The Jumpstart model is a structured approach to lesson/unit planning. Its use ensures that your unit of study will include activities that will make use of active learning approaches, and will present a coherent and well-organized experience for the students. The use of the Jumpstart model is recommended by Durham College because it supports our philosophy of a commitment to student success, and our academic direction of developing excellence in teaching.
The following templates are a great way to plan both lessons and units. Click on one of the applicable the links below to download a blank version to work with:
- [2024] F2F Delivery Lesson Template (Microsoft Word)
- [2024] Flex Delivery Lesson Template (Microsoft Word)
- [2024] Hybrid Delivery Lesson Template (Microsoft Word)
- [2024] Hyflex Delivery Lesson Template (Microsoft Word)
- [2024] Online Delivery Lesson Template (Microsoft Word)
Previous templates:
The Jumpstart Model Video
The following video gives an overview of the Jumpstart Model and how it is applied to teaching. Click anywhere on the video to begin watching.
Connection Activities
Connection Activities capture students' attention and help connect the lesson to students' previous studies, their existing knowledge, and their overall program of study. Connection Activities should, ideally, lead the student to actively bring existing knowledge to consciousness, because we know that new knowledge is better understood, retained, and retrieved if associated with existing knowledge. Connection Activities can be brief (5-10 minutes) and should relate to the overall lesson outcome or topic. You should have ONE Connection Activity for the entire lesson. Connection Activities help to address the following questions:
- Why should I learn this?
- How will I use this in my life and work?
- How does this relate to what I already know or have experienced?
Connection Activity Ideas
Click on any activity idea below to learn more about that specific activity.
- What are some of the characteristics you personally admire about this organization? Why?
- What kinds of opportunities are available within the organization for career management and development?
- Would you refer a colleague or friend to this organization? Why?
The use of a comic strip can help to spark reflection and get students thinking about the lesson topic. You can also use a comic to present a case scenario that can be used to introduce the topic.
You can create your own custom comic strips using Storyboard That. 
The posing of a discussion question as a Connection Activity can be used to invite students to share their opinions and experiences about the lesson topic and can encourage multiple viewpoints. Consider asking questions that will encourage students to relate to the lesson topic on a more personal level. For example, "What does x term mean to you?"; "What experience have you had with x topic?" You can pair students or group them in threes or fours, and let them discuss the question. This encourages participation from all students, even those who may be hesitant speaking up in a whole-class discussion.
You can also use the Discussion Tool in DC Connect to facilitate an online discussion, or you can use a tool such as AnswerGarden to create a word cloud of student responses.
An image that sparks discussion or reflection can make a great connection activity. You can find a variety of images on Flickr that can be used as prompts, and the New York Times also has a weekly feature called What's Going On in This Picture? that can provide some inspiration.
K-W-L charts are graphic organizers that help students organize information before, during and after a lesson. They can be used to engage students in a new topic, activate prior knowledge, and monitor learning. A K-W-L chart typically consists of three columns:
- K - What do you Know about the topic?
- W - What do you Want to know?
- L - What did you Learn?
As a Connection Activity you can present a scenario related to your lesson and have students make a prediction based on the scenario. You can use an online polling tool such as Socrative or Poll Everywhere to gather students' predictions, or have them note them individually and then reflect on them during the lesson. You can also use a Pause and Predict strategy with video where you play a small clip of a video and then pause it and ask students to predict what will happen next. This can encourage discussion related to the lesson topic and activate students' prior knowledge. 
A Quick-write activity involves posing a question and giving students a set amount of time (from one to a few minutes) to respond in writing, or with a quick-draw activity you can ask students to draw their response. As a Connection Activity you can pose a question related to the lesson topic that taps into prior knowledge and use this as a prompt for a quick-write or quick-draw activity.
- What are some of the characteristics you personally admire about this organization? Why?
- What kinds of opportunities are available within the organization for career management and development?
- Would you refer a colleague or friend to this organization? Why?
The Think/Puzzle/Explore Activity helps students connect to prior knowledge, stimulates curiosity and lays the groundwork for independent inquiry. It involves posing the following three questions to students as you introduce a topic:
- What do you think you know about this topic?
- What questions or puzzles do you have?
- How can you explore this topic?
- What strategies do you think you are currently using to support metacognitive knowledge?
- What strategies do you think you could be using to support metacognitive knowledge?
- What strategies do you want to learn more about to support metacognitive knowledge?
Content Activities
Content Activities are used to deliver the course content and can take a variety of forms (i.e. lectures, readings, research, multimedia, student-generated content etc.). There is a Content Activity for each sub-topic, step or section within a lesson. Content Activities should be broken into manageable “chunks,” alternated with Practice Activities. It's important to only give students an amount of material that they can digest at once. You don't want to overwhelm them by delivering all the content at once. You want them to have digestible chunks of it, or subtopics. Content Activities help to address the following questions:
- What do I need to know?
