The First Five Minutes: Getting Lessons Off to a Strong Start

The first five minutes of a lesson can make or break what follows. Too often, lesson starters lack purpose, drift, or fail to secure students’ attention and readiness to learn.

This webinar focuses on getting lesson starters right—using simple, effective routines that improve behaviour, focus and learning from the very start. Drawing on practical classroom experience, we will explore what effective starters look like, how to avoid common pitfalls, and how to build consistent approaches that work across different contexts.

Session 1 is a live session and open to all. Sessions 2 and 3 are only available to leadership hub member schools.

Participants will leave with clear, actionable strategies they can use immediately in their own classrooms.

Session 1: Why Starters Matter

The purpose of the first five minutes
Common mistakes (and why they happen)
The link between starters, behaviour and expectations

Session 2: What Great Starters Look Like

Retrieval practice and prior knowledge
Silent starts vs interactive starts
Setting the tone for learning

Session 3: Making It Stick in the Classroom – For Middle Leaders

Embedding routines so they reduce workload
Managing transitions and settling the class quickly
Adapting starters across subjects and key stages
Avoiding overcomplication

Bonus Session: Using EdTech to Enhance Lesson Starters (10 Minutes)

All Teachers
Middle Leaders

Lisa Jane Ashes

Lisa believes that education is about developing minds for the future. She also believes that many schools fall short of producing a fully rounded end product’ because they fail to coordinate learning across their departments.

She has therefore made it her mission to transform how teachers think about the curriculum so that they can begin to deliver a whole school approach to education. To achieve this, she helps teachers develop personally and professionally by empowering them to collaborate with others within and outside their particular department.

In Lisa’s most recent book, ‘Teacher in the Cupboard,’ she helps teachers examine their approaches to the many problems educators face. Tried and tested solutions to myriad issues are examined from all perspectives. This book provides a mindset to facing problems and is a human approach that can be adopted to solve them.

Lisa’s first book ‘Manglish’, considers how English and Maths can be creatively brought together to improve literacy and numeracy throughout the school, providing practical ideas and strategies for doing this. Lisa is passionate about writing and appears in many teaching and learning publications such as: ‘There Is Another Way and ‘Don’t Change the light bulbs — A Compendium of Expertise from the UK’s most switched-on Educators’.

She has also written many articles to help reflect on her work in education and share her evolving ideas as she goes. Lisa takes her message of curriculum collaboration around the world. Through her work with the charity ‘Reach Out to Schools,’ Lisa has developed teams in Ghana and Nepal where she uses her strategies to help create a culture of continual self-improvement among the country’s teachers.