Using Timing
activities
tested timing tips…
1. Plan for flexibility
If you’re haemorrhaging time in your lessons, it’s often because you’re teaching WELL! Congratulations! It
could mean you’re responding to learners’ needs by doing things like:
showing an interest in what they have to say
providing opportunity for questions
picking up on errors
upgrading learners’ output
working with emergent language
opening up discussions rather than shutting them down
You don’t want to stop doing those things, because that’s what makes your lessons worth attending and where
lots of the learning is taking place. So what can you do?
Plan for flexibility. Give yourself leeway in all your timings. So if you think that final speaking task is going to
take 15 minutes, give yourself 20 or 25 minutes. That’ll give you time for feedback on content and form,
following up the discussion together, recording any new language and so on.
Alternatively, build a ‘flexi-stage‘ into your lesson plan. Add up your estimated timings and make sure they
come to 50 minutes for a 60-minute lesson. That give you a 10 minute flexi-stage to spill over into.
In summary, the key thing is to know yourself, know your learners and allow yourself leeway at the
planning stage. But remember, this time is for those positive things mentioned above! What if you’re
haemorrhaging time for things that aren’t beneficial? Read on…
2. Black holes
We all have our favourite teacherly time-wasting habits. Here are just a few that I’ve been guilty of over the
years:
Making asides to ourself
Making all learners wait while we hand out materials, write on the board, etc.
Waiting for technology
Wasting individual learners’ time as they wait for others to finish tasks
Drawing out instructions
Giving unclear instructions and having to clarify or intervene in tasks
Getting carried away with CCQs and ICQs
Going off on teacher tangents (not to be confused with exploring something that everyone wants to talk about)
Letting activities run for longer than necessary
Doing things in open class that could be done faster in closed pairs/groups.
If that’s the case, you might want to ask someone to observe you to identify ‘black holes of time‘ in your lesson.
You could ask them to look specifically for what they feel is unproductive use of time. Alternatively, they could just
write down everything you do, time it all and you can discuss what was productive or unproductive use of time
afterwards.
Thornbury’s post ‘T for Time’ makes for an interesting read on this subject, with data from a newspaper about the
worst offending subject teachers by country!
3. Front-loading and backwards planning
Another way to address timing in your lesson plan is backwards planning. This works in any
lesson plan that builds towards a final communicative task.
Imagine the final communicative task that learners will complete is a job interview role-play.
Everything that you do in the rest of the lesson should prepare them for that. If there is
anything that doesn’t fit the bill, then scrap it. For instance, if role-playing a job interview is
the main aim of the lesson, reading advice about job interviews isn’t necessarily going to
help learners’ output and might just eat up time. You’d likely be better off spending time
looking at collocations about professional achievements (set up a project, get feedback, etc.).
Of course, take this with a pinch of salt – the reading advice activity above might be a nice
detour towards the goal, it might add