It's the Most Wonderful TIME of the Year

Time.  It’s every teacher’s worst enemy.

There is never enough time to do everything you WANT to do -- let alone everything you’re EXPECTED to do.

Feel free to add, but here seems to be a random to do list from a school social studies teacher

• Plan lessons
• Make copies
• Put up Common Board
• Collaborative planning with colleague
• Check email
• Answer email
• Grade papers
• Go to IEP meeting
• Talk to AP about issue with kid
• Write referral
• Take referral to office
• Call parents
• Check email again
• Delete 3 emails from Tracy Newman
• Cover a class
• Meeting of some sort
• Chat with kids between class to build relationships
• Check notebooks
• Get activity form filled out
• Uhhhh.... Actually teach, too

Time is a terrible enemy of teachers. Even if we take away all the administrative paperwork stuff, there is still not enough time in the instructional day to do everything -- and even LESS time if you want to actually have a life outside of teaching.  

I know that some of you feel like “the District” or “administration” is asking you to do more and more and more...

And you’re right.

Our profession is ever-changing -- like most other professions, I might add. We have more content, more strategies, more differentiation to do

But we still have the same ol’ 180 days we always have had.

So instead of giving you MORE to do.....

Let me give you less.

Here are four things to spend LESS time on in your classroom, so you can have more time for the “good stuff” -- engagement, collaboration, higher-order thinking ... You don’t have to QUIT these practices. But you might consider minimizing them so you can spend more time getting to the “big payoff” stuff....

SPEND LESS TIME

1. Spend less time ... writing the questions.  Writing the questions takes time. You don’t have a lot of instructional time. Why don’t you have the kids spend less time writing the question -- and more time digging into the question, breaking it down, and answering it.
1. I know, I know ... you want them to study from it. If they actually do study from it, then that is a good time investment. If they don’t (I find that most kids don’t), then skip writing the question. They can use more brain power writing the answer in complete sentences or just writing the answer more completely.
2. Spend less time ... making everybody wait for those three kids still working. Again, you only have so much time in a class period. Ten minutes of the rest of your class sleeping (high school) or going bananas (middle school) is ten minutes that learning could have occurred. There are a few options on this.
1. 
   You can give the rest of the class some review/remediation that is flexible to work on while they wait (Good idea: vocab illustrations or review activity. Not-as-good idea: word searches or crossword puzzles).
2. You can modify the assignment for kids who work slower. Oftentimes, an ESE or ELL student can DO the work, but not as quickly as other kids. Let them skip #4 and 7  (or whatever) so they can really master the other five questions. It’s actually a decent modification for differentiation if you do it judiciously. Have them do more quality, less quantity.
3. I know, I know ... you want every kids to have the time they need to learn. And you’re right. But if the rest of your class is consistently waiting for a few kids, then that isn’t a good use of everyone’s time -- and it sometimes results in the slower-workers feeling uncomfortable or pressured and rushed. Find a modification that will work for you to gain a little instructional time.
3. 
   Spend less time ... going over every answer. I know kids need good answers modelled. I also know that kids are smart. And they will learn that if you go over every answer -- that they won’t need to do the work. They can just wait until you tell them the answer and copy that down, without having to think. Go over a couple where you worry about misconceptions. And then, let them figure out some of the rest.
1. I know, I know ... you want the kids to get the right answers. But those answers don’t mean anything if the kids didn’t do the thinking/reading to get the answers. Give them a couple of answers (particularly tough answers or common errors) to check and see if they’re on the right track. Then, let them be responsible for their work.
4. Spend less time ... having kids copy stuff. Seriously, y’all. It takes forever. Whether notes or definitions or answers, it takes an eternity for kids to copy things -- and they SO RARELY think about what they’re copying, it’s seldom that it’s worth the time. If you want them to have the info so badly, give it to them. Print it out for them and have them highlight it, text-code it, make questions about it. Have them interact with it, instead of copying it from the board, the book, or the dictionary.
1. I know, I know ... you want them to have the important information. And you want them quiet and on task. None of those are bad things! But the time it takes to copy isn’t equal to the learning that happens. How many of you have said, “what do you mean you don’t know the answer? It’s right there in front of you!”. This is because they don’t absorb or learn as much from copying as they do from making their own meanings.

