Re-Doing Your ‘Do Now’

Before Covid-19 closed schools and seriously upended the ways teachers go about their craft, the beginning of the teaching day or hour was fairly simple: The kiddos came into the classroom and immediately their eyes would catch the task written on the board or projected onto the screen. The “Entry Task,” “Bell Work,” the “Do Now”– whatever you call it — teachers have used this tool for years.

It serves a variety of purposes, the most important of which is creating a tangible transition for students — cognitively, emotionally, and physically — from where they just were to a more focused and ready-for-the-lesson mindset. Teachers provide short review questions or ask a provocative question that hooks students emotionally into the content coming up. While the kiddos are tending to those things, teachers are using the precious moments to finish an email, gather materials, or take the last bite of lunch. It’s amazing what teachers can cram into five minutes while students are bent over their papers, scribbling away.

I used this approach haphazardly at first, calling it “The Entry Task,” because it was … well, a task my high school students were supposed to do when they entered my classroom. Each day, they would travel via light rail, taxi, or bus for my afternoon class, so the Entry Task was my approach to helping them calm the swirl of emotions they carried form the morning or the night before.

The term “Entry Task” had a kind of light, inviting quality to it, and I thought its intention was clear. “Entry” + “Task” = a task you (the student) do upon entry. Right?

WRONG.

I sprung Entry Tasks on my high school students one day, tired of the disorientation they (and I) felt at the start of our time together. I created a simple paper form that had a place for student name and date, and five textboxes, each with a subject line to be filled in each day of the week. Oh, and a little line for me to score their efforts: 5 points for each “Satisfactory” Entry Task completed in a timely manner. Five days of the week, five textboxes. Easy.

“Okay, everybody,” I announced one day. “I’m starting a new thing! When you come into the room, please get settled, get the Entry Task sheet out of your file, and follow the instructions on the screen.”

My students sighed, but then got to work. With my instructions unopposed, I assumed they understood the intention and agreed: Enter, settle, do the task.

Day One went smoothly. They were surprisingly quiet. On Day Two, all bets were off. They came into the room chatting, checking their phones, slopping their bags on the floor, slumping on desks … anything BUT doing the entry task.

When I reminded them by pointing to the Entry Task written on the board and nudging them towards their individual folders to pull their paper form, they said things like, “Aw, bro, you were SERIOUS?!” Or “Oh, um, can I use the bathroom real quick?” A couple of students pulled their forms, but then just set the papers on their desks and started playing on their phones.

Now, my students were great kids, so I knew their defiance was not based on deliberate meanness, but the action I was asking of them simply didn’t fit their mental and emotional profile. Remember, the prefrontal cortex — the command center of the brain — isn’t fully formed until a person reaches 25 or 26 years of age. My students’ Command Center was still under construction, with 8-10 years to go.

It became painfully obvious that “Entry Task” was too vague for teens. But I knew they had all been familiarized with “Do Nows,” “Entry Tasks,” or whatever in middle school. What was up with that? How could they forget something they had likely done every day for 3 years? I even confirmed this fact with some teachers I knew from the feeder schools. “Yes, we did the Do Now every day.” “Yes, every day we did bell work.” “Yup, the Do Now was non-negotiable.”

So, what my students were doing was pretending not to understand what I wanted them to do. Teenagers have a knack for that, preferring (or needing) instead to establish a modicum of control in school, where control is limited.

By shlumphing into the room and NOT doing the Entry Task, the message my lovely kiddos were sending to me, was “Entry Task” is optional. Unless I explicitly TOLD them to do it, they could just ignore it, hope I’d forget, and away we go. Of course, I fell into the trap of explaining the entire Entry Task a few times each week, which defeated its purpose. “What do you want us to do? I don’t understand?” was another way they hijacked me into doing the work for them. CLEVER.

I fell for that on a number of occasions. I hate that.

Seeing that my students needed more direction, but in a stealthy, equally-clever way, I changed up the Entry Task prompts to be a little more light-hearted and even fun: riddles, trivia, questions about what we covered the day before, etc.

My creativity worked for a couple of days, but the students soon slid back into their “What to do?” with the Do Now. It occurred to me that a simple change in terminology might do the trick. I changed Entry Task to “Do Now” — following the lead of Doug Lemov in his blockbuster book, Teach Like a Champion.

THAT should do it! Pun intended. The instruction for what to do and when to do it was inherent in the label itself: “DO. THIS. NOW.”

I experimented one day to see if my change in wording could make a difference in students’ behavior. I erased “Entry Task” and replaced it with “Do Now,” underlining it with a flourish and drawing a smiley face. Sure enough, I overheard one of my students say to a classmate upon entering the room, “Dude, put your stuff away, we gotta do that thing on the board.”

Silently vindicated, I was able to take attendance, sign off on an email. And that was that.

At the end of the school year last June, I conducted a poll to find out what kinds of exercises my students preferred during our 16-week semester. What kinds of activities did they like the best? I planned to use their feedback as I considered this coming fall. The survey included things like “in-class discussions,” “Circle Time,” “Presentations,” and “Do Now’s.”

Guess what. NOT ONE STUDENT marked the Do Now as an option moving forward. NOT ONE. No one liked the Do Now?!

I was crushed. So much for my stealthy teaching. So much for all of the hours I whittled down the task to a pithy prompt with a picture. Didn’t they know how much time I spent conjuring those up?!?

I am thinking about the start of school. It’s coming fast. And I want to keep my “Do Now” as a means to help students settle and focus while I get myself doing the same.

After last year’s debacle, it’s occurring to me that I might have more success if I offer students more choices in the matter. In other words, they could write a caption to a cartoon and share that; create something out of origami paper; work on a riddle; write a discussion prompt for our next Circle time; or respond to a prompt that has more to do with how they are doing at the moment, not what I want them to think about.

It’s worth exploring, right?

If my students and I can work TOGETHER during those first few moments of settling in, we will more likely feel like we’re sailing in the same direction.