As I mentioned before one of the things I want to work on this year is pacing my day to day lessons. On my lesson plans I always plan 5 - 10 minutes for the warm up problem or activity for the day. However, by the time students get into class, get settled and actually start working I usually end up giving them more like 10 - 15 minutes. The only person I have to blame is myself. I'm guilty of not holding them to the standard that I set. Five minutes a day might not sound like a lot, but that adds up to 25 minutes a week of loss instructional time that could have been used for presentations, discussions, exit slips or any other activity.
This problem does not stop with the warm up. I usually chunk my activities/lessons so that students have to be finished with a certain portion within a given time limit. But I get so wrapped up in working with students that I lose track of time.... resulting in (you guessed it) more lost instructional time.
So what is a teacher to do about this problem?
The solution I'm going to try is to use a timer. It's so simple I don't know why I never thought of it before. There are many different (and free) online timers that can be used such as www.online-stopwatch.com (the one that is used in initial implementation training and inspired me at the Carnegie NMI conference to try this) that are great for displaying if you have a projector and a computer for day to day classroom use. Unfortunately I do not have a way to easily (due to the room configuration) hook my computer to the projector and document camera that I have. So I decided that I could buy a small kitchen timer and put it under the document camera to project it to students. I had looked all over at various stores but could not find one that was inexpensive (the really hard part) and simple enough for what I needed. I finally found one while I was shopping yesterday (I've been looking since the end of July) at ... where else...the dollar store. You cannot imagine how elated I was. It was the perfect size and exactly what I was looking for.
Being that school does not start until September 7, all I need now are some students so I can try it out. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.
A blog written BY teachers FOR other teachers. Learn more about the Carnegie Learning curricula: best practices, pacing, classroom management, and more!
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4 comments:
Brandy, pacing has always been issue for me. I never have enough time to do everything. I've only taught 50-minutes classes, which makes it difficult to have a bellwork, grade homework, answer questions, maybe give a quiz, have a student-centered activity, and still give students 15 minutes to start on their homework. Nearly impossible. Ideally 90 minutes every day would be wonderful. With budget restraints in our district, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Plus, I'd rather have my students 50 minutes everyday instead of 90 minutes every other day. The worst part is that I feel like I'm always rushing the students. Don't you? This year I think I'm going to try to have fewer problems to work through so that we can discuss them more in depth. I do agree that a timer helps. Luckily my SMART Board has several timers built in. I'm so glad to read that you found one that will work with your projector! Good luck.
I'm definately going to have to find a balance between moving the lesson along and rushing students. I guess I can always reset the timer for a little longer if I need to. Its just something I feel like I should try. Even if it is only for the warm up time. I'm hoping it will motivate the students to stay on task.
I am lucky with our schedule I see the same kids for 90 minutes everyday all school year. Math and English classes at my school go year round while all other courses are only 1 semester. They started this schedule last year to help with math and reading acheivement. Our schools went up this past year, so it seems to be working.
90 minutes every day, year round? I am so jealous!!! :)
Hmmmmm. How do the History and Science teachers feel about only seeing their students for one semester? How did this new schedule effect the scores of your state's history and science standardized tests?
We are not tested on History at the High School level, but our Science scores stayed about the same.
The other teachers have come to terms with it. They complained at first, but were really happy when our scores increased. We had the 5th largest increase in our state.
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