Creating a Container for the Learning to Happen

One activity that could work really well, like if you're just needing a few more minutes to kind of catch your breath, or just agin to get your thoughts together, is to do i call a focusing activity right at the beginning of class. So it could be that you have a screen up on the board, and it's got a slide on it that has like a provocative question, or a controversial question,. Or a graph with a piece of data or evidence or something on it. And you ask your students in the first five to ten minutes, to just respond to that, like talk with each other, or write something down. It gets them started in class, like it gets