In my 15 years of full-time teaching, the only thing I have done consistently in every class is use the first few minutes for writing exercises, and I will continue to do that for as long as I am teaching. I love them not only for the learning benefits they offer, but because they have both a symbolic value and a focusing function. Starting with five minutes of writing helps students make the transition from the outside world to the classroom.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
In a conversation I had with Ken Bain, my longtime mentor and favorite education writer, he cited that quote — the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude — as one of the great openings in literary history. It’s hard to disagree: The sentence plunges us immediately into a drama, acquaints us with a character on the brink of death, and yet intrigues us with the reference to his long-forgotten (and curiosity-inducing) memory. That sentence makes us want to keep reading.
When I teach my writing course on creative nonfiction, we spend a lot of time analyzing the opening lines of great writers. I work frequently with students on their opening words, sentences, and paragraphs. In that very short space, I explain to them, most readers will decide whether or not to continue reading the rest of your essay. If you can’t grab and hold their attention with your opening, you are likely to lose them before they get to your hard-won insights 10 paragraphs later.
The same principle, I would argue, holds true in teaching a college course. The opening five minutes offer us a rich opportunity to capture the attention of students and prepare them for learning. They walk into our classes trailing all of the distractions of their complex lives — the many wonders of their smartphones, the arguments with roommates, the question of what to have for lunch. Their bodies may be stuck in a room with us for the required time period, but their minds may be somewhere else entirely.
It seems clear, then, that we should start class with a deliberate effort to bring students’ focus to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, based on my many observations of faculty members in action, the first five minutes of a college class often get frittered away with logistical tasks (taking attendance or setting up our technology), gathering our thoughts as we discuss homework or upcoming tests, or writing on the board.
Logistics and organization certainly matter, and may be unavoidable on some days. But on most days, we should be able to do better. In this column, the second in a series on small changes we can make to improve teaching and learning in higher education, I offer four quick suggestions for the first few minutes of class to focus the attention of students and prepare their brains for learning.
Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. “The material I want students to learn,” he writes in his book Why Don’t Students Like School?, “is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting.”
My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day.
For example, in a session of his “American Government” course that focused on the separation of powers, the first question of the day might be: “What problem is the separation of powers designed to address?” And the last: “What forces have eroded the separation of powers?” Those questions are also available to the students in advance of class, to help guide their reading and homework. But having the questions visible at the start of class, and returning to them at the end, reminds students that each session has a clear purpose.
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