Making the Most of Every Minute

Have you ever stopped to think about the sheer amount of knowledge you try to pass on to your students in a year? Think of stacking up all your textbooks, and just picture how many facts, concepts, and ideas would be written there. And then there are the cumulative hours you spend lecturing and the books you read to them and the behavioural instruction that pops up throughout the day and the games you teach them—when you really stop to think about it, you are trying to pass on a lot of information to your students.

And yet, you can probably also think of hundreds and hundreds of things that you don’t teach them but could (and maybe should).

Efficient Transitions

In his book Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov says, “Time is water in the desert, a teacher’s most precious resource: to be husbanded, guarded, and conserved. Every minute matters. And yet in a variety of situations, we risk letting the minutes slip by.”

Unless the teacher is being intentional about it, in a typical day in any given classroom, there are many opportunities for learning that slip away quietly in little chunks of one or two minutes at a time. Now, that might not seem like such a big deal.

But as Lemov says when talking about the importance of efficient transitions, “If you were able to cut a minute apiece from ten transitions a day and sustained that improvement for two hundred school days, you would have created almost thirty-five hours of instructional time over the school year. Practically speaking you would have added a week to your school year.”

So if you think about how much knowledge you could give to your students in a whole extra week of school, suddenly those little minutes here and there feel a lot more important.

Capitalize on Moments of "Dead Time"

One very practical way to make good use of the minutes of class time you have is to look for areas of "dead time" in your classes. Of course, this will vary depending on the specifics of your classroom, such as the age of your students or whether your classroom is individualized or conventional learning. But I imagine you can relate to the following situation in some way:

You’re in the guided instruction part of a lesson, so perhaps you’re doing a worksheet together. You get the students to work on filling in a section on their own. And of course, everyone gets done at different times. Billy is done first because he’s always done first, and he starts getting restless. This is a bad situation because now Sam is done too and he’s also getting antsy, so he starts making faces at Billy. But you don’t notice right away because you’re busy helping Barbara, who is really, really confused. And Sally is only on number two and she’ll probably never get done now because she’s distracted by Billy and Sam.

Or, maybe if you teach older students, the problem is that as they get done with the assignment, they start to zone out or get distracted by other things. When you try to move on, you have to fight really hard to get everyone’s focus back on you and what you’re teaching. This results in you losing a lot of momentum.

Learning how to capitalize on those moments of “dead time” contributes both to classroom management and the continuous engagement of your students’ minds.

Put Expected Procedures in Place

There are two ways to work against dead time. The first is to put expected procedures in place of what students are to do whenever they have spare time, (even just a minute or two). You can set clear expectations and make it normal and assumed that students will follow those procedures. For example, you might normalize students working on writing out their spelling lists or practicing their Bible memory or writing in a daily journal or reading a book whenever they have a spare minute.

Create Short-term Assignments

The second is to create short-term assignments that change from day to day. These can either be written on the chalkboard for students to reference or given verbally on the spur of the moment. Think of things that take approximately 1-3 minutes to complete. They can be tailored to strengthen areas where students are weak. Consider the following examples (these are given from a middle grades perspective, but take the general ideas and apply them to your age level):

• Math

  • When you’re done with this section, I want you to write a story problem that requires you to divide by a decimal to solve.

  • Recite the 6 times table in your head.

  • Calculate the perimeter and area of the top of your desk.

  • Find the LCM of 18 and 21.

  • Calculate how many hours of math you have done this year if each workbook page takes you an average of 15 minutes to complete.

• Spelling/Vocab

  • Find the longest word in your spelling list and write it three times. Do the same for the shortest word.

  • Choose two vocab words and use them both in one sentence.

  • Mentally say-spell-say your list.

  • Come up with an acronym for one of the words in your list you find it most difficult to spell.

• Science or History

  • Study the diagram on page 34.

  • Reread the text pages we learned about today to solidify the information in your mind.

  • Flip to a random page in the glossary and read the terms and definitions, looking especially for ones from this chapter.

  • Write two things you learned today that you didn’t know before.

  • If you could ask Albert Einstein one question, what would it be?

• Grammar

  • Write an interrogative sentence with a compound subject.

  • Choose any sentence from page 53 and diagram it.

  • Write a run-on sentence, then think of as many possible ways to correct it as you can.

  • Look ahead to the next concept we’re learning and see how much of it you already understand.

  • Write as many adverbs as you can think of.

• Bible

  • Practice this month’s memory work.

  • Read over all your notes from this chapter.

  • Write down one way you can apply today’s lesson to your life.

  • Open to a random page in your Bible and see what you can learn.

Basically, the sky is the limit here, and you get to be creative in the types of things you get your students to do. But this type of short, “extra” assignment helps to create an environment where hard work and engagement in learning is expected. As you normalize it in your classroom, your students will learn to jump back and forth from their workbook assignment to your short-term assignment whenever there is dead time to fill.

It may take a bit of extra work or thinking in the moment to come up with these activities, but the payoff of focused, engaged students who are using their time wisely is well worth the extra effort. Also, once you start doing this, you will find that your brain more easily and naturally comes up with these ideas in the spontaneous moments you need them.

The time you are given to teach the young minds in your classroom is precious. Make the most of every minute.

Works Cited:

Lemov, Doug. Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010.C