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Leveraging the Warm-up 2.0


I'm re-purposing one of my first blog posts. Maybe that's bad blogging manners, but since no one was reading my first posts, I figure no one will mind. 

In a hybrid model, the warm-up is more important than ever. The last time we saw students was...who can remember? It was days ago. As one of my colleagues in the 6th grade said, in a hybrid model every day is a Monday. 

So we need to leverage cumulative review and spaced practice. Chapter 4 of Benedict Carey's book How We Learn:  The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens, lays out the benefits of spaced practice: "people learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute--or 'space'---their study time than when they concentrate it." An efficient way to build in spaced practice is through a warm-up review. 

And the first moments in class are prime time. This graphic from David Sousa’s How the Brain Learns shows the two “prime time learning” moments in a 40 min. class: roughly minute 3-13, and then again in the last 5.  While many of us, myself included, have used the warm-up routine as a way to settle kids in to class, the warm-up should also take advantage of that prime-time learning. 

One last plug for the warm-up: it's an easy place to differentiate. And we need all the easy places to differentiate we can get. 

Here are some ways to get the most out of the warm-up: 
  • Create warm-ups with multiple questions: Students work at different paces; establish an expectation that students will work for the full 3-5 minutes, but some students may only answer 1 question while others may answer all 5.
  • Expect independent work: Kids should work for the whole 3-5 minutes, irrespective of how many problems or questions they complete.
  • Cumulative Review:  Write warm-up questions or problems that review the previous days’ material, plus one that reviews older material.
  • Allow for choice: If there are 4 increasingly difficult warm-up questions, reinforce that students have choice: they can start with whichever one they want, as long as they work for the whole time.
For Further Reading
Benedict Carey, How we Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why it Happens. 2014.
 
David Sousa, How the Brain Learns, 4th Edition. 2011
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