Tips For Beginning Lessons

It is highly beneficial to the delivery of quality teaching and learning, to foster a willingness in our students to adopt ‘want to’ and 'can do’ attitudes.

For this to be achieved, we must have a well thought out and inviting strategy to begin lessons, enjoyable and relevant activities to maintain momentum during the class and a buoyant conclusion to engender in students a ‘looking forward to the next class’ feeling. 

Our students learn better and we teach better when we are all happy; a proven reality! Therefore it is imperative to create an enjoyable and fun atmosphere.

Following are techniques that will assist us in being confident in ourselves in beginning lessons and be consistently at our best and be in a cycle of continuous improvement:

• be punctual and get to class before our students
• greet them with a hello and a smile using their first names; role model that we really enjoy their company and being there
• ask them to line up in an orderly fashion outside the classroom
• chat positively with them as they enter the classroom.

Start each lesson with:

• a joke of the day
• what’s making news?
• anything special happening in anyone’s family?
• greet the class as a whole and begin with something such as, “How is everyone, today we are going to….”, “Anything new happening around the place?”
• ask whether they encountered any problems with 'learning in another settings'(homework) or understanding what was learnt in the previous lesson
• try to 'catch' students doing good things early in the class and praise them individually and privately; this will set the tone for the lesson
• don’t ignore any behaviours that don’t meet agreed class expectations
• be consistent and adopt the broken record approach; “John, you are not meeting our class movement expectation, please do what we agreed to”. Don’t enter into discussion.
• always have spare paper, pens, etc to cater for students who don’t have what they require to learn and participate fully in class
• choose before class the formats we will employ in the lesson such as, in various sized groups, individual, cooperative learning, discussion, role plays, etc.

Should students arrive from a previous class in which a colleague’s expectations were low or inconsistent:

• welcome them positively and remind of our agreed class expectations; “the way we do things around here”
• often in such situations in is advantageous to 'waste' five minutes asking our students to revisit our discussions on what we agreed were shared reasonable expectations
• if there was physical activity in the previous class which significantly increased students’ heart rates, chat with them outside the classroom and remind them that they are about to enter the 'learning zone'; make it a calming time.

“I have always been delighted by the prospect of a new day, a fresh day, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning”

Joseph Priestley