Zak's Weekly Musings (September 14, 2022)

In our last Midweek Musing, we spoke about the indispensability of establishing an exit routine as a means of cultivating a predictable learning environment, with the goal being to unburden students’ working memory and open pathways for deeper cognition. This week, let’s talk about the exit routine’s counterpart, the first five minutes of class. But I want to start by telling you about my first heartbreak. 

Just a few weeks into my 6th grade year, I worked up the nerve to ask out Sara Marcus. She and I were in an improv elective together and we bonded over a shared affection for Lauryn Hill, Dawson’s Creek, and Total Request Live (TRL). When she agreed to go out with me, I was elated. I was new to the school and already had my first girlfriend! 

Well, as we all know, middle school relationships can be fickle and ephemeral. Just a couple of months later, Sara sent one of her friends to break up with me during recess. I was devastated. I thought we went together like PB&J. It turns out that in her mind we went together about as well as peanut butter and pickles. 

I can still vividly remember walking into Mr. Mann’s Latin class right after lunch only for him to announce that we had a pop quiz. No buffer. No time to collect myself. I walked in the door, sat down, and was presented with a 20-question pop quiz. 

I’m sure you can already guess that I bombed that test. But, it was more than that. I harbored a real resentment towards Mr. Mann after that and later Mr. Marchiaro, my 7th grade Latin teacher. I simply stopped identifying as a Latin student – or, at the very least, as a student who would apply a modicum of resilience or motivation to refine the meager Latin gifts that I possessed. By 8th grade, I had dropped Latin and picked up Spanish. 

Like 6th grade Zak, none of our students arrive to class unscathed. From the moment our students wake up, their sense of self is both overtly and more perniciously being torn at. Perhaps another student made a comment about their hair on the bus. Maybe they got in a fight with their parent over breakfast. Maybe they just dealt with their first breakup. Regardless of the details, past is prologue for our students – it sets the stage for the levels of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional engagement we see from students in our classes. 

This is why the first five minutes of class matter so much. The first five minutes afford students the buffer period they need to align three tangled and overlapping mindsets to put forth their best possible effort – an academic mindset (“I’m ready to learn”), a subject-area mindset (“I’m ready to learn Latin”), and a lesson-specific mindset (“I’m ready to learn Latin by studying irregular verbs”). 

Sure, spontaneity has a role to play in our learning culture, but not in the first five minutes of class. The first five minutes should be repetitive and routinized. They should provide students a chance to forget about what happened at recess and begin to transition into the academic mindset they need to be successful in class that day. These five minutes should, at a bare minimum, include a learning target and do now, grapple question, or bell ringer. 

It’s for you and your department to choose what these first five minutes of class look like, but the first five minutes need to be the fulcrum upon which students transition into your class.