I know you have too much to do in your work day. I can’t give you less paperwork or faster grading practices or perfectly behaved students. I wish!. But I can share what I see with many classrooms that are making the best use of the time -- and what drains our instructional time.  You don’t have to quit these practices entirely. Just be mindful of how much time they take VERSUS  how much benefit you get from them...

And please know how thankful I am for such awesome colleagues! Have a wonderful thanksgiving break!

-Tracy

Hermine and Time

I hope you survived the weather last week!

As I “hunkered down” for Tropical Storm Hermine, with the roads into and out of my neighborhood flooded (but not our actual house or yard, thank goodness), I was transported back in time.

When I was in 7th grade, our Social Studies course was Florida History or Florida Studies or something. I remember very clearly having some Florida map project where we had to color the 67 Florida counties by population.

Being a poor judge of time (and vastly overestimating my skills), I waited until the last minute. Literally, I waited until the day before to start, ignoring my teacher’s daily reminders to work on it.

You know how this story goes. At 10 pm the night before, I realized that I only had 22 counties done and would never get it done in time. I wasn’t ready to pull an actual all-nighter at age 12.

I went to bed, resigned to a really bad grade, or maybe, if I was lucky, a deadline extension in exchange for points off.

I awoke to a Hurricane Day! A Glorious, No-school Hurricane Day (actually a tropical storm day),

I was given a second chance and I promised the Weather Gods that I wouldn’t waste it. I worked that whole Hurricane Day and turned in a beautiful map the next day.

I thought about that a lot last week as I was, again, given the gift of unexpected extra time.

All day Thursday and Friday, I cleaned my house, played with my kids, hung some pictures I had been meaning to hang, pulled some weeds in between rain bands, and cleaned out a closet. I also worked on a family photo album and did some online shopping. All things I wouldn’t have had time for on a normal week.

As teachers, we all know the frustration of not enough time. There are benchmarks to teach, pacing to keep up with, remediation to fit in, review to facilitate... and no one has increased our class time hours to keep up with the increased demands.

I will encourage you to look for those elusive minutes in a pretty regular place -- your bellwork.

Our science colleagues (and plenty of others) are really big on the 10-70-20 idea of class time. Meaning

• 10% of your class time on Bellwork
• 70% of your class time on The Lesson
• 20% of your class time time on Wrap-Up and formative assessment

I would encourage you to time yourself in a couple of classes. Give one kid (who usually is done early or who needs a special job to stay focused) a timer and have him or her time how long each part of the lesson takes: your bellwork, your main-part of the lesson, and your wrap-up

Then, I challenge you to see if your bellwork really takes 10 percent of your class time.

If you have traditional 45-minute class periods, that should be only 4-5 minutes, from start to finish.

If you have block periods, that should take 8-9 minutes.

Time it. With a stopwatch, a phone, or http://www.online-stopwatch.com/

Seriously! That really isn’t much time. In my class, bellwork was easily 10-15 minutes, sometimes creeping up toward 20!!

I really think if we are tighter with our bellwork/intro times, we will feel like I did in the 7th grade -- blessed by More Time. You may not get your house (or classroom) cleaned, your yard weeded, or your Florida Counties appropriately colored, but you will get those extra couple of minutes to teach, exhale, and confirm the learning.

Use those precious recaptured minutes to see if your kids actually learned what you want them to have learned. Use those reconquered minutes to have  your students tell YOU what they have learned.

You might just learn something good -- that they DID get it. Or that they need more help. Either way, you have more and better info to reteach, reinforce, or remediate if necessary.

See if you can grant yourself More Time. Your students don’t need ten or fifteen (or twenty) minutes of bellwork. Take a few minutes from there and see if that can help you do more of what you need to do.

As always, I love to hear from you. Did you time your bellworks? How were your times? Did you find a way to take some of that time and use it for a better purpose? Let me know! newmantr@pcsb.org

Oh My Gosh! It's Later Than I Thought!

Oh my gosh! It’s later than I thought!

My husband likes to tease me by saying that if I ever got a tattoo, it would say: “Oh my gosh! It’s later than I thought!”

(It would look sweet tattooed around my wrist, in lieu of an actual watch, right?)

I admit, I lose track of time a lot. I can be eating breakfast and all of a sudden -- Oh my gosh! It’s later than I thought! It’s time to leave and I still have to find my keys and my other shoe!

It happened a lot in my classroom a lot, too. I was always behind in my lesson plan or behind in my pacing because everything took longer than I thought.

