This article and the accompanying worksheets are based on a workshop I gave to a group of teachers who were about to finish their four-week initial teaching course, and were somewhat panicked by the prospect of teaching 25 hours a week- as it took them every waking hour to prepare their 4 weekly lessons during the course. If you missed out on such a workshop, this article could well be for you (wherever you are in your teaching career). If your time management is good, you can use this as a format to pass your skills onto your stressed-looking colleagues!
Think about time.
To start, think about ‘the world’s least efficient teacher’ and list all the things that take up their time when they are at work. There are suggestions further down.
In your own time.
Now decide how long it takes you to prepare for one lesson. If it varies a lot, either take an average or just pick a number that sounds reasonable. Draw a circle to represent that preparation time. Divide it into five or ten minute segments (e.g. six ten-minute segments for an hour’s preparation time). If you are working with someone, interview each other on how much time you spend doing the things listed in the ‘the world’s least efficient teacher’ list (e.g. ‘How long do you spend deciding which bit of the textbook to cover in the lesson?’) and divide the circle into (labelled) segments representing those activities. If you are own your own draw your own segments.
Lifesaver
Either show your circle to someone else, or look at it yourself and find the biggest segments. Is there anyway the time spent on those things could be cut down?
Manage it like a manager
Look at the ‘Top time management tips for businessmen’ and see if any of them could be relevant to TEFL teaching- and specifically to your situation.
Pass it on
Time management is just as useful for your students as it is for you (especially exam students and businessmen), and doing it in class can be a great way of reminding yourself of the tips!
Time Management for Teachers- Photocopiable Worksheet
When Kim, the world’s least efficient EFL teacher, is preparing a lesson he or she…
reads the paper before doing anything else/gets a cup of coffee before he or she starts anything/ checks what everyone else is teaching/ drops paperclips, bits of paper etc. on the floor/looks for missing books/ photocopies/ cuts things up/ looks through books for good ideas/ reads EFL magazines/ checks e-mails/tries to remember what he or she did in the last lesson/ looks through his or her pigeon hole for a favourite activity/ tries to find pens/ runs back from the classroom to get something he or she has forgotten/ marks the last homework/ searches for dice/ looks out of the window/ cues tapes
Top time management tips for businessmen (in no particular order)
- Decide on your short-term, middle term and long-term goals.
- Work out when your most productive part of the day is and do the things that require maximum brain activity when you are at your best
- Break big jobs down into small, manageable parts
- Do the worst jobs first
- Reward yourself when you have completed a big job
- Do all your paperwork in one session.
- Schedule breaks.
- Delegate
- Finish each day by making a ‘to do’ list for the following day. Prioritize and number the items.
- Organise an efficient filing system, and use it.
- Throw away everything you can. Do not file it.
- When leaving a conference or meeting, go through all the materials and discard those you won’t look at again.
- Only handle each piece of paper once.
- Clear your desk at the end of the day.
- Good enough is good enough/ Get results, not perfection.
- Start and finish on time.
- Get an egg timer and time how long you spend on the phone.
- If someone asks you to do something, don’t be afraid to say ‘No’.
Possible answers
I think all the tips are relevant to teachers. I have made comments on the ones people have asked me about in the workshops or that I have some favourite tips for.
1. Decide on your short-term, middle term and long-term goals.
With your classes, deciding on what you want to cover in the term and dividing it up into lessons can take away the ‘staring at the book and wondering what to do’ part of lesson planning right away- even if it’s something as simple as working out how many pages you have to cover. This point is also relevant to your personal aims, however. Think about where you want to be and what you want to be doing in 2 years or 5 years. If you want to do a higher teaching qualification at some point, you’ll need to teach high and low levels, and not avoid the phonemic chart and tricky grammar points. If you are thinking about writing materials to be published, spend as much time as you can trying out the latest materials and writing up your own stuff. To summarise- you can only prioritize when you know what’s important to you.
2. Work out when your most productive part of the day is and do the things that require maximum brain activity when you are at your best.
For me, this means it’s more productive to come in very early in the morning than to stay any amount of time in the evening.
4. Do the worst jobs first.
For me, this means filling in the register and record of work the minute I come out of the classroom.
6. Do all your paperwork in one session.
More relevantly, do all your photocopying in one go.
7. Schedule breaks.
Plan to have your next cup of coffee, read the newspaper etc. after you have planned 2 lessons. Be strict on yourself, but also make sure you do take that break at the time you’ve ‘agreed’ with yourself.
8. Delegate
This means finding what the students can usefully do that saves you from doing it, e.g. giving them the answer key with their homework.
9. Finish each day by making a ‘to do’ list for the following day.
Prioritize and number the items. You’d think it would make you feel worse about the number of things you have to do, but it really does work as a way of rounding off the day and making you feel that the next day is already halfway under control.
10. Organise an efficient filing system, and use it.
Simple tips can save hours every week and take away that feeling of drowning under paper. For example, when you make a class set of photocopies, take the top copy and fold it sideways around the others to keep them together- possibly putting a paperclip on top of it to make sure.
13. Only handle each piece of paper once.
For example, pieces of homework- don’t read them once to see how they’ve done and once to actually mark it. Do it all in one go. Connected to this point is a technique for saving time when using supplementary books. Instead of flicking through the book every time you need an idea, flick quickly through the whole thing and make a photocopy of anything that looks interesting, whether it’s relevant to your present lessons or not. Stick all the ones you can’t use this week in a ‘to do’ file and refer to this once a week to see if you can fit any of the good ideas in anywhere.
15. Good enough is good enough/ Get results, not perfection.
Set yourself a limit for how much time you are willing to spend on your teaching a week. 60 hours sounds like a lot, but if you don’t set a limit like this it could well be more than that with a full timetable.
16. Start and finish on time.
Especially true for finishing lessons. Surprisingly, more students complain about lessons finishing late than starting late- after all, late-starting lessons don’t make you miss your bus!
17. Get an egg timer and time how long you spend on the phone.
…or flicking through books looking for ideas, cutting up, etc.
18. If someone asks you to do something, don’t be afraid to say ‘No’.
…especially extra questions after class. Just say ‘I have another class now’.