- How do I do this?
Content Activities Ideas
Click on any activity idea below to learn more about that specific activity.
Before your read the article, please take a moment to think about the following questions:
- What do I need to do before reading the article to increase my understanding?
- What am I supposed to learn from in this article?
- What's the best strategy for reading this article?
- What do I already know about the topic?
- What do I need to do while I am reading this article to increase my understanding?
- What don't I understand?
- What's confusing me?
- What information is important to remember?
- What do I need to do after I complete the article? What questions do I need to ask myself about the article?
- What were the most important ideas in this article?
- How can I remember what I’ve learned?
- What do I want to learn more about now?
Images can be used as a Content Activity to help illustrate or demonstrate concepts that are difficult to grasp through text alone. Avoid using images for purely aesthetic reasons; rather, use images that are directly related to learning outcomes. You can find existing images using sites such as MorgueFile.com, Flickr, and Wikimedia Commons. You can also create your own diagrams, charts, tables, and flow charts using tools such as Creately and Gliffy. 
Infographics are visual representations of information which help to present complex data quickly and clearly. They are a great way to show the power of graphs and charts to communicate an important idea. You can find many existing Infographics for use in the classroom via Cool Infographics, or you can create your own custom infographics using tools such as Canva, Easl.ly, Infogr.am, and Piktochart. - Lecturing - Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University
- Effective Lecturing - Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina
- Lecturing Guidelines - Teaching Commons, Standford University
You may also want to consider using a guided note taking strategy where you can provide students with a worksheet or handout with blanks that they can fill-in during a lecture to promote active listening. The following is an example of a guided note taking template:
Another option to add greater interactivity to your lecture is to include a Lecture Bingo activity where you would create a bingo card with terms that will be discussed in a lecture. During the lecture, students listen for the terms and mark them accordingly on their bingo cards when the terms are used in the lecture. As participants collect five vertical, horizontal, or diagonal dots in a row, they yell "Bingo!"
Video can effectively communicate complex information to students and there are an endless number of ways that video can be used as a Content Activity. Watching a video can be a passive experience so you may want to consider providing students with some guiding questions to answer or an activity to complete while watching the video. The image on the right is an example of a template that can be used to guide viewing.
You may also want to consider incorporating some interactivity into your video. There are a few tools including: EdPuzzle and Thinglink that allow you to add interactive questions and rich media into an existing video's timeline to actively engage viewers. The following are some examples of these tools in action:
There are a variety of sources where you can locate educational videos including the following:
- Annenberg Media
- BBC Film Archive
- CBC Archives
- Google Video
- HotDocs Doc Library
- Internet Archives
- Khan Academy
- Merlot
- National Film Board of Canada
- National Geographic Videos
- PBS Video
- TeacherTube
- Vimeo
- YouTube EDU
Practice Activities
Practice Activities provide hands-on application immediately follows exposure to content and provide students with the opportunity to apply, practice and review what they've just learned. They are essential for learning because they help students find out immediately whether they in fact understood and can apply and express the content that they just learned. Practice Activities provide feedback on achievement (self-marking, peer marking etc.) and allow students to check their understanding and mastery of the content throughout the lesson. Through the use of Practice Activities students become more aware of their own learning and more able to make study plans, or other action plans if they find that in fact, they can't apply or understand the material. Each sub-topic, section, step or ‘chunk’ of content within the lesson should have a Practice Activity. Practice Activities help to address the following questions:
- How am I at this?
- Am I getting this okay?
Practice Activities Ideas
Click on any activity idea below to learn more about that specific activity.
This activity provides students with an opportunity to apply concepts to real-world applications and makes a great Practice Activity as it asks students to speak immediately to the ways in which new material can be applied in real world settings. After students have been introduced to some principle, generalization, theory, or procedure, you can pass out index cards and ask students to write down at least one possible, real-world application for what they have just learned.
For this activity, students are asked to complete the second half of an analogy. The first half is a key relationship or idea from the content, and the second half is meant to check overall understanding of the connection between different concepts. It can be as simple as "A is to B and X is to Y." For a variation, the professor can provide three of the four possible blanks for students, leaving less possible answers. This activity helps students understand the relationship between two concepts or terms given as the first part of the analogy and connect the new relationship to one they are more familiar with. The image on the right is an example of an Approximate Analogy activity.
- What are some of the characteristics you personally admire about this organization? Why?
- What kinds of opportunities are available within the organization for career management and development?
- Would you refer a colleague or friend to this organization? Why?
Another option for a Practice Activity that examines the different viewpoints of a topic is a Pro/Con grid which asks students are asked to jot down a quick list of pros and cons, costs and benefits, or advantages and disadvantages on an issue. This activity helps students to learn about decision making process and apply a clear comparison method to make an educated decision. This technique can be used as a Practice Activity in any course where questions of value are an implicit part of the syllabus.