Because of the “it’s later than I thought” phenomenon, I got behind on my pacing every year. Every single year, my final unit of the year from a three week plan to a two-day fly-by lesson.

Five minutes here and ten minutes there can really add up! If you mean for your bellwork to take five minutes but it really drags on to ten minutes every day (and it doesn’t need to take ten minutes), that’s 15-25 minutes a week! That’s an hour every month. That’s ten hours of instruction time a year. That adds up to two weeks of instruction time over the course of a year.

So, in an effort to tighten up lessons, to stay on pace, and to tighten up classroom management, I offer this “brilliant” advice:

Use a timer. All the time.

I know, I know. That sounds completely obvious. And pretty anti-climactic. But hear me out....

Timers can help us accomplish everything we need to accomplish. They can keep us stay on track. They can also help us gauge student understanding. They can help us craft more focused, multi-part lessons.

Timers can change your life!

Why I didn’t use them when I was in the classroom? I used the clock! I told my kids how much time they had for each activity! Isn’t that enough?

In a word, no.

If I went back to the classroom now, I would use a timer displayed every day for just about every activity. I might use a cool one from Online Stopwatch (at http://www.online-stopwatch.com/classroom-timers/) on my projector. I might use a cheap dollar-store digital timer, set down on my ELMO projector. I might use one that is an app on the SMARTboard.

Kids don’t need to look at the clock and do the math every few minutes. They need a countdown clock. They need to see, at any moment, how much time they have left in whatever activity they’re doing.

Kids need to be held accountable for staying on task. They need to know that they can’t drag their feet and dawdle and get out of the next part of your lesson by pretending to need more time. They need to know they can’t talk about the movies for twenty minutes and then write down the answers when you go over it.

Kids need timers to help them stay on track. Of course, as a teacher, you will always circulate during the timed activity, helping kids who need it, checking for thoughtful answers and correct responses and on-task behavior.

But I would use it frequently during a class period. Here are some ways.

• As soon as the bell rang, I would set my classroom timer for five or seven minutes in which bellwork must be completed. I wouldn’t let bellwork drag on for 10 or 15 minutes like I often did while I was taking attendance or checking the ABC list or letting my kids ask for pencils 5 minutes into the bellwork.
• I, personally, have the tendency to talk a lot. (I know -- those of you who know me are SHOCKED at this revelation!) I would set the timer for any teacher-talk that is more than giving directions. Mini-lecture? Set a timer. Modeling the strategy? Set a timer. I need to hold myself accountable and not ramble or beat the dead horse. I need to stay focused. I set a timer for myself to equalize out our class, so they know I am accountable for getting things done in a reasonable amount of time, just like they are.
• I would time every turn-and-talk. Those could go on for a long time if I let them. I have a (good) habit of circulating the class and listening to each set of kids talk and asking them about their turn and talk. Meanwhile, the other ten groups in my class have started talking about TV or Taylor Swift or something. Two minutes is my default, but you can adapt depending on the task or topic.
• Time each major activity. Give the kids an appropriate amount of time for each. Each time to read, each group discussion, each written response, should have a timer to help you and your students stay engaged.
• Use a timer to gage student understanding. Don’t let the time drag on while you wait to see if kids understood the topic. Don’t let ten or twenty minutes go past before kids tell you that they don’t understand something. Set the timer for five minutes, check how they’re doing after that five minutes before you let them move on to the rest of the activity.

I’m not unreasonable. Obviously, if your kids genuinely need more time, please adjust accordingly. Call a “timeout” and reteach. Add extra minutes to the timer when necessary.  I would NEVER tell you to move on if your kids aren’t done or aren’t understanding the content. BUT on the other hand, if they’re goofing around because they know you will let them have another twenty minutes, then tighten up your times.

Some of us will be amazed at how much time we save when we use timers to tighten up our class time. Some of us will be amazed at how the on-task behavior changes when we use timers to keep kids accountable.

And, to be fair, some of us will be amazed that the rest of the world doesn’t already do this. I wish I was a person who had been using timers forever.

I have observed in more classrooms in the past six years than I can count -- middle school and high school, veteran teachers and first year teachers, men and women, north county and south county. One thing I have noticed across the board is this: teachers who use timers regularly, who set specific time goals and then follow up or adapt as needed, teachers who don’t lose track of time -- those teachers cover more ground and cover it more effectively than those who don’t.

