You could tell it was the end of the 3rd quarter just from the daily announcements:
Tickets for the spring musical, awards from the art show, final competitions for dance team and Super Bowl. Athletic awards banquets, FFA Dinners, state championships for speech and robotics and then the biggest finale of all: the March Madness of Indiana basketball.
And then we were released for Spring Break. A week to go somewhere far away from school or to sleep in, catch up, and get ready for the last push: 4th quarter, the culmination of the academic year.
But more often than we like to admit, when we get back from Spring Break, a lot of us will come face-to-face with the equivalent in teaching of running out of money before you run out of month.
There’s way too much left to “cover” before the last bell rings in May.
If you find yourself in this predicament, here are five simple steps to solve the problem of too much curriculum and too few days. And some advice for how to prevent this from happening next year.
1. Make a list of the curriculum topics you have yet to cover.
2. Decide which ones are “Imperative” and which ones merely “Important.” Use the chart below for your list. Then ask yourself the questions in Step 3. They will help you sort the Imperatives from the Importants.
Start with a list of the topics.
| Topic | Imperative | Important |
3. Ask yourself some questions about those topics to help you sort them into one of the two columns to the right.
- Is the topic a skill you need to teach?
Skills trump content most of the time. Skills, the students have to have; chunks of content are often dispensable. For example, in American Literature, the textbooks contain selections from a pantheon of great writers. Will the students survive if they don’t read something by Willa Cather? By John Steinbeck? By Truman Capote? Those authors are favorites of mine, and of course they’re Important, but in the big scheme of things, students won’t be scarred for life if they miss reading “A Wagner Matinee” or Of Mice and Men or “Miriam.” Capote isn’t an Imperative.
But research skills? Those are important for academic success in any class, and it’s the English teacher’s job to teach them. So don’t cut out the research project. Look instead for ways to streamline it.
Think about the skills in your discipline that the students have to have, that the teacher next year is depending upon their having learned. Put your time and effort into those topics.
- Is it a piece of sequential learning that you can’t skip?
In math and world languages and other linear-sequential subjects, you simply can’t skip some things. There are processes and constructions kids have to know in order to progress to the next level. These are Imperatives. What can you do to compact the instruction so that you’re spending less time on each topic before moving on to the next?
Can you do the homework in class so that you see the mistakes the students are making as they make them—and offer correctives right then and there?
Can you put kids in cooperative groups and have them help each other?
Can you cut down the number of examples or possibly stop elaborating so much?
- Is it an activity, rather than a topic, that you could dispense with or truncate?
An easy one to rethink is a film. Do you have to show it? Eliminating a movie can save a couple of days at least. Can’t cut it out entirely? What about showing excerpts only? What about an after-school showing with popcorn and soft drinks?
Is it a culminating project that involves teaching a process as much as the content? For example, a debate on an issue the students have been studying. Without some instruction in process, a full-on debate can deteriorate into a shouting match. What about conducting a Socratic Seminar or a Pinwheel discussion—something easier to model that doesn’t take up so much time—but still gets various points of view out there.
An independent research activity can be a huge time suck. What about putting the kids in groups and conducting the inquiry as a team? They can jigsaw their discoveries and divide up the presentation work as well. By working together, they get the advantage of collaborative learning—often more productive anyway than learning alone—and you can likely save a day or so of time online and/or in the library.
Teamwork saves time generally and it allows you to capitalize on the students’ natural disposition to chatter. Set up your expectations so that they stay on task. Consider using a rubric for daily effort to reinforce your expectation that the students stay focused. They can fill it out themselves—most kids are honest—and you’ve got override privileges if they misjudge themselves.
- How can you use a process you have to teach as a vehicle for teaching content? In other words, can you create a twofer?
I remember one year when I was teaching Animal Farm, as I did every year in 9th grade. I was short on time that year and needed to take students through the research process and give them enough background in Russian history that they would be able to see the novel as allegory. I ended up dividing 300 years of Russian history into six time periods and/or areas of interest. Students worked independently on a research question of their own, but they were organized in groups, each group addressing one of the six interest areas/time periods. As they researched their own sub-topics, they had a cohort of friends who were working on sub-topics from the same time period. The students worked collaboratively even though each one submitted his or her own paper. In the end, each group made a 5-6 minute presentation to the class on their period in Russian history. In this way, the class took a whirlwind tour of Russia—from Peter the Great to the launch of Sputnik. The students helped each other understand their period in Russian history, but also work through the processes at play in research and reporting. As I said, a twofer.
4. Open up a blank calendar (or dig out a 2016 calendar you stashed in a drawer somewhere) and literally block out the days. Don’t forget that Finals Week is lost for teaching new material, and be sure to save a couple of days for review. Pare each topic or unit down to its essentials and fill in the days. You may find you have only a few days to teach something that usually requires two weeks. When that happens, you’ll whittle the content down to the necessities by necessity. You’ll be amazed at how quickly what is really imperative will surface—and the rest, the important but not the imperative—will just fall away.
5. Stick to your game plan. Don’t allow yourself to deviate from it or you’ll have to go through this process again. Day by day, one day at a time, you’ll get to the end of the year. You’ll find actually that it’s a sprint—after Spring Break, everything goes fast—but if you follow your plan, you’ll stay on the track to the end.
This falling behind has happened to all of us, even veterans who’ve been at teaching for a long time. In fact, it commonly happens to veterans because the longer we teach, the more in-depth we go about our favorite topics and pretty soon, we’re way off track. For a new teacher, the problem more likely arises because it just takes longer to teach things than you had supposed it would. Plus, there were more interruptions than you had expected or planned for. Either way, for both the veteran and the novice, the problem is one of pacing.
So add this to your resolutions for next year: Map out the year (easier to do when you’ve been through it once) and stick to your objectives.
And take this tip seriously: When planning units for next year, add an extra day to each unit you map out. Then you have a day for re-teaching or for interruptions or for something unexpected or just because you’ve fallen behind. We never have enough days, so if you do end up with a day left over, you can just add it to the next unit! You’ll be glad you can.
In an American Classroom 