How Do You Manage Your Time?
Strategies for Organizing Classroom Procedures: Time Management
Some strategies and tips on how to organize your time management and classroom procedures before your students work on the main learning task.
How do you manage your time in the classroom? While wearing a watch is important for keeping the time and knowing how much to allot for activities, time management techniques and strategies have implications for running a classroom. And yet while it might seem like another classroom related topic, it actually has great implications for learning. When implemented well, time management techniques can keep both your learners on their toes as you work towards building with them together a time management system.
Time management should be an integral part of those classroom procedures which you yourself value, and help keep your classroom running like clockwork so that students know in advance what to expect.
This can be done in the simplest of ways, beginning with writing the agendas of your lesson plan on the board, including the pre-, middle, and post parts. Also write an approximate time allotment for each section. Students like to be informed of what they will learn. By approximating the times, they feel structured. Writing the actual numerical figure f the times on the board appeals to those visual learners who are in need of a sense of structure.
Time Management and Classroom Procedures
Each type of work that is learner centered should be broken down into small steps. For example, teachers should tell them class how much time they will:
1. Spend time on the instructions. (allow for a question-answer session)
2. They will be on task whether it is group work focused or individually based task.
3. Spend summing up the lesson with the teacher. One way to sum up the lesson is by using reflections which are very easy to implement and are self-revealing in terms of what the student had learned for that particular lesson.
Using time efficiently is also about prioritizing classroom related tasks relating to those immediate needs before collecting the class again. This has important implications for closing a lesson. For example a teacher should do the following during a group work task:
- Circulate around the students explaining to those who are still struggling understanding the task demands.
- Break the task even further down to particular students.
An experienced teacher will tell you that a skill that you are introducing for the first time also needs more elaborate procedures. Thus, your lesson plan needs to incorporate additional time management strategies, especially if the task or skill is new for the students.
The same goes for those students who have difficulty comprehending the skill and may need additional support before going on to the next skill builder. Additionally, a teacher should also take in account the time it takes to explain instructions, modeling, giving examples, showing a demo - all of which would ideally precede the main learning task.
Over to You:
In which areas of time management do you need to pay extra attention? When in doubt, always wear a watch!
