Beginning of Class Routines
This brief routine, often called a "Do Now" or "Bell Ringer," is completed by students immediately upon entering the classroom to activate prior knowledge.
What is a warm up (or Do Now)?
Language objectives focus on how students will use language to do this with the content.
What is how students will practice/demonstrate language skills?
This type of assessment, collected at the end of a lesson, provides immediate data on student understanding before they leave.
What is an exit ticket (or exit slip)?
This term describes temporary instructional supports—like graphic organizers or sentence frames—that are gradually removed as language proficiency grows.
What is scaffolding?
This quick, whole-class CFU requires students to show a simple hand gesture— up or down, or sideways—to indicate their level of understanding.
What is thumbs up or thumbs down?
To maximize instructional time, effective warm-ups should ideally take no longer than this many minutes at the start of a class period.
What is 5 minutes (accept 5–10 minutes)?
This component of a language objective describes the specific academic vocabulary, grammatical structures, or language mechanics students will use.
What is language forms (or structures)?
Because it is used to modify upcoming instruction rather than assign a final grade, an exit ticket is classified as this type of assessment.
What is a formative assessment?
This strategy involves showing students concrete objects, physical items, or real-life examples to provide immediate context for new vocabulary words.
What is realia?
These equitable calling techniques ensure that all students are prepared to answer by using randomized tools
What are popsicle sticks or digital spinners or other random equity cold calls tools?
This specific cognitive strategy involves using a warm-up to bring past learning back into working memory, which strengthens long-term neural pathways.
What is using Previous Learning/ or using activating Prior Knowledge
Language objectives are typically categorized into four core domains: reading, writing, listening, and this one.
What is speaking?
To ensure high response rates and accurate data tracking, an exit ticket should ideally contain no more than this many targeted questions.
What is 1 to 3 questions?
This collaborative routine gives multilingual learners structured time to process a question individually, discuss it with a peer, and then present it to the group
What is Think -Pair- Share?
This active response routine requires every student in the room to write their answer simultaneously on a small, erasable slate and hold it up on the count of three.
What is Show Me (or Individual Whiteboards)?
When a teacher uses yesterday's frequent homework misconception as today's opening prompt, they are using this targeted, data-driven warm-up technique.
What is a data-driven warm-up?
In the language objective "Students will justify their answers using 'because' and 'therefore' sentences," the word "justify" represents this critical component.
What is the language function?
To promote metacognition, this specific style of exit ticket asks students to evaluate their own learning progress alongside a content question.
What is a self-assessment / reflective exit ticket?
This pedagogical concept, advanced by Stephen Krashen, states that language learners acquire language best when input is just one step beyond their current linguistic level
What is Comprehensible Input?
This critical instructional metric measures the specific amount of time a teacher pauses after asking a question to allow students to process their thoughts before prompting an answer.
What is Wait Time?
A warm up can be utilized as this type of assessment to determine where students are performing before, during and after a lesson.
What is a formative assessment?
This linguistic term refers to the organizational patterns of language (such as paragraphs, lab reports, or essays) that must be explicitly taught in a language objective.
What is discourse?
This instructional next-step involves using the specific trends discovered in yesterday's exit tickets to form small, temporary intervention groups the very next day.
What is flexible tiering / responsive small-group instruction?
This powerful vocabulary strategy leverages words in a student's native language that share a similar spelling, meaning, and linguistic root with an English word.
What is cognates?
To prevent passive compliance, teachers should avoid asking "Does that make sense?" and instead use this type of question that requires students to explain why or how.
What is an open-ended / probe question?