I’m a big proponent of a warm-up task to start class. Whether you call a Do Now, an entry ticket, or a warm-up, establishing this routine is an essential pedagogical tool; I’d argue that this is true whether you’re teaching 11th grade students of AP Chemistry or 6th grade students of health. Individual think time, cumulative review and spaced practice are key components of processing and memory.
Chapter 4 of Benedict Carey's book How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens, lays out the benefits of spaced practice: "people learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute--or 'space'---their study time than when they concentrate it." An efficient way to build in spaced practice is through a warm-up review.
I have blogged about the warm-up routine before, in October of 2019 and again in October 2020. Here’s an excerpt from one of these previous posts:
Create warm-ups where kids can be self-sufficient. They need their notes or previous classwork, but they don’t need you, special materials, or help from a classmate. Expect that kids will work for the whole 3-5 minutes, but not that they will complete every question or problem.
For years, I established an expectation that students do the warm-up alone. For 3-5 minutes, I want them to have individual time to process, remember, look through their own materials, and not rely on anyone else. But am I perpetuating a culture of individualism? Tema Okun’s resource, “White Supremacy Culture,” describes a culture in which “people believe they are responsible for solving problems alone,” which “leads to isolation.” That certainly seems problematic. Am I inadvertently, by warmly but firmly insisting that students try the work of the warm-up, leading to their isolation and perpetuating a white supremacy culture? It’s time to look carefully at this.
I do think that an individual warm-up can be part of anti-racist instruction, if a few other important conditions are met:
Differentiate: The warm-up must be crafted with multiple entry points so that all students can find a question, problem, or prompt that is “just right” for their skill and knowledge. The warm-up is an easy place to differentiate; and we need all the easy places to differentiate we can get.
Provide choice: There must be choice built in; allowing students to start anywhere, and expect only that they will work for the full 3-5 minutes, not that they will finish all the tasks.
Establish the habit: The routine must be regular enough that students build the habit of thinking, reviewing materials and remembering on their own. This only works if it's regular enough to establish habit - not sporadically planned into the week's instruction.
Follow up with an opportunity to collaborate. There must be robust opportunities for students to work together at other times during the lesson, in a way that honors the social aspects of learning and making meaning.
Okun’s antidote to individualism are to “include teamwork as an important value,” and “make sure the [class] is working towards shared goals and people understand how working together will improve performance." I think the question here is what happens after the warm-up? Do you expect students to work individually for the majority of the class? In any lesson, students need both structured and unstructured opportunities to talk to each other. And, as my colleague Jocelyn Fletcher Scheuch points out, a warm-up can be built in to a larger, collective task. For example, when done well, the individual work precedes intentional collaboration, leading to collective understanding
So, keep doing a warm-up. Craft it intentionally with cumulative review or cognitive priming, multiple access points, and choice. Support your students in the habit of individual think time, and follow up with collaboration.
Finally, keep asking yourself: Why am I doing what I’m doing the way I’m doing it? And keep applying an anti-racist lens to that reflection. I’ll commit to doing the same.