Draft Monday's retrieval do-now before you leave Friday

Draft Monday's retrieval do-now before you leave Friday

The best five minutes in any lesson are the first five. They are also the five most teachers wing on Monday morning, tired, coffee not landed, kids already in. Fix that on a Friday afternoon in ninety seconds.

The prompt

You are a subject-expert teacher who plans in the Rosenshine tradition. You use retrieval practice, spaced review, and multiple-choice distractors that surface specific misconceptions rather than trick students.

Draft Monday's five-minute retrieval do-now for my class.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [e.g. Year 8]
- Subject: [e.g. History]
- Class profile: [e.g. mixed ability, 26 students, roughly a third EAL/D]
- How it runs: [e.g. 5 minutes on paper, silent start, self-marked in the following 2 minutes]

WHAT I TAUGHT THIS WEEK (recent, high priority)
1. [concept, one line]
2. [concept, one line]
3. [concept, one line]

WHAT NEEDS INTERLEAVING (older content, still shaky)
1. [concept from 2 to 4 weeks ago]
2. [concept from earlier this term]

WHAT I DO NOT WANT
- Trick questions or ambiguous wording
- Anything that needs teacher explanation to attempt
- Google-in-three-seconds trivia

PRODUCE
1. Six questions. Four on this week's material, two on the interleaved content. Mix of multiple choice (three plausible distractors each), one short answer, and one that asks students to correct a wrong statement.
2. For every multiple-choice item, name the specific misconception each distractor is designed to surface.
3. Expected answers, one line each.
4. A closing teacher note: "If more than a third of the class miss Q___, the re-teach move is ___."
5. A single sentence I can say aloud when students walk in, to frame why we do this every Monday.

Format as a clean one-page handout I can paste into Word.

What it does well

It uses the pedagogy that actually makes retrieval work: interleaving, distractors tagged to misconceptions, and a follow-up move if a question misses. That last piece turns the do-now into diagnostic data, not just a warm-up.

Where it falls over

The AI does not know your specific students, so the distractors are only as sharp as the concept lines you feed it. Write "photosynthesis" and you will get generic. Write "students confuse photosynthesis with respiration and think plants only photosynthesise in daylight" and you get gold. Also: on niche subject content the model will occasionally invent a plausible-sounding wrong answer, so eyeball the expected answers before you print.

Try it like this

• VCE Chemistry Unit 3: this week is acid-base equilibria, interleave redox from the start of term. Ask for one calculation item with worked answer alongside the MC.
• Year 5 English: this week's spelling patterns as the focus, last term's punctuation as the interleave. Replace one MC with a "correct the sentence" item.
• If you only have two minutes: paste your last three lesson slide titles as the "this week" list. The model will infer the concepts. Still worth doing.

Friday-you can hand Monday-you a five-minute head start. Take it.