Time Management




Have you ever tracked how you spend time at work or the time you spend behind your desk? It’s fairly eye-opening to see how long some tasks actually take and how quickly you can complete others.
Like many businesses, we try to track our hours by project. A few months ago we ran across a free program to assist in the process called
Klok. Klok is time-tracking software with many features.

I don’t use Klok constantly anymore, but it certainly made me aware of where I’m wasting time and helped me rearrange a few tasks throughout my day to make me more efficient. As a small business, it has helped us better estimate the real-time needed to complete projects and budgets.


Time management is one of those skills we all would like to be just a little better at. As educators, we’d really like for our students to be better time managers! The first step to improving is to look at where you’re currently at. How about asking your students to track their work time over a certain timeframe: a few periods, during the school day, over the course of a unit or say during a select 48 hours? Follow up with a journal entry or discussion to reflect and provide time management strategies. If you’re into technology, test out Klok. If you need something simpler, use the good old pen-and-paper method.

Suggestions for Effective Time Tracking:



  • Set up the general categories you want to track
    -General category examples: sleep, homework/studying, in-class, non-school related computer or games, TV, hygene, etc.
    -More specific examples would be broken out by subject or even by specific tasks within subject

  • Keep track while you’re doing the task (we are often off when we try to estimate after the fact)

  • Be sure to sum totals for all categories (could be a good graphing exercise as well)

Reflection and Follow-Up Items:



  • What surprises you about how you spend your time?

  • What doesn’t surprise you about how you spend your time?

  • In what areas could you easily be more efficient?

  • How could you better balance your time?

  • What tasks would you like to spend more time on?

  • List 2 goals for how you would like to better allocate your time next week

Leadership Development Tip for August 28, 2008

Avoid Power Struggles with Choices

During my first year of teaching, I had a really good mentor in the classroom next door. I picked up a few good habits by simply watching. Perhaps the best thing I learned from my mentor was how to avoid power struggles by offering students choice. When a student was off track she would approach them with the following statement:

“You have two choices: you can head back to your desk and complete the assignment before class ends or you’re welcome to join me today after school and finish it then. Why don’t you take a minute to think about what would work best for you.”

Then she would purposely walk away for a minute or two to give the student his or her space. She never approached the student looking for confrontation and she always remained calm. She also stuck to her word of requiring students to show up after school if needed.

I tested out both methods: the “do this now” and offering choice and much preferred the results of the choice. I’ve since found more theory and great suggestions in two books: Teaching with
Love and Logic and Positive Behavior Support. Next time you’re dealing with a challenging student, try it out for yourself!

Love and Logic offers these Rules for Giving Choices (pg. 31Teaching with Love and Logic first edition):



  1. Always be sure to select choices that you like. Never provide one you like and one you don’t, because a child seems to have a sixth sense in selecting the one don’t like.

  2. Never give a choice unless you are willing to allow the child to experience the consequence of that choice.

  3. Never give choices when the child is in danger.

  4. Never give choices unless you are willing to make the choice for the child in the event he/she does not choose within ten seconds.

  5. Your delivery is important. Try to start your sent with:
    - You’re welcome to ___ or ___.
    - Feel free to ___ or ___.
    - Would you rather ___ or ___?
    - What would be best for you ___ or ___?

Professional Development Tip for August 28, 2008

Career Cluster Interest Inventory

Looking to expose your students to Career Clusters? Wanting to dig a little deeper than just asking what your students want to be when they grow up?

Check out the
Career Cluster Interest Inventory available on CareerClusters.org. It’s a PDF you can print off for each student with the scoring directions and brief information on each cluster. The inventory itself is straightforward and very easy to score. It will help students identify the top three clusters they may be interested in. If you’re planning for students to take the inventory in class, budget at least 20 minutes for the actual assessment and scoring.

Take it one step further by compiling classroom results to help you cater content examples to your students’ interests.


Career Development Tip for August 28, 2008

Very Cool Class Project Idea

If you’re teaching in the classroom or work with teachers, you’ve got to checkout Common Craft. They’re a small on-line company doing great things. They self describe their product as “explanation.” They produce short, on-line videos which explain things like social media and the election process in “plain English.”







Electing a US President in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.