This activity requires students to categorize concepts according to the presence (+) or absence (-) of important defining features, thereby providing data on their analytic reading and thinking skills. When using this as a Practice Activity, choose a limited number of items or classes of items that are similar enough to confuse your students. Determine what the most important features are that the students must recognize to correctly categorize these items. Make a list of defining features that each category either possesses or does not possess. These must be rather clear-cut in terms of their presence or absence, although the categories may share a limited number of features. Sketch out a matrix with features listed down the left side and categories across the top, or vice versa. Ask students to complete the matrix and provide a time limit for doing so. The following is an example of a Defining Features Matrix:
The documented problems technique asks students to show both their work and show the reasoning behind their work, which provides extremely valuable and detailed information about any conceptual difficulties or lingering misconceptions students may have, as well as an overview of the basic strategies they are using to solve problems. The primary emphasis of this activity is on documenting the steps the students go through in attempting to solve the problems rather than on whether the answers are correct or not. Documented problems are an extremely effective means of helping students clarify their thinking and gain more deliberate control over their approach to problem solving. Documentation of a problem can be something as simple as a brief paragraph or two of what was done (and why) or extensive as a line-by-line report of each step in a mathematical proof (Angelo & Cross, 1993).
- If you were to write a headline for this topic or issue right now that captured the most important aspect that should be remembered, what would that headline be?
- How has your headline changed based on today's discussion? How does it differ from what you would have said yesterday?
A memory matrix is a simple square or rectangle which is divided into horizontal rows and vertical columns. The rows and columns will contain key course content or topics that students need to “connect.” Students must fill in the blank cells with information that connects particular rows and columns. The Memory Matrix is useful as a Practice Activity in courses with high information content. It is best used after a Content Activity that focuses on a substantial amount of clearly categorized Information.
Summary Activities
Summary Activities provide an opportunity to consolidate the sub-topics, steps or sections of the lesson into one application. They provide formative feedback to the students on their mastery of the entire lesson. Summary Activities should be as similar to the eventual evaluation as possible so that students get a good idea of whether they are ready to be graded, and whether they have in fact mastered the content and skills of the lesson. You should have ONE Summary Activity for the entire lesson. Summary Activities help to address the following questions:
- How does this all fit together?
- Am I ready to be graded on this lesson material?
Summary Activities Ideas
Click on any activity idea below to learn more about that specific activity.
- For one of these, choose a colour that you feel best represents or captures the essence of that idea.
- For another one, choose a symbol that you feel best represents or captures the essence of that idea.
- For the other one, choose an image that you feel best represents or captures the essence of that idea.
- CONNECT: How are the ideas and information presented CONNECTED to what you already knew?
- EXTEND: What new ideas did you get that EXTENDED or pushed your thinking in new directions?
- CHALLENGE: What is still CHALLENGING or confusing for you to get your mind around? What questions, wonderings or puzzles do you now have?
- I used to think...
- But now, I think...
This technique consists of asking students to jot down a quick response to one question: “What is the muddiest point in ________?” This technique provides information on what student find least clear or most confusing about a particular lesson or topic. As a Summary Activity, the muddiest point requires students to reflect on the lesson and identify any areas which were not clear. Faculty can use the feedback to discover which points are most difficult for students to learn to guide their teaching decisions about which topics to emphasize and how much time to spend on each.
A one minute paper is a quick, concise paper, written by students (either individually or in groups) that typically focuses on a short answer question. The question is usually introduced at the end of a class to help summarize and reinforce the material learned in that particular class. This activity provides the feedback required to ensure that the intended learning was successful (or not) and can also provide feedback to the students. If the students are confused by the content, or are unable to answer the short question, this is an indicator to both the student and the faculty member that the material taught in the class may need to be revisited.
This activity requires the student to answer the questions represented by WDWWHWWW (Who Does/Did What to Whom, How, When, Where, and Why?) about a given topic, and then to synthesize those answers into a single informative, grammatical sentence. The purpose of this strategy is to find out how concisely, completely, and creatively students can summarize a given topic within the grammatical constraints of a single sentence. This strategy can provide feedback on students' summaries of just about anything that can be represented in the declarative form, from historical events, to the plots of stories and novels, to chemical reactions and mechanical processes.
- Recall: Students make a list of what they recall as most important from the lesson.
- Summarize: Students summarize the essence of the lesson.
- Question: Students ask one or two questions that remained unanswered.
- Connect: Students briefly explain the essential points and how they relate to the goals of the class.
- Comment: Students evaluate and share feedback about the lesson.
This activity can be used as both a Connection and Summary Activity and asks students to uncover their initial thoughts, ideas, questions and understandings about a topic and then to connect these to new thinking about the topic after they have received some instruction. It involves asking student to respond to the following prompts:
- What are 3 Thoughts/Ideas you have related to the topic?
- What are 2 Questions you have about the topic?
- What is 1 Analogy/Metaphor related to the topic?