So try using timers on your bellwork, your reading, your teacher-talk time, or your activity. Adapt and be flexible, as needed.

Then, drop me an email and let me know if you notice any differences in your pacing, content coverage, or behavior management! I love to hear how it goes!

Pacing and Opportunity Cost

When I graduated college, I got an awesome first job that paid $25,000 a year. Having no clue how taxes and withholdings worked, I got a nice apartment, a new jeep, a cell phone (big spender back then!) and I set myself a budget of $2000 per month (25,000  ÷ 12 months = $2083. I obviously had no idea what was going on, having never had more than a part time job)

Three months later, I was resorting to buying all my groceries at the Exxon station, because that was the only credit card I had left.  Mmmm, gas station food!

The debt from that debacle stayed on my credit for years. I paid ridiculous interest rates on everything for the next decade.

All that to say that we all make choices with the resources we have.  We can spend our money on nice apartments OR new Jeeps, but probably not both at the same time with a cellphone bill on top. We can go on vacation or make home improvements, but we probably can’t do big vacations and big home improvements in the same years.

We all have limited resources and unlimited wants.

In personal finances, we call that a budget.

In economics, we call that opportunity cost.

In teaching, we call that 180 school days.

While I won’t get into our financial resources for teaching expenditures (it varies everywhere), in the classroom we have limited time resources and unlimited passion for our content. And unlimited Google-able access to more content knowledge and cool lesson plans. And unlimited teacher knowledge. And unlimited cool stuff we want to do with our classes.

But, still the same 180 days.

It’s not like history is getting any shorter. We get more every day.

We could teach an entire course on George Washington. We could spend YEARS learning about him. But we still only have the same 180 school days and the same giant set of standards to teach.

It’s so frustrating! Opportunity cost teaches us that for every extra minute we spend on George Washington is a minute we DON’T get to spend on something  else. It’s a minute we don’t spend on any of the hundreds of other topics we want to touch on. It’s a minute we don’t spend on any of the dozens of activities we could do with the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the birth of the nation, the Constitutional Convention, or the First Presidency.

We have to make choices every day as how to best spend our instructional time. What do we keep in and what do we leave out. Where do we teach in depth and where do we just “cover”.

We have two guides to help us make those instructional time decisions: our standards and our pacing guides and/or blueprints.

1. Our standards come from the state. The state Department of Education (with input from the general public) determine the standards for each course.
2. Our pacing guides and test blueprints come from our Pinellas County schools colleagues (except the 7th Civics and HS Us History blueprints, which come from the state also)

All of these tools are there to help make some of those decisions for you. Whether that’s helpful or frustrating is up to you.

Now, with the advent of the dd-EOCs (district-developed End-of-Course tests) and semester exams it looks like the Wild West days of Social Studies are over. The days when we could stop and teach whatever we wanted (Dinosaur unit in US History? Weapons unit in Civics? ) are over.

We choose where to put our time resources in our classrooms.

Our kids have to take assessments based on what we teach. If we don’t teach our standards, we do our kids a disservice.

We do a disservice to their grades with the EOCs and dd-EOCs counting as parts of their grades but we also do a disservice to the teachers grades above us. If kids don’t learn what they need to know in 6th grade, we really mess things up for our 10th grade colleagues. If they don’t learn what they need to know in 10th grade, we make their college professors reteach our content.

I really messed with 11th grade teachers when I didn’t teach about Reconstruction.  

Pacing is a struggle for everyone, middle and high school, required and elective, state EOC and DD-EOC courses. No one is immune anymore. It’s so hard when you have so much knowledge and passion about your content.

Unlimited wants. Unlimited passion for content.

Still,  only 180 days.

As we ALL struggle with pacing and test blueprints and the same 180 days, I encourage you to look at your time resources again. Where are you spending too much time? Where are you spending too little? Are you teaching all of your benchmarks? Are you teaching the ones that will be tested? Are you balancing the time it takes to do a project with the amount of learning a kid actually gets out of that project? Are you spending a lot of time on management or technology or bellwork or tests or wrap-up? Where can you tighten your belt, time-wise? Where do you need to catch up and where do you need to keep it up?

Like it or not, these tests narrow the options of what we can do with our 180 days. What do you find effective to stay or get on pace? How do you keep to your pacing goals?What time management tricks work for you? As always, I love to hear from you! Email me at newmantr@pcsb.org