Finally a Place for Starters!

 For once, I think I am late to the party! When did Starters and Plenaries come in? Early 2000s? (Here's what I was teaching in the early 2000s.) Well I think I have finally found a place for Starters in my teaching.

Plenaries I could sort of see the point of. An opportunity for pupils to reflect, for the teacher to assess, for progress to be considered. That made sense. (Although not the idea of making it into a performative stationery-heavy part of every lesson. Or misusing the word Plenary.)

But what were starters for? To engage pupils' brains? To get them ready to learn? To have part of the lesson where there was problem solving or bringing in elements from wider learning? It didn't make much sense to have this as a separate part of the lesson rather than getting stuck in. The problem with Starters seemed that they were more Start-Stop. And the few times I did try them, they took over the whole lesson.

But now, I am actively looking for ways to make sure I and all the other teachers in the department have clearly defined and programmed moments where we go back over content and concepts that mustn't be let go of. Because of our rolling Snowball curriculum model, we try to have this built in to the Scheme of Work already, but if our mantra is "Everything is joined up, nothing is left behind" then extra opportunities to make this explicit are always welcome. We are already using our low stakes drag and drop computer room tasks to do this.

So we are trialling what we are calling, "Fluent in Five Minutes." Our maths department have this, and I think there is a similarly named Primary maths initiative. They've stolen the word fluency from languages, so I am stealing it back. In maths the fluency means fluency of recall and then fluency of application. So their starters are a mix of tasks to prompt recall of meanings and definitions, processes and equations, arithmetical dexterity, and some problem solving. The Starter may or may not be used to link previous knowledge to today's lesson.

Another benefit is Routines, and starting every lesson in a predictable way. A downside is that someone has to prepare them, and that that someone has to learn to use Powerpoint. Or Powerdisappoint as I call it after a morning spent working out how to stop it resizing text and refusing to do accents. Fortunately, as the tasks are meant to be low on extraneous cognitive demand, they can be very similar so that pupils immediately know what to do and can focus on the language. They are designed to be do-able, rather than to catch pupils out. They are low stakes and pupils know that they won't be marked. But that the teachers will be alert to how they work and what is going on, so that they can take it into account in their planning. The idea, though, is that the tasks are an exercise in refamiliarisation with content, strongly scaffolded, and then the answers are given, with an opportunity for a quick focus on important concepts. All before the lesson proper begins.

And that doing all that will have a positive impact on the lesson, by giving pupils confidence and helping them have their French ready at their fingertips.

Here are some examples. They are then followed by an answer slide, sometimes with notes.

This one is a mechanical exercise in writing out the sentences in order. And then translating them into English. It is refamiliarisation with words from Year 7.

The bar at the bottom is a timer. It's a rectangle with a colour gradient, so green at one end fading to red at the other. And when the teacher clicks, it is set to "fly out" to the left. But slowly. In fact it slides out in exactly a minute. You can't set it for the full five minutes. And anyway, I have pupils who will spend five minutes happily watching the timer. So it may well be the first thing to be cut.

This one is a translation of 5 roughly similar sentences to draw attention to the words like is, has, to have... It is shifting attention from the broad meaning to the precise forms, focusing on high frequency words that are taught grammatically and lexically in a pincer movement.

You will see that as a school we are using beige or pastel coloured backgrounds to avoid visual stress from whiteboards and we are avoiding clutter on slides. I don't know if this will have the side effect of making everything too samey to be memorable. I notice Seneca Learning do use decorative images that could distract but which are designed to make the exercise look and feel different from the last one.

Translating "in" into French can be tricky, and this exercise exposes pupils to that, but in a do-able way because they are translating into English. The answers slide also prompts discussion around "at the weekend" and "on Monday". For Year 8, this is moving into new content. For Year 9 it is revisiting vocabulary and grammar in a low-stakes way.

Similarly, this one revisits content from Year 7 and the concept of word order. Again, it exposes pupils to the difference in word order but with them working into English. This is partly for recall and partly looking to build on internalised models that can be used by analogy for new contexts.

I will let you know how it goes. The department are under strict instructions that if they already begin lessons with this kind of thing but with expert quick-fire questioning, then they are totally at liberty to continue to do that instead. If this revolutionises my lessons with pupils who are at once calm, focused and ready to push on, then I will claim it as a triumph. (If it leads to a deadening, a dragging and pain, then I shall say I was right all along for the last 20 years.) We shall see!