Do Now

Do Now is the opening task or warm-up exercise that starts a class before its main activity. In the teaching model explained to Tony Danza, every lesson has three parts—a Do Now, a central activity, and a wrap-up—and the opening task is meant to keep the class moving toward a stated goal. Its importance in the book lies in the tension between formal preparation and lived classroom reality: a Do Now can be written carefully into a plan, forgotten in the pressure of a first lesson, or deliberately replaced when the students’ actual interests offer a better route into learning.

Definition and Place in Lesson Planning

Do Now is presented as a practical classroom structure rather than an abstract educational slogan. David Cohn explains that a lesson plan must include not only what the teacher will teach, but also how the material will be taught and how students’ retention will be assessed. Each class should have a goal and three stages: the Do Now or warm-up exercise, the main activity, and the wrap-up. The opening task therefore serves as the first visible action of the lesson, giving students something to do while establishing the subject and preparing them for the work that follows.

The structure also exposes a novice teacher’s vulnerability. Tony spends three full days preparing his first lesson plan, yet during the class he fails to look at it after checking it roughly twelve minutes before Nakiya appears in the doorway. David’s central criticism is that lesson plans are useless unless the teacher remembers to use them. Tony then notices the forgotten Do Now still written on the blackboard and recognizes that the omission has contributed to the class’s disorder. The incident makes the concept concrete: planning is not the same as execution, and an opening routine cannot help if the teacher loses contact with the plan under pressure.

Routine, Attention, and Participation

On the second day, the Do Now helps Tony enter the classroom differently. The students sanitize without being told, take their seats, and respond to the prompt, “The most important ______ in my life is …” Tony no longer launches into the sweaty monologues that characterized his first attempt; he points to the board and tells the students to begin. The contrast suggests that the routine does work even when the teacher’s performance becomes quieter. It gives the students an immediate, shared action and gives Tony a way to organize the opening minutes without trying to win the room through personality alone.

The need for such a beginning is intensified by the conditions around the classroom. Tony is assigned truancy duty by Ms. DeNaples, escorting tardy students across campus and confronting parents who bring their children late. In class, Monte taps his pencil, Eric Choi folds an elaborate moving origami object, and other students avoid reading aloud while secretly checking cell phones and texting. A Do Now cannot solve these problems by itself, but it creates a defined threshold between arrival and participation. The task asks students to act before the main lesson can be derailed, while making disengagement visible to the teacher.

David also warns Tony that students must become involved in their own education; a teacher cannot learn for them. That principle gives the Do Now its larger educational function. It is not simply a way to occupy students while the teacher prepares. It asks each student to produce an initial response, however brief, and places responsibility for the first movement of learning with the student rather than with the teacher’s performance. The routine is consequently connected to Tony’s gradual shift away from popularity as a teaching strategy and toward active participation.

Flexibility and the Uniform Debate

The most revealing use of the Do Now occurs when a planned exercise is abandoned. Tony’s lesson plan calls for a prompt about physical fitness and nutrition, linking health to educational and intellectual fitness. But the class is preoccupied with the new Northeast High School uniform policy. Eric Lopez and Matt complain about it; Monte says the policy makes everyone look as serious about school as he is; Eric Choi appreciates no longer having to wear the shirts his mother buys; Chloe and Katerina mourn the loss of shopping; and Ileana and Ben-Kyle object on grounds of free expression.

Instead of forcing the planned topic onto a reluctant class, Tony erases the fitness assignment and writes, “How do you feel about the uniform policy? Explain why.” The replacement preserves the form of a Do Now while changing its content in response to the students’ immediate concerns. This is not a collapse of planning but an adaptation of the lesson’s entry point. The students begin writing at once, and their compositions show more energy and conviction than almost anything they have written earlier in the year. A prompt that recognizes an existing disagreement succeeds where an unrelated exercise might have produced passivity.

The writing then develops into a team debate. Tony has learned in professional development that students retain ideas best through discussion, particularly debate, and the uniform controversy provides a ready-made structure for that work. Charmaine argues that, although she is still a minor, living in America should permit her to dress as she wishes. White Nick counters by asking what happens when clothing becomes distracting. The Do Now thus operates as a hinge: it begins as individual writing, opens into opposing positions, and leads into collective reasoning and speech.

From Opening Exercise to Student Agency

The same logic extends beyond routine prompts. In a creation-myth lesson, Tony asks students to write their own myths explaining creation and natural phenomena and including gods, goddesses, or spirit forces, with at least three required elements. After discussing Anansi, the trickster spider credited in Ashanti legend with creating the sun, stars, and moon, he pairs the students to compose and perform their own versions. Eric Choi and Ben-Kyle create “The Magic Button Myth,” using a large paper button attached to a paper spring and labeled “DO NOT PUSH.” Their performance makes the world begin when one god does exactly what another god has forbidden. The class cheers, and Eric, usually shy and gawky, is unsure how to receive the praise.

Although this activity is not identified solely as a Do Now, it clarifies what the opening task is intended to initiate: students move from a prompt, to an idea, to collaboration, and finally to public creation. Tony’s use of a prompt can likewise lead to discussion of social justice. After hearing a rap that refers to Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he finds students arguing for and against the song’s implications about violence, self-respect, and social action. The opening of a lesson becomes valuable not because it is short or standardized, but because it can generate a question that students are willing to pursue.

Tony eventually applies a similar principle to Monte’s dissatisfaction with the pace and standards of the class. Monte believes To Kill a Mockingbird is too easy, criticizes the slow progress and weak control of the room, and appears convinced that he could impose stricter order. Tony gives him one entire period to design and teach his own lesson through the Student Teacher program. Monte prepares a legal-term worksheet based on the trial in the novel and plans a demanding analysis of the characters’ qualities and interactions. The experiment fails to produce the discipline Monte expects, but it turns his complaint into responsibility. In that sense, the opening-task principle broadens into a redistribution of classroom agency: students are not merely recipients of a teacher’s plan, but potential designers and leaders of the work.

Limits and Significance

Do Now also belongs to a much larger labor system that teachers are expected to manage. Teachers at Northeast High School describe having to serve as instructors, counselors, friends, social workers, and surrogate parents. Tony’s unofficial advisory students come to his classroom for air-conditioning, half sandwiches, companionship, or refuge from serious problems. Some arrive late because their electricity was shut off and the house was too cold to sleep in. Under such conditions, a brief opening assignment exists alongside truancy patrols, emotional counseling, discipline, documentation, and the effort to keep students from leaving school altogether.

The pressure is not merely personal. A teacher Tony meets at a gym has 150 students across five classes, including students escaping gangs, grieving brothers killed by gangs, living with fathers in prison, or experiencing homelessness. Even weekly quizzes create a numerical burden: one minute of grading per student would already require 150 minutes, before the actual complexity of schoolwork is counted. Tony recognizes that caring for students requires attention and personal sacrifice, while veteran teachers warn that without boundaries some students will take everything from a teacher. The Do Now therefore appears as one small, visible component of an immense and frequently uncompensated workload.

By the end of Tony’s year, he rejects the blame game as an explanation for educational failure. Teachers are expected to teach, counsel, comfort, coach, inspire, document, evaluate, and respond to changing district and national mandates while handling about 150 students a day. Within that system, the Do Now represents both discipline and possibility. It is a modest formal device, but it can mark the difference between a class that begins in confusion and one that begins with students doing something; when adapted intelligently, it can transform immediate conflict into writing, debate, interpretation, and shared responsibility. Its significance is therefore not that one warm-up can repair an underfunded school, but that meaningful education often begins with a concrete invitation for students to enter the work themselves.