Teach like a champion 3.0: 63 techniques that put students on the path to college - Lemov Doug 2021

Technique 30: Work the clock
Pacing

We measure things because they matter. Time is the greatest resource you as a classroom teacher manage, so measuring that time intentionally, strategically, and often visibly is critical in shaping your students' experience in the classroom. This skill is called Work the Clock.

Show the Clock

First, show the clock: make time visible to students. Showing how you allocate time—indicating how much you allow for certain activities and that you track its passage during a lesson—will help students understand that you value its wise and careful allocation, and will ultimately teach them to be attentive to it as well.

Showing the clock also has the added benefit of helping you discipline yourself. What teacher hasn't planned five minutes for an activity, for example, but unintentionally spent fifteen on it? What teacher hasn't told her students, “You have ten minutes to work on this,” only to lose track of time and give students twice—or half—that? The result can often be a lesson that ends incompletely; you don't get to the end of the story or the experiment, or you end with only guided practice rather than independent practice.

When you send students off to try a problem for a few minutes, make your best guess as to how long it should take and say, “OK, try one of these on your own. I'll give you three minutes.” Then start your stopwatch or, better, start an overhead stopwatch—perhaps an LCD clock you can project on the overhead or on the wall. If students can see the clock, they can self-manage—learning, for example, to pace their time for a short-answer response.

Some might protest that they don't want to be locked into a specific time allocation for an activity when they don't really know how long it will take, but it's important to remember that you're not actually locked in by giving an initial time allocation. If the time you allocated wasn't enough, you can always extend it (“OK, we've been working hard, and it looks like another two minutes might help”) or shorten it (“Wow, your answers are too interesting and too good to wait the full three minutes, so we'll check in at two minutes!”).

Showing the clock gives rise to a time-sensitive culture. I would love to tell you that classrooms should be timeless places where we take as long as we need and follow every digression, but we all know that's not the reality of our daily periods of forty-two, fifty-five, or seventy-five minutes. And the fact is that you are more likely to be able to occasionally meander timelessly if you manage the rest of your time very well.

Showing time also allows you to talk about time less often. Projecting a clock as it counts down the minutes or seconds on an activity requires no additional narration once your students have learned to attend to it (and once they know that you're going to abide by it). You just say, “Okay, let's go,” start the clock, and let it run, perhaps offering an occasional reminder (“You'll hear the beep in just under a minute,” for example). Then say, “Okay, let's see how we did,” when the timer has finally wound down.

Several years of applying the tools of master teachers has led my Uncommon Schools Teach Like a Champion team to use this at our workshops. During independent work (or breaks!) we often project an Internet stopwatch so that participants know where they stand on time. Generally we find that they much prefer self-management to being constantly managed by us—particularly at lunch breaks.

You can encourage students to embrace time management and develop time management skills by setting up opportunities for them to complete multiple tasks during a block of independent time. “I'm putting twenty minutes on the clock. In that time, you need to edit your paragraph and complete your self-assessment.”

Use Specific, Odd Increments

Whether you are showing the clock or are the only one who can see it, it's valuable to use specific times and odd increments when you discuss time allocations with your class. Consider this mundane case study. If I was leading a professional development session for teachers and said, “Okay, let's take a short break and pick up again in ten minutes,” I would probably not have people return ready to work in ten minutes. The time allocation I used—ten minutes—sounds like an estimate. Round numbers often contain an implicit “about” in them, as in “Let's pick up again in about ten minutes.” Ironically, I'd get people back and ready to work much more quickly if I gave them a longer time increment for their break, as long as it was specific. In a race between “Okay, let's take a short break and pick up again in ten minutes” and “Okay, let's take a short break and pick up again in twelve minutes,” I am betting on the second group every time.

In your classroom, be specific about exactly how long students have for an activity, and vary your allocations. Four minutes of group work is usually better than five minutes of group work (and three minutes is better than “two minutes,” which also sounds like an estimate), but better than both is an initial round of solo writing for two and a half minutes and then a group discussion for three minutes. The variation in allocations for different activities or different iterations of the same activity communicates your intentionality about time. You care about and are precise about time, and this makes others respect it as well. Having established such a track record, you're actually likely to get a pretty good response from folks if you do occasionally use “two minutes” and the like.