As a teacher, I can see several of the videos coming in very handy in the classroom as they explain things much clearer than I typically do. I also think you could show a sample or two to your students and then charge them with the business of explaining something they’ve learned in class by making a similar video or presentation. All you’d need is white paper, a few markers and some kind of camera to record. Even a $15 web cam would work just fine. Picture a few students writing a mini script and making a little video explaining photosynthesis, the Civil War or proper sentence structure. And, you could add it to your own library to show classes in the years to come. It may also come in handy to show off to parents and administrators. Very cool!

Check out the
Common Craft Store for yourself. You can preview all the videos. Additionally, Common Craft offers a 50% discount on site licenses for school districts.

Classroom Engagement Tip for August 28, 2008

Add a Trip to the College Bookstore

Recently, I went with my sister-in-law to help her pick up books for her college classes this fall. Not wanting to hover, I started to ramble around the aisles and pick up books that look interesting (and some that didn’t). Somewhere between Computer Science and Horticulture it struck me – there really are a lot of cool careers out there…something for everyone. I never considered mechanical engineering as a field of study, but after spending three minutes flipping through books and seeing the kinds of projects they work on, I kind of wish I had.

How many of your students have never had three minutes to consider a career field?

Schools and parents are great today about having students visit colleges to find out where they might like to go to school. Here’s a suggestion: next time, encourage them to stop by the college bookstore to spend a half hour browsing books of the fields of current interest and those that might inspire interest. The activity can be applied to any type of college and can be accomplished individually or with groups. And…it’s free! No fee to use this “career interest inventory.”

Yes, books are “old school” – you can send them to a college’s online book store to do a similar activity, but it’s not the same. We all have a emotional connection to books from childhood; there’s something about feeling the pages and seeing the words and pictures on paper that speaks to us in ways that screens cannot. And what decision is more emotional than choosing a career field and college?

Career Development tip for the week of August 21, 2008

Olympic-sized Leadership

The Olympics are a great opportunity to discuss traits of leadership and success with students since it is one of the few cultural events that most Americans follow (even more than American Idol). Here are a few discussion questions you might use with students:

  • Who has inspired you in this Olympics? Why?
  • Who has shown leadership during these Olympic games? Why?
  • Are successful athletes leaders? Why or why not?
  • What can we learn about leadership and teamwork from the Olympics?
  • How is “real life” different than the competitions at the Olympic games?
  • What traits do successful leaders and successful athletes have in common?
  • Why do we cheer for some athletes/teams and not others?

Leadership Development tip for the week of August 21, 2008

Digg It – Classroom Style

Digg is a popular Internet widget that allows readers to “tag” articles that they enjoy. Every time an article is tagged (when the user clicks on “Digg It”), that information is sent to the Digg website where a real-time listing of the Internet’s most popular articles is presented. In this way the rest us can see which internet articles (of the millions posted every day) are most popular with fellow readers. It helps us sort through the blizzard of information to find the “good stuff.”

As a unit review activity, have your students “tag” their favorite “article(s).” Have students review notes, activities and assignments and make a list the things they found most interesting, helpful or unexpected (at least one). Have the class share and compile on the board. It will be interesting for students to see what their classmates were “Digg-ing”. It’s also great information for you to see if there are consistent activities, points, or assignments to which students positively responded

Classroom Engagement tip for the week of August 21, 2008

Get Your Own Email – Seriously

We see lots of stories about students sharing stories and pictures on sites like Facebook and MySpace that make us gasp with astonishment. Comments like, “I can’t believe they would put something like that up for everyone to see.” and “Don’t they know that anyone can access that?” are common in conversations when the topic comes up.

What’s equally astonishing, though, are the number of professionals that use their work email for personal purposes and think that their privacy is protected. It’s not. Stop using your school email to schedule doctor’s appointments, complain about your colleagues, or apply for other jobs. There is nothing private about email when it’s provided through your employer. Besides, your friends and family who haven’t worked in a school likely have a belief that teachers and school professionals are to remain at all times, well, professional. An innocent act such as forwarding a favorite recipe to a friend on your school email can give the impression “must have a lot of free time up at the school” when that recipe is forwarded on two or three times.

