Time Mangement | Internship Reflection 3

Time management is an important aspect for teachers to have in a variety of aspects of the job. It is good to be able to manage time while planning instruction in order to make sure you have all of the resources you need for a lesson. It is important to make sure you allot yourself enough time to get grades in during a reasonable window of time. Finally, it is beneficial to be able to manage your time during instruction to ensure that you are spending an appropriate amount of time during each part of the lesson.

In the middle of February, I had a lesson during which I was observed. For this lesson, I had students use various art supplies to make physical models of the different phases of mitosis as a group. When planning this lesson, I was concerned about getting through the lesson at a reasonable pace and making it to the final activity. From previous experiences in the classroom, I had realized that activities involving art supplies have a tendency to stretch much longer than necessary and end up not getting finished. To counteract this, I made the plan to use an online countdown clock to keep myself and my students on track with the activity.

I broke the lesson down into tasks that would take small amounts of time to complete. For instance, I gave my students two minutes to get into groups of four and move to a station. I gave students 10 minutes to research their phase and fill out their planning sheet. I even set an amount of time during which the groups were supposed to obtain all of their supplies.

When it came time to implement the lesson, it became clear immediately how helpful the countdown clock was. At first, students didn't pay much attention to how much time they had. However, as the timer went off and I moved quickly to the next step, they began to learn that they needed to figure out how to budget their time to stay on track. By the third or fourth task, students were getting the hang of the process. As a result, the lesson moved steadily forward and we were able to spend time discussing the final activity.

Since this lesson, I have used the clock multiple times in my lesson to ensure that I don't lose track of time, but also to help students learn to manage their own time. This is a strategy I intended to use frequently in my own classroom.