In the video Emily Badillo: Go Right to Work, which shows a recent fourth-grade lesson on Number the Stars, Emily Badillo launches a writing task with four minutes (not five!) of work time. After explaining that she'll be looking for example sentences to share with the class, Emily cues the group to begin by restating the time: “You've got four minutes. Go right to work.” She immediately sets a four-minute timer on the red stopwatch attached to the front board so that all students can keep an eye on their time as they're working. As she circulates, Emily keeps one eye on the clock so she can provide verbal time stamps for students as they go. “You've been working for one minute,” she says. “Looks like almost everyone is done with the first sentence. Keep up that speed.” This narration helps students check their own pace and mark the passage of time—How much have I accomplished in this first minute? Am I on track with the rest of the class?—but is warmly and positively delivered, emphasizing success and encouraging those who might not be finished yet. After another two minutes of work time, Emily addresses the room again—“You have one minute and thirty-six seconds left. Get as far as you can.” The precision here helps students see that she'll be taking the end of work time seriously (it's not an approximation or an estimate) but her encouragement to “get as far as you can” lessens the pressure, reassuring students that while the group will be stopping soon, each person's job is simply to make as much progress as possible in the time allotted. Finally, she tells students, “You have twenty-five seconds left, wrap up the sentence that you are on,” preparing students for the end cue and ensuring they aren't caught off guard by the timer. When the timer goes off, Emily says simply, “Stop where you are, put your pencils down,” pauses the timer, and begins to Cold Call students to share their work.

We see teachers using Work the Clock phrases at a few key moments of an activity—at the outset or in the launch in order to set expectations, periodically throughout work time to set benchmarks for progress or encourage stamina, at in the final thirty seconds or so, to cue students to wrap up their thinking and prepare for the transition. Here are a few phrases that might come in handy:

· “You have the next two minutes to respond to Question 2. If you finish early, try Question 3 as a challenge.”

· “You've been working for two minutes and thirty seconds. Looks like most of us are working on the third problem.”

· “We have about three minutes left; you should be moving on from your reading into answering the first reflection question.”

· “Wrap up your conversation with your partner in the next ten seconds.”

· “You'll hear the timer in another forty seconds; finish the sentence you're working on.”

Using Countdowns Effectively

A countdown is a statement of a desire to get something done within an explicit time frame—one that's shorter than it might otherwise be. On the basis of observations, I encourage the judicious use of countdowns in most classrooms, especially when they follow some important dos and don'ts:

Dos

Do use countdowns for simple tasks, wrap-ups, or transitions. Be aware that you will disrupt a certain percentage of work in the room. For this reason, try to transition, over time, to less narrated countdowns, advising students to be “ready for the [timer] beeps in ten seconds” or merely counting selected digits (for example, “Ten, nine [pause for a few seconds], five, four [pause], two, and one.”)

Do use the lowest countdown possible. Be cautious about giving students too much time to do a simple task. Putting pencils down shouldn't take ten seconds, so don't use a countdown from ten. Try three. The idea behind a countdown is to give students just enough time to do something well. Don't rush students by setting an unreasonable goal, but do be constantly encouraging students to manage their time efficiently during transitions and other mundane tasks and to be attentive to efficiency in academic tasks.

Do narrate follow-through during a countdown. If I narrate during countdown, for example, “I'll need your eyes up here in five, four, Nick is ready to go, two, Sarah's ready,” I am describing students who exceeded expectations. In other words, call students' attention to exemplars during a time when they can all still meet your expectations for them.

Don'ts

Don't stretch a countdown—that is, don't slow it down to match student behavior. If you do, it shows that you will adjust the countdown to the alacrity (or lack of it) students demonstrate, rather than the reverse. This defeats the whole purpose. It's much better to end on time and respond with feedback: “Looks like we didn't quite make it. Next time, we have to be faster so we can get back to the novel.”

Don't narrate follow-through after a countdown has finished. In doing so, you are describing a student who has merely done what you asked, and you risk making it sound as though you are pleading for follow-through (“Won't you please try to be like the kids who've done what I asked?”). This can undercut expectations as effectively as it can reinforce them.

Don't overnarrate students who have met your expectations. A few quick acknowledgments of those who are ready is great. Too many, and it sounds as though you're worried students won't follow through on what you've asked them to do.