A high proportion of the lessons I watch from the beginning begin with a Do Now or lesson starter. Most often the instructions or questions are on the whiteboard and students are expected to get going with the task on arrival while the teacher takes a register and settles the class. Quite often this is a ‘silent Do Now’ – so students are meant to work in silence for that calming effect after a lesson transition and to create a period of intense focus.

My honest evaluation of this very common practise is mixed: the Do Now routine usually achieves the goal of creating a calm lesson start but, in terms of learning, quite a lot of the time it doesn’t work very well at all, especially for the least confident students. Why is this? 

I think, largely, it’s because the purposes of a DNA get conflated.

• A behaviour management routine to create an ordered start to lessons
• An opportunity to consolidate prior learning – a warm-up practice.
• An opportunity for routine retrieval practice – essentially a mini test.

It’s hard to wrap all of these things into one activity, especially if it always has to be silent. In practice, I think there are several common problems. Here’s 1o in no particular order:

1. Too many questions for the time.

Quite often too many questions are set to be completed in the time, to go over the answers and to re-teach where problems arise. It’s over-cooked. 10 questions is only workable if you can do them all relatively easily and it represents a bit of a work out with some quick self-checking. Very often the lower third of the class doesn’t finish and they start a lesson feeling behind already.

2. Questions are not consolidatory enough

A warm-up ought be positive, affirming and largely consolidatory – like a band or choir warming up playing one of their familiar songs to get everyone in the groove with some mental rehearsal of familiar material. You don’t start a piano lesson with an awkward bit of sight reading. You do scales. Too often, DNAs are just too hard and do not constitute a doable consolidatory warm-up.

3. Students can’t self-check

Going through answers one by one is painful and time consuming. In a good DNA, students can see all the answers at once, check their own or swap with a partner to check each others – so the focus can be on the follow-up. DNAs suck up lesson time if the teacher tries to elicit a student answer to every single question, one by one. The capacity to self-check is itself a skill you want to foster to preventing this seems like a missed opportunity as well as being inefficient.

4. Time for checking is curtailed.

Often, when time is pressing, the bit that is missed is the part when you check for wrong answers, areas of confusion, concerns, questions- so students who get quite a few items wrong are not identified to the teacher; they don’t know who got what because they don’t devote any time to trying to find out. They are relying on that weak student picking up the correct answer and self-correcting. Invariably, this isn’t what is happening! Again, it’s a poor start to a lesson for student who isn’t succeeding in the DNA.

5. Wrong answers and problems are not identified.

Linked to No 4 above, often the teacher seeks correct answers but not wrong answers so there’s a bit of a fudge; each question may have a correct answer aired but the DNA process doesn’t allow exploration of why certain wrong answers were given or where the stumbling blocks are for any number of individuals. Again, this is more likely if there are too many questions.

6. Re-teaching is minimal

Following from 4 and 5, it’s rare to see a DNA lead to a pause where the teacher says: OK, seems like that’s quite a problem for people, let’s go through this bit of material again. There’s just a hope that telling them the answer IS the reteach -when obviously that’s often far from sufficient. This means that you can bet the same students will get the same DNA questions wrong again next time – because really they are no further along.

7. Post-DNA Consolidation is minimal

Linked to 4,5 and 6… if a teacher does go over a further example in some detail, students don’t get time to practise. They hear the explanation and then off the lesson goes. They rarely, for example, are offered another similar question to try to get right after having heard it explained again. So, there’s this hoping going on – the teacher is just hoping that some of it will stick, but there’s no check so see if anything landed.

8. Silent DNA negates possibility of talk-based options.

When the conflation of settling with testing and retrieval happens, the problem arises where students would really benefit from verbal exchanges such as paired quizzing or simple verbal rehearsal of explanations or paired elaborative interrogation. This isn’t compatible with a silent DNA so the diet tends to be quizzing and short answer questions. They are fine as part of the repertoire, but it does mean some really good consolidatory warm-ups are essentially off the menu which is a shame. 

9. The DNA and lesson introduction are confused.

This could be me but I often find it weird and baffling when students are asked to write a date and title about topic A, then do a DNA involving topics X, Y and Z, then go back to the lesson on topic A. It’s disjointed. Why not just do the DNA, then start the lesson on topic A, if that’s what you want. It means that there’s often confusion about what to focus on when addressing the whole class for the first time. Is it the topic or the DNA? I see teachers in a spin over that first five minutes pretty often when simplicity is there to be found. 

10. The topic mix is too wide.

Very often that ‘thing’ of having three from this week, one from last week and one from last month on a grid… has reached the level of absolute law! Drives me mad when children have absolutely no idea about the material in the questions – had no warning that these topics would feature and have not studied them for weeks – and then are asked recall questions on the assumption that this should be secure knowledge, getting a top-up. Nope. It’s just so common for these wide topic range starter to be a total train wreck for the weakest students – as featured in this slightly ranty post:

If you pick through those problems the solutions emerge:

Don’t set too many questions or make them too hard, ensure self-checking is viable and keep the topic range reasonably narrow. This is so :

• students have a positive warm-up experience and most students get most answers correct or get some decent writing practice;
• you can find out what problems students have and who had them
• if necessary you can re-teach the core concepts in a time-efficient manner and in response, set practice questions to consolidate the learning. 

Set each Do Now to build confidence not to catch students out – so link them to the learning sequence you are in and build student agency around studying in readiness. If a significant number of students are getting most answers wrong or not finishing – change the DNAs so that their success rate will be higher and they are practising getting things right.