How to Provide Starters and Plenaries in the Classroom

Starters and plenaries are beginning and ending activities which seek to connect learners to prior learning and review and consolidate learning respectively.

Knowledge bank

The National Strategy initiatives have championed the use of active approaches to connecting learners to lesson content and reviewing learning experiences during a lesson before learners leave.

Prior to this practice being enshrined in the National Strategies, accelerated-learning approaches were advocating this as a crucial practice in linking, consolidating and remembering learning.

Starters have the following benefits:

They connect learners to the content and process of the lesson.
They enable learners to make links between what they already know and what they are about to learn.
They acknowledge prior knowledge and build self-esteem in this way.
They actively engage learners within a short time of them beginning the lesson.
They establish the expectation that the lesson is about engaged learning from the very start.

Plenaries have the following benefits:

They allow learners to consolidate what has been learned.
They enable learners to reflect upon how they have learned and how they can improve their approach to learning.
They serve as a check back to the learning outcomes from the beginning of the lesson, to assess success and what else might need to be done to meet the aims.
They give an opportunity for learners to use memory tools to commit ideas to long-term memory.
They provide an opportunity to preview forthcoming learning and leave learners with questions to engage them for next time.

The primacy and recency effect established through educational research studies suggests that we remember more about the starts and ends of learning experiences than we do about the middle. Similarly, the well-documented Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting suggests that without a summary to a learning experience we will forget around 60 per cent of what we have learnt within 24 hours. Such data is always open to interpretation, but it does add weight to the need for a plenary experience for learners.

Activities for starters and plenaries can range from simple 'review three things you learnt last lesson' to more elaborate and multi-sensory approaches such as 'review in the style of a favourite celebrity what you have learned today' or 'here are five answers from the last lesson on this topic, now make up the questions to go with the answers'. In The Creative Teaching and Learning Toolkit, we provide a range of starter and plenary activities in the form of a bookmark which you can copy, cut out and keep handy in your planner.

Ask yourself

How often are you currently providing starter and plenary activities?
What are the challenges to including them? Why is it worthwhile persevering if you have had difficulties?
Which activities do learners most enjoy? What do they value most?
In what ways are your colleagues using starters and plenaries? What can you learn from their work?

To do list

Seek the views of your learners on starter and plenary activities they find most useful and enjoyable.
Encourage your learners to develop suitable activities for the group and get the ideas laminated and up on the wall.
Set the expectation that learners will review their previous lesson at the beginning - even if you're not there!
Develop and collect from other colleagues a range of activities so that you can provide variety of approach over time to keep the momentum of starters and plenaries going.
Task learners to challenge you if you do not leave enough time for a plenary. Get them to give you a five-minute warning.