Let me preface this by saying that I am, by no stretch of the imagination, a fan of DOL (daily oral language). I know teachers who have the DOL transparency up at the beginning of class, ready for students who are eager to find the mistakes in three arbitrary sentences. This works for them. It never worked for me. I would lose the transparency, or write on it during first block so that it was unusable the rest of the day, or not be able to find every mistake myself.
Another reason that DOL never worked for me is that I think bellwork (that which entertains the children while we get our own acts together) needs to be related to the lesson at hand. Bellwork can get their minds warmed up in the direction of the content.
Think of all that can happen in the 5 minute class change at any average high school. Students make up and break up; make plans and break plans; sometimes they'll even sneak in a comment about schoolwork. More than likely, its who is kissing whom, who was at the party last weekend, and what time does the game start. Anything but school.
So when they finally get to your classroom, they aren't ready to jump into thinking about literature or history or biology. They are still thinking about the last 5 minutes. This is where frontloading the lesson comes in.
Frontloading is simply a beginning to the lesson. Effective frontloading will get students thinking about what's going to come next. According to Jeffrey Wilhelm, frontloading is a form of assessment, motivation, preparation, and support. Frontloading gets the student ready for the lesson by either activating prior knowledge or scaffolding on new knowledge in preparation for deep textual work.
Frontloading can be as complex as an anticipation guide or a K-W-L chart. But frontloading can also be as simple as introducing the material with a personal anecdote. Or inspiring a quickwrite. Frontloading goes beyond the busy work we often give students so that we will have time to take roll and check homework. However, effective use of frontloading can rev the engines in the minds of high schoolers and prepare them for deeper thinking on the topic at hand.
