Classroom Management Strategies: Do Now
Richard Taylor
An example ‘Do Now’ activity
At the start of every lesson, valuable time is wasted trying to settle students down as they enter the class while waiting for everyone to come before the lesson can start. One strategy that can help ensure students are productive as soon as they enter the classroom and ready for instruction when you are ready to start the lesson is Do Now.
Do Now is a task that you assign to your students to do as soon as they enter your classroom. Using the Do Now strategy effectively is critical to ensure students remain focused and efficient in your lesson. Here are four principles to help you apply this strategy successfully:
- Students should be able to carry out the Do Now task without any specific direction from you and without any collaboration with their classmates. Some teachers misunderstand the purpose of the Do Now task and use a task that requires them to provide explanation to the students. This defeats the purpose of the Do Now which is to help students manage their own learning and become autonomously productive.
- The Do Now activity should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.
- The Do Now activity should require students to complete a language production task (e.g. they have to write something rather than just read a paragraph). This makes the Do Now more rigorous and engaging as students have to produce language and you can easily check that they are engaging with the task.
- The Do Now activity should either review language that students learned recently (e.g., students can do a crossword with vocabulary they learned in their last lesson) or it should preview the day’s lesson (e.g., students can write their thoughts/opinions about a topic to be introduced in the lesson; an excellent way to activate their schemata!).
Applying the Do Now strategy consistently as a routine activity at the start of every lesson will help make it more effective and efficient as a classroom management tool!
Adapted from Lemov, D. 2010. T_e_a_c_h_ _L_i_k_e_ _a_ _C_h_a_m_p_i_o_n_. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
