What happens in the first ten minutes of your class? Grant Wiggins, the speaker I heard today in a workshop on the concept of "essential questions," posed this question as a side-bar to our main topic of conversation.
This may be where we win students or lose them. How many of us begin the class with mundane business, such as checking or going over homework? We all know that the first line of a novel or poem, the first scene of a movie, the lead in a newspaper article -- these can determine whether or not we will continue or check out. My husband and I have a fifteen-minute rule for rented movies. I have a 50- and then a 100-page rule for novels. How many times do we actually judge a book by its cover -- or title? How often to we teach the importance of an opening line in an essay? I even have a 10-minute rule for workshops at conferences -- if it doesn't engage me in that amount of time, I bail.
So why wouldn't we expect our students to react in the same way? What are we doing to engage them (or not) in those first ten?
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