Transitions

Hello everyone,

As you plan your lessons, don't forget to plan transitions.

Each portion of your lesson plan involves moving from one activity to another: warm up to correcting the warm up (formative assessment) to direct instruction to group activity (with formative assessment) to individual practice with formative assessment to closing class. Each of these movements requires a combination of things, including the transition that the students must make from one activity to the next.

If your transitions are bad, you will likely have a variety of problems.

The overall flow of the lesson is confused and disjointed. Activities don't build on each other. The students lose concentration. Distractions have an opportunity to impose themselves on the lesson.

Part of what happens during transitions is pure management. Hand out and collect papers quickly, so that you can overlap the businesses of the class. (You may recap some key points while handing out papers, for example; or you may ask students to take out their books and open to a certain page while handing in their classwork; or you may have them pass in the homework as they do the warm-up.) Many of the business elements of the classroom require little concentration, so they may be done simultaneously with other elements that require more or less concentration.

It may be wise to give important instructions while the students are listening to you. Say something like, "Do not begin until I tell you to; only listen to my instructions." (One implication of this is that something must be attended to exclusively, and may not be overlapped with other activities.) Before the students begin on the activity that you have just given them instructions on, you may say something like, "Hand in your papers [from the previous activity] and begin [the new activity]."

Dead time in the classroom is like dead air on the radio. When a radio station fails to broadcast anything, people change stations. When a teacher leaves a gap in the flow of the classroom, students "change stations." It may take a long time for them to come back, which causes all sorts of difficulties for your timing.

Consider also the mindset that students have been in before you take them someplace else. "You have been looking at so-and-so," you might say. "Now we're going to consider such-and-such. These two are different in this way . . ." Some students may have finished an activity early, and have already drifted into non-sequiturs. You will need to do a brief (five or ten second) review ("We have just worked on this-and-so. These, you remember, are the elements of this-and-so.") Don't assume as you transition away from an activity that they have been following your every word and that they've understood and remembered everything.

Transitioning from the classroom to their homework is vital as well. Make sure that they really have a chance to hear what the homework is. Don't just shout it at them as they dash from your room.

Keep the flow; use transitions effectively.

Jeff Combe