Ready, steady, go! How you can use research to improve the start of your lessons

What’s the most important part of a lesson? Many teachers would point to the first few minutes as a vital time to settle students and engage them in learning. Researcher Timo Saloviita discovered the students typically miss six minutes at the start of every lesson – adding up to five weeks of learning across a whole year!

Reducing this waste of time is exactly the sort of issue that we discuss with our partner schools as an area that can be researched and improved with the use of educational technology. Following one discussion, here are three areas that one school set out to solve.

1. Getting to the room

 Solutions suggested for fixing the problem included teachers being more visible on corridors and spending more time embedding routines with students, but it has always been difficult to see how effective these interventions are. That all changes with ONVU Learning’s solution – as it is running discreetly before and during lessons, teachers could see exactly when students arrive and whether different solutions change this.

2. Greeting students

Some of the most viral education videos of the past few years have been those showing the different ways teachers greet students outside the classroom – watch ‘Miss Judy’, filmed in October 2018, let her students choose a greeting, or teacher Jerusha  Willenborg  give a different handshake to every one of her class. Other suggestions include handing out personal personal greetings or a much more ‘British’ approach asking students to line up behind desks in silence until the teacher says ‘Good Morning’! ONVU Learning Reflects self-refection process would provide a good way for a teacher to look back at changes such as these and see how they affected the rest of the lesson

3. Starting learning

The choice of what to do at the start of a lesson is one that is the topic of significant research. Professor Rob Coe, Consultant to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has just launched a project challenging Science teachers to test whether a lesson would be better if it started with a quiz or a discussion.  

Teachers are also split as to whether you should leave work out for students to start as they arrive or wait until they’re all present outside a room before bringing them in at the same time. This can depend on the subject and whether the teacher is changing room themselves and needs time to set up their teaching materials.  Again, using ONVU’s Lessonvu would allow teachers to test this and perhaps even contribute to Professor Coe’s research project!

2. How do you solve the lesson starter problem?

In many schools, lesson observations or learning walks are seen as the best way to address issues such as lesson starts, because observers can find the factors that make a difference to a specific school. But there’s a big problem with them. It’s called the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ – the presence of an observer is bound to affect the lesson. However well you try to minimize their impact, observers walking in and out of a classroom are bound to change how the lesson starts – our blog post on the ‘best and worst lesson observation feedback’ includes this extreme example: 

‘Once I had five observations coincide with the same 1hr lesson – two staff in for book-looks, two in to give a general graded observation, and one in to check differentiation and SEN provision. Feedback? Pupils seemed distracted.'

There’s a similar problem with mobile video cameras. A technician or teacher setting them up at the start of a lesson will cause delay and questions from even the best-behaved students, while ‘wannabe TV stars’ can ruin the start of the lesson by trying to get themselves on camera! 

Find out more about the other benefits of our discreet, always-on cameras here.