Do Now
A short silent task waits on the desks, so learning starts before you speak
What is it?
A Do Now is a short task, visible the moment students walk in, that they start silently and by habit while you handle the door and the register. It needs no instruction from you. It earns its place twice over: the entry becomes calm because there is something to do besides socialise, and if the task is retrieval of past learning, the first five minutes quietly fight the forgetting curve every day.
The steps
- Use the same place and format every lesson. Board or printed slip. Three to five questions, answerable in under five minutes, in books or on the slip. The sameness is what lets the routine run without you.
- Make it self-starting. The task needs no explanation, no choice, and no new content. If a student could reasonably ask "what do we do?", the task has failed before the lesson began.
- Fill it with retrieval. The highest-value Do Now is quiz questions from last lesson, last week, and last term (see Spaced Review). Three lines of questions, months of retention.
- Stand at the door, not at the front. Greet, scan, and direct with a word:Books open, off you go.The room starts itself while you are still saying hello (pairs with Threshold Greeting).
- Review it fast, and mean it. Three minutes. Cold-call the answers or use whiteboards. Treat errors as information:Half of us dropped the negative — watch this.A Do Now that is never checked teaches students it is wallpaper.
- Guard the clock. Start the review at minute five even if some are not finished. Keep the whole thing, review included, under ten minutes. The Do Now serves the lesson. It must never become the lesson.
What it looks like
Four questions are on the board when the 11-year-olds arrive at Ms Rahman's history room: two on last week's causes of the fire, one on source types from September, one asking for this term's key word ending in -archy. Students file past her at the door, sit, start. Two boys drift into chat; she looks over, taps the board from the doorway, and they turn to their books. Register done, she is at the front: "Boards up on one… monarchy, good. Question three — Priya says 'primary source', Dev says 'eyewitness'. Who's right?" "Both, miss." "Both. Why?" Six minutes after the bell, the new lesson starts.
How you’ll know it’s working
- Students start without being told. Time the gap between sitting and writing: in a bedded-in routine it is under thirty seconds.
- The teacher is at the door or circulating during the task, not explaining it.
- The review happens every time, briskly, with answers checked rather than just collected.
- Start-to-new-content time is consistently under ten minutes.
Pitfalls & fixes
- Do Now creep. The ten-minute starter that eats a third of the lesson. Cap the questions, start the review on a timer, and remember the task's job is ignition.
- Novelty formats. Wordsearches, riddles, anything needing explanation. Novelty demands instruction, and instruction breaks the self-start. Keep the format boring and make the content interesting.
- Introducing new material in it. Students cannot self-start on what they have not learned. New content waits for you. Do Nows look backwards.
- Collecting but never reviewing. Within a fortnight, students calibrate their effort to your attention. Review it every time, even at two minutes, or the routine hollows out.
Weigh it up
Why it’s worth it
- Entries calm themselves. A room with something to do settles without being told to settle, and the daily battle over the first five minutes simply stops being fought.
- Filled with retrieval, it puts the testing and spacing effects to work every single day. That is months of retention bought with the same five minutes the class used to spend finding pens.
- It recovers teaching time. The gap between sitting down and learning drops to under a minute, and those reclaimed minutes compound across a year.
- The review is free assessment data: you see yesterday's gaps before you build today's lesson on top of them.
- It buys you the door. While the room starts itself you can greet students by name, read the mood, and catch problems on the threshold instead of mid-lesson.
The costs
- The power is the sameness, and the cost is the same sameness: day after day, the lesson opens on quiet routine rather than spark. Run the occasional grand opening after the Do Now, not instead of it.
- It costs planning. Five worthwhile retrieval questions per class per day is real work, though a question bank builds quickly and last year's exit tickets become this year's Do Nows.
- Late arrivals still puncture it. The routine softens the disruption; it does not repeal it.
Adaptations
- Early years: the principle survives as "busy fingers" entry tasks — patterns, letter tracing — even where reading instructions doesn't.
- Primary: one shared format all year. Picture prompts can replace written questions for younger children.
- Secondary / post-16: ruthlessly subject-specific retrieval. In exam years, past-paper fragments make the Do Now double as exam training.
- Practical subjects: a kit-and-question variant — collect equipment, then answer two recall questions at the bench while the teacher checks stations.
Where this comes from
Old entry-routine craft, codified as "Do Now" in Teach Like a Champion; filled with retrieval it inherits the testing and spacing effects — a craft container for an evidence-based filling.
Sources
Related techniques
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