Some email services are more susceptible to filters and firewalls – Hotmail is an example, but others seem to have more success –
Gmail, for instance. See what works for you. Remember, though, that even using school computers to send personal email can be a slippery slope, but it certainly provides you more opportunity to present yourself as the committed professional you are – in every mode of communication.

Professional Development tip for the week of August 21, 2008

If You Do Nothing Else

If You Do Nothing Else

My efforts to come up with something crafty and useful for this week’s Career Development Tip haven’t been all that fruitful, but they did lead me to ask myself, “What is it that teachers/counselors/administrators/paraprofessionals/coaches must do to help students do in the career development arena?” I’ve come up with the line “the first step is to start showing we care.” Please don’t be offended—I know you care dearly about your students. By “care” I mean, make it priority, start the conversation with students and follow up. They’ve been asked a number of times what it is they want to be when they grow up, but how many adults have taken a genuine interest in what they’ve said or challenged them to consider careers that fit with their talents and interests? How many adults have asked how they will go about accomplishing their goals?

As you’re settling into the routine of school again, make it a habit to show you care about their future careers. If it feels like too much, focus on two or three students who could use guidance and encouragement.
.


Career Development Tip for August 14, 2008

Reflecting

Reflecting

Outside of reviewing a test, rarely do we ask students to reflect on learning. It’s understandable since by the time students have turned in an assignment, we must hurry on to the next topic. What is the payoff of asking students to reflect?

Let’s answer this question first: what do I mean by reflect? A few simple questions that students are expected to answer honestly about their learning process and the effort they contributed. It doesn’t have to be graded, but you do need to read (or listen) and respond either in conversation or writing. Below is an example of a form that could be used as a standard, post-assignment or evaluation reflection guide.


Back to the question of payoff in asking students to reflect. For one, reflection helps hold students accountable. It’s more difficult for Jake to turn in poor work when he knows he will be asked to reflect on it. Second, reflecting is critical life skill. It forces students to articulate and review their thought processes. In the education world, this is called metacognition. For many students, it’s not a natural skill; they learn it from others and by practice. Helping students increase their metacognitive skills helps them to become more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses. This is a critically important leadership skill, too. Use the reflection exercise as an opportunity to discuss how leaders must learn to recognize what they are good at and what they aren't so they can use the talents of others to build great teams and produce outstanding results.



Leadership Development Tip for August 14, 2008

Classroom Blog

Classroom Blog

I applaud all of you who have built and maintained functional classroom websites. In my first years of teaching, it was simply too much to keep up with. Lately I’ve seen a few teachers keeping a classroom blog. I think this is brilliant as it:

is much easier to set up and maintain than typical classroom website
gives you a real voice to write to your students
students don’t really have to navigate much to see the current content

If you’ve never set up a blog, it’s very quick and easy. There are a number of host sites such as
blogger.com and tumblr.com. If you do have plans of launching a class website at some point, I’d recommend starting your blog in wordpress.com as it offers the option to easily transfer everything to your website when you are ready.

Here’s my favorite example of a simple, effective classroom blog—
Mrs. Plas’ Virtual Classroom.

Professional Development Tip for August 14, 2008

Roll the Dice Review


Roll the Dice Review


Looking for an easy way to wrap-up a lesson? Prepare six questions and post them on the board. Grab some dice (even just one is fine). Select a few students or have students partner with a few peers around them and roll. The number they roll is the question they will answer for the class.

You can write content-specific questions or have a general set of questions. Below is a sample set of general questions:
What was one thing you learned during class today?
Of the topics discussed today, what things seemed confusing?
Of the topics discussed today, what did you already know?
What is one test question you could write based on what we learned today?
If you had to summarize what was covered in class today in three sentences, what would you say?
How would you explain to an elementary student what we are learning about in class right now?

Consider posting a generic set of questions on a poster in the class to refer to whenever needed. Depending on the time available, you can have students roll two numbers, share answers aloud or write them down.

If you’re looking to go the content-specific route, consider having small groups of students write sets of questions and trade with other groups.

If you’re looking for some fun dice to use, a quick Google search yields many options. Here is one:
http://dicegamers.com/m_foam.htm.



Classroom Engagement Tip for August 14, 2008