Time Management

Basics

The effective school allocates and protects a significant amount of time for instruction of the essential skills. The instruction must take place in an integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum. Effective instruction time must focus on skills and curriculum content that are considered essential, that are assessed, and most valued. There should be abandonment of less important content.

 

If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.
Lee Iacocca
First Generation Second Generation
In the effective school teachers allocate a significant amount of classroom time to instruction in the essential skills. For a high percentage of this time students are engaged in whole class or large group, teacher-directed, planned learning activities. In the second generation, time will continue to be a difficult problem for the teacher. In all likelihood, the problems that arise from too much to teach and not enough time to teach it will intensify. In the past, when the teachers were oriented toward “covering curricular content” and more content was added, they knew their response should be to “speed-up.” Now teachers are being asked to stress the mission that assures that the students master the content that is covered. How are they to respond?

In the next generation, teachers will have to become more skilled at interdisciplinary curriculum and they will need to learn how to comfortably practice “organized abandonment.” They will have to be able to ask the question, “What goes and what stays?” One of the reasons that many of the mandated approaches to school reform have failed is that, in every case, the local school was asked to do more! One of the characteristics of the most effective schools is their willingness to declare that some things are more important than others; they are willing to abandon some less important content so as to be able to have enough time dedicated to those areas that are valued the most.
Best Practices/Activities Resources

 

 

 

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