Teaching Ideas

Starters

The technique of giving students a ‘starter’ has been around since teaching began. It has now been adopted as one of the core techniques within the Key Stage 3 National Strategy because it is regarded by OFSTED and others as ‘best practice’.

This is what the DfES has to say about starters:

“Starters are about purposeful, whole-class, interactive teaching which involves all pupils. They:

• are essentially active in nature and get the lesson off to a flying start;
• focus on an appropriately demanding pace in thinking and learning rather than on the business of activity;
• provide thought-provoking and engaging beginnings to lessons;
• are not ‘compulsory’ but can add greatly to a lesson’s effectiveness;
• can be used to create lively introductions and are the first stage in meeting the key lesson objectives;
• can include brief, small-group activities prior to whole-class work;
• can be used for ‘little and often’ teaching of skills;
• can be planned as a sequence of discrete units to build knowledge, understanding and motivation over a series of lessons;
• exploit prime learning time – pupils are often at their most receptive at the beginning of lessons and concentration levels are high, yet this time is often devoted to administrative and organisational tasks.”

In short, it could be said that starters have been designed to ‘warm up’ students, to engage their thinking skills, to bring them psychologically to the lesson and to make best use of the time you have. The short-term investment in this type of activity will reap huge benefits in the long run.

For RE specialists, starters can be a useful way of engaging students in the learning that is going to take place in a lesson. They can also be a useful ‘hook’ on which learning can be hung, and serve as an aide-memoire for the students as they consolidate their learning.

Experienced teachers will already have a string of such activities or techniques, and so the starters described throughout Complete RE are to be seen as advisory only. Once you have used some of the suggestions and are familiar with the materials provided, you may feel like developing your own starters.