on a 5-a-day. Rather than just any five questions to essentially fill the time, the questions needed to become much more strategic. This resulted in the following guidance which we shared with the team:
KS3 guidance
KS4 Literature guidance
KS4 Language guidance
Teachers were expected to use the guidance to amend or write their own 5-a-day tasks for their classes based on the common misconceptions and areas of need within the class or year group, informed by our data analysis. For example, in Year 8 we were noticing repeated issues with the misuse of semi-colons, so this became the focus for Question 3 - the punctuation-based question. In Year 11, we knew students were struggling to recall quotations, so we made Question 2 for Literature lessons a cloze activity based on quotation recall.
For a while, this worked well. These Do Nows were definitely more thought-through and we noticed an improvement in the skills practised during the 5-a-days. However, like with most things, after a few terms we realised that we needed further adaptations based on new areas for development that had arisen. This is probably the best thing about our 5-a-days: they are adaptive and flexible according to what our students need.
For example, in our November mocks with last year’s Year 11 cohort, we noticed a real issue with the analysis of language methods. Essentially, the confusion between inference and analysis – vague statements made about what a method ‘suggested’ rather than a specific analysis of what THAT particular method actually did. We produced a scaffolded help-sheet to develop students’ analysis skills (explained my earlier post ‘Improving Analysis’) which made a huge difference, but importantly we also practised refining analysis skills through the 5-a-days – every single lesson. We began including a quotation at the top of the slide, and then making the five Do Now questions primarily analysis of said quotation. See example below:
Amended KS4 example - Literature
This process worked really well. We implemented it for the Year 10 cohort at the time as well – who are now in Year 11, and are already a step ahead of the previous cohort when analysing the impact of methods. I’m sure at the next round of data collection we will notice new trends, and we will undoubtedly meet to discuss and strategise how to fix them. But this is what makes our 5-a-days so impactful: they are data-informed, they are adaptive, they are strategic. Essentially, students are completing around ten minutes of assessment feedback and improvement every lesson.
No matter what your current approach to Do Now tasks in your own departments and classrooms, a reflection on whether they are as strategic as you need them to be could be really beneficial – it certainly was for us.