Bell ringers that start a conversation

Search for bell ringers and you get grammar drills and maths riddles. These are for the days when you want the room talking instead of quiet.

7 min readUpdated 10 August 2026

Nearly every bell ringer you can find is drill. Correct the sentence, solve the puzzle, define the word. That is a reasonable way to settle a room, and it is the only kind anyone writes about.

This is the other kind: one image, one question, three minutes of talking, then you start. It settles a class differently, by giving them something to say rather than something to complete.

It only works if the image is worth three minutes. A stock photo gets a shrug. Something with one clear idea in it gets an argument, which is what you want at 8:50 in the morning. See the twenty in the Classroom Collection, or get a free lesson with the visual and its questions already paired up.

Why the drill version wins by default

Drill is easy to justify. It is on-topic, it is markable, and if someone walks in you can point at the board. A discussion bell ringer has none of that, which is why it gets used in advisory and tutor time and almost nowhere else.

It is also the reason it works. Students know the difference between a task that exists to occupy them and a question someone actually wants an answer to.

Twenty to steal

One image on the board, one of these underneath

Three minutes, no writing, no marking.

What is going on in this picture?
What would you title this?
Who does this remind you of?
Is this good advice or bad advice?
What is the opposite of this?
When is this true, and when is it not?
Would you put this on your wall? Why not?
What would your younger self make of this?
What is missing from this picture?
Who needs to hear this today?
Is this obvious or is it hard?
What would have to be true for this to work?
Where have you seen this happen?
What is the argument against this?
Rate how true this is out of ten, on your fingers, on three.
What would you change about it?
Does this get easier or harder as you get older?
Is this about you or about other people?
What is one word for this?
What happens next?

Any of the twenty questions works with any image. This is the whole system. Ugly Action Beats Perfect Inaction

Do-nows for the first five minutes

A do-now has a narrower job than a bell ringer: get them in, seated and pointed at something while you take the register. It has to work without you.

Image on the board, question underneath, answer in your book in one line. No hands, no talking, no marking.
The same question every Monday. Repetition is a feature. They stop asking what to do.
Two options and a show of hands on three. Twenty seconds, and it wakes a room up more reliably than anything written.
One word on the board. Write down what it makes you think of. Compare with the person next to you. Nothing collected.

Exit tickets that are not quizzes

The standard exit ticket asks what they learned, which produces a sentence copied off the objective on the board. These ask something they have to actually answer.

What is one thing you are still not sure about?
What would you tell someone who missed today?
On your fingers: how confident are you with this, one to five?
What is a question you have that we did not get to?
What was the hardest part of that?
What would you do differently if we did that again?

Making it a rhythm

The version of this that survives past October is the one with a fixed shape. Same slot, same format, different image. Teachers who theme the days keep it going longest: an image on Monday, a would-you-rather on Wednesday, a reflection on Friday.

When it stops working it is almost always because the question got harder, not because the class got bored. Go back to the easy ones.