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

Technique 31: Every minute matters
Pacing

Respect students' time by spending every minute intentionally.

I observed one of my favorite moments in teaching—simple, humble, and powerful—early in my Teach Like a Champion study process when I saw Annette Riffle of North Star Academy in Newark working with her fifth-grade math students. The moment started with an utterly typical scene. Students had solved a problem on the coordinate plane independently at their desks. They'd had to plot certain points to show the outlines of a hypothetical stadium. Annette ended the independent work with a crisp, pace-accentuating clean finish—a series of claps that she gives and that students echo to bring them to attention. Then she said, “Someone come give us a stadium,” handing the marker to a girl named Kadheisha, who excitedly approached the front of the room to model her work on the overhead.

Ten thousand teachers have, from time immemorial, called a million students up to the board to “show their work,” and not much usually happens while one student puts said work up on the board. Twenty-nine students sit and wait for thirty seconds or a minute while the student in question completes the work they will soon review. Perhaps in some classes, three or four students put problems up on the board at once. But the rest of the group does precious little, even if told to “pay attention to what they're writing.” Twenty-nine students wasting thirty seconds are the same as one student wasting almost fifteen minutes, except that, in addition, precious amounts of momentum are also squandered reenergizing students who've lost the task.

What came next in Annette's class, though, was quietly brilliant.

While Kadheisha did her work at the board, Annette did a quick review of key terms and ideas with the rest of her students. “What quadrant are we in? Fatimah? And what do we call that line along the bottom? Sean? And which direction does the x-axis run, Shatavia?” The result was not only a productive use of time and the reinforcement of key facts during what would otherwise be downtime, but also an exercise that increased the likelihood that students would use key vocabulary words to analyze and describe Kadheisha's work.

Time, I was reminded in watching Annette's class, is water in the desert. It is a teacher's most precious resource—it is to be husbanded, guarded, and conserved. Every minute of it matters and the way we use it shows students where our priorities lie. We must work to maximize the precious moments of class we share with students to ensure we're using our time as intentionally as possible. This is not to say we must avoid all downtime or breaks—after all, these can be opportunities to have meaningful interactions with students—but rather to emphasize that we must be deliberate and thoughtful in our choice about how to spend even the smallest increment of time. Mastering Every Minute Matters means deciding how to spend time intentionally, even in the moments between activities or other everyday pockets of time that are easy to miss.

Every Minute Matters … Even in the Hallway

One of the very first videos we shot in what became the Teach Like a Champion project, long before there was such a name, is a short video of History teacher Jamey Verilli managing his minutes one afternoon at North Star Academy. Waiting for the rest of the class to arrive with some of his students in the hallway just outside his classroom, he begins quizzing students on their vocabulary:

· “What does it mean to be ’bound’ to do something?”

· “Can you use it in a sentence, John?”

· “Who would have been bound to the land in a Middle Ages town?”

· “What are you bound to be doing right now?”

Class has not even started yet. Not in the classroom, not during class time, but Jamey recognized a learning opportunity. Meanwhile, his students are excited, smiling, happy to be engaged, and showing off their knowledge.

Purposeless time can kill momentum. One reason that Jamey's students are so invested and engaged is the message he is sending. He's showing he believes that their time is important, not to be wasted, and that they and what they are learning is of great significance. A teacher like Jamey creates a sense of meaning and productivity that pervades the room.

The first step in Every Minute Matters is a psychological one: recalibrating your expectations so that you think not, “Well, it's just thirty seconds” but rather, “Good gosh, thirty seconds—how can we use that well?” There's a quiet confidence implicit in such a shift. The well-it's-just-thirty-seconds teacher tacitly assumes that he could not do much with thirty seconds, so why bother? The second teacher knows, believes in, and embraces how much he might accomplish even in a very short period of time. After all, almost everything we've ever learned, we learned in the end, in a minute. There was an extra minute of reflection, practice, explanation, or discussion that pushed us over the top and perfected our skill or knowledge. There's no reason to believe that the profundity of the learning has to correlate to the glamour, predictability, and formality of the setting. The critical moment can just as easily come at 2:59 p.m. on Friday afternoon as the buses start to fill the circle in front of school as it can in the middle of your lesson on Wednesday morning.

Once you've embraced that notion, you'll start seeing pockets of time everywhere, where once, it seems, none had existed. A bit of occasional advance planning will help you make the most of it. Keeping at the ready—in your “back pocket”—some activities and groups of thematic questions aligned to what you're teaching can make the difference.

Back-Pocket Questions

If you work in a school, you are alert to the constant potential for the unexpected. Schools are complex organizations where the perfect flow of scheduled events is sometimes disrupted. So it's useful to be ready for the unexpected by having a portfolio of quick and useful back-pocket questions ready to go. These activities are also much easier to incorporate impromptu when students recognize them as something familiar that they know. You might opt to give a name to the activities you do most often so students know what to expect. For example, “Let's do a little vocab bingo” saves the time you'd need to explain a new procedure or activity. They can live in a real pocket (on a set of note cards) or a metaphorical one. Plan the questions both periodically (every three weeks or so) and in advance, so that they are aligned to key objectives for your current unit. I also know teachers who keep a mental list of good topics for Q&A among mastered skills, enabling them to strategically spiral in practice and ensure retention of mastered content. You can always review key vocabulary, just as you can always ask students to put historical events in chronological order or put events from a novel in sequence.

Without any props at all, you can always ask “math chains”—sequential math problems such as “Three times six. Now doubled. Take that number's square root. Subtract seventeen and take the absolute value. Add 104. Your answer is?” My colleague Paul Powell did this daily when he started a school—Troy Prep in Troy, New York—in a building whose layout had students regularly waiting for others to clear tiny landings and passageways before they could move between classes. There on the landings and stairs, with Paul calling problems to students a dozen stairs above or a dozen below, his students mastered hours of math—ultimately resulting in some of the highest math scores in New York State.