Strand 2: Planning the time

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I never seem to have enough time in my lessons

If you often feel that you'd like to stop the clock in your lessons because you are running out of time and won't be able to complete all that you wanted to, then there are clear problems with how you estimate time (and possibly how you use it).

This guide can't give you the 'right' answer but the activities suggested here can help you develop better time-management and time-planning skills.

Why is timing important?

There are many who think that it is a simple matter to clear up any overrunning by going back to the lesson the next day (or the next teaching slot) and finishing it off so it doesn't matter if you get the timing right. That's mistaken. Can you think of three reasons why it's mistaken?
Click here for a list of five when you have them.

If lessons are poorly timed, it will usually mean that the final phases are missed out. As this part of many lessons is the opportunity for learners to deploy the target language or skills and to review what they have learned, it means that they rarely get to do this while the lesson is fresh in their minds.
Poor timing often results in rushing through phases and being less thorough than you should be.
Poor timing often means holding over the final phases of one lesson to the beginning of the next. By that time, you and the learners have lost the focus and it also disrupts the structure of the next lesson, compounding the problem.
Poor timing also means that the learners don't have the satisfying sense of a whole lesson in which they have gone from knowing little about the topic to being able to use it.
Poor timing makes you look disorganised and ill prepared and lowers the confidence learners have in your professionalism.

Activity 1: estimating sensibly

Here are some lesson stages (from a variety of lessons) designed for a class of twelve low-level (A1 /A2) learners with average attention spans. The lessons were conducted by an experienced teacher who gave clear, concise instructions and explanations and did not go off-topic frequently.
Can you estimate the amount of time each stage actually took? Click on the table to compare your answers after you have thought a little.

timing task 1

Actually, all of these procedures bar 1 took longer than this experienced teacher had planned. If you have answers which are very close to the numbers here, then you are good at estimating timing. If, however, your answers are more than 25% out, here are some things to consider.

Before you go on, think why you might have been wrong and then click here.

Few classes start exactly on time so allow an extra minute or two for an initial stage. It is not just telling the story of the holiday that takes time, you also have to make sure people are understanding as you go along and that may well mean pausing and repeating / rephrasing parts and could also mean handling interruptions. On average, telling a story in class will take twice as long as telling it to a friend because you are using it for language content as well as meaning.
In this case, in fact, the story could have been told in three minutes but it was an intriguing one and the learners wanted to know more about some of the horrible events.
This is a key phase in a lesson so this teacher rightly chose to be thorough. Too often, these phases where the learners demonstrate to the teacher and themselves how much they have learned are consigned to very short 2-minute slots. Done thoroughly, they take time.
This was rather a long time to take, admittedly. The issue here was that the card activity was quite complex and wouldn't work if the students had selected the wrong coloured ones from a pack (A students were asked to select only green and red cards; B students only blue and yellow cards). The teacher not only had to move people around, he had to demonstrate what to do, check the instruction and then double-check it before starting. Not doing this risked the activity not working at all. Taking time to make sure all activities are properly understood is seldom mistaken.
These are low-level students and a scanning / intensive reading task like this is unfamiliar territory. Because an understanding of the text was crucial to the rest of the lesson, this phase was extended until everyone was happy that the text had been properly understood by everyone.
This was a brisk activity with the teacher going to each group and assigning A, B, C or D to each of the four students and then getting them to reform groups with an A, a B, a C and a D in each group. Even so, one minute was spent assigning the letters and another three went by before the new groups had settled with their pens and paper etc. with them.
7.5 minutes is actually quite brisk. That's only 90 seconds per question and from that can be deducted the time it took to explain the task and check the instruction. The students actually talked about each of the 5 questions for less than a minute. That's only 25 seconds each.
This is clearly a critical presentation phase. To rush it is perilous even when you are keen to get to the practice and productive phases of the lesson. In this case, the drilling alone took half the time because it was very thoroughly done and each student was given individual attention. They liked that.

Activity 2: learning from experience

Plan a lesson with realistic timing for each phase (see Activity 1).
Teach the lesson and make notes on the plan showing how long the phases actually took.
Amend the lesson plan to take account of any discrepancies and insert or remove phases so that you have a coherent lesson with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Teach the lesson again and see if it helped.

Repeat this often enough and you can train yourself to time things properly in the classroom. As we saw, it's an important skill. Well timed lessons impress everyone, not least your learners.

Gauging progress

There's a separate guide in this section of the site to gauging and measuring progress in your development. Go there for more ideas.
In terms of planning timing more effectively, the best judge is probably you, so focus on ways of recording what you did and whether your timing is getting better.