Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Teaching Tip #138




Teacherscribe’s Teaching Tip #138


This was aimed at beginning teachers, but can’t it apply to us all?

Commandment #7 – Maximize your teaching time.

I think Mr. Froiland is a master at this.  Students often talk about how not a moment is wasted.  I’m envious of this.

I don’t do a good enough job maximizing my class time.  One tip I am going to use from this article is to set time limits.  Hard time limits.

I like to truncate my block into at least three or four different sections.  One might be an intro activity of 10 minutes. Another might be a write assignment of 15 minutes.  A third would be a reading assignment of 40 minutes. And wrap up with an exit slip activity that sets us up for the next day.

In fact, I’d like to see us return to look at some of the best practices we have adopted for the block.  And breaking up the block into sections was one of them. But my problem is that I don’t have firm time limits.  So if students are reading quietly, I’ll let them keep going. Inevitable, a few finish early and go on the MacBooks or take out their phones.  I don’t stop this since several others are still reading, but I’m not maximizing the time of those on their computers or phones.

I need to get better at that.


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