How I Start 99% of My Classes

Dear colleague,

I don't know of a better class starter/do-now/bell-ringer/warm-up than provisional writing. In my classes, this looks like me providing prompts (typically three) and students getting a set number of minutes to write toward the prompts. Sometimes, I ask them to write toward all three; other times, they get to pick. But the basic work that we begin with in my classroom, 99% of the time, is writing.

I like to roll it out this way in my general-level classes.

Step 1: Get all students proficient at producing 100 words in five minutes. Yes — I am a bit obsessive about hitting word counts during the writing warm-up, especially in my general-level classes.

As a writer who has published over a million words myself, I know that quantity precedes quality. And also, for many of my students who don't believe they are writers or that they can write, piling up words over the first weeks of school is an effective fertilizer for writing-conducive beliefs (e.g., Belonging, Efficacy) to start growing.

Writing 100 words in five minutes is one of those special kinds of things you can ask students to do that

• A) Is perceived as difficult by many students and, at the same time,
• B) Is actually not difficult (20 words per minute is all that's required; most people can write at this rate even with their non-dominant hand)

This helps us to begin sensing that the limitations for writing aren't physical. They are intellectual and volitional.

(Regarding the five-minute time period, I like to expand it out to 10 minutes as soon as students have developed some initial success with meeting the goal of Step 1. The length of a given day's warm-up depends on what else we need to accomplish in the lesson. 99% of the time, the warm-up is from five to 10 minutes in length.)

Step 2: Get all students to improve their word count PR (personal records). I typically use the runners or weight lifters in the class to introduce the idea of a personal record. I like the PR angle because it signals that in this class, we'll compete against our past selves, not against one another.

Once students establish their PR for writing warm-ups (measured in word count), they can begin to keep track of their own progress. (I don't have any kind of system for having students do this, but such a system would be a good idea — I just haven't gotten to it yet.) For some students, their PR quickly reaches into the mid-hundreds. Last year, I had a student who could consistently produce 500+ words during a 10-minute warm-up — and this student wasn't so good at many other things in my class. It became a great source of confidence and pride for him (Effort/Efficacy/Belonging beliefs), and from there, he was able to care about improving in other areas of work.

Writing warm-ups like this, using the simple two-step process above, have a lot of happy benefits:

• They disarm any negative student beliefs about being unable to write.
• They provide daily opportunities for me to mini-sermonize on why writing is good.
• They normalize the struggle (Strategy #10 in Will to Learn) of writing, creating a culture in which we're all pushing ourselves to do hard things.
• They allow us to begin class in a calm, focused manner — an essential classroom management goal.
• They give me a reliable spot in my lessons to incorporate prompts that aim at other goals, such as content review or belief cultivation (e.g., Valued Within exercises, goal-setting, Values Affirmation work, etc).

Like virtually all of my approaches to teaching, what I've shared here isn't novel or ground-breaking. But it works very well.

Teaching right beside you,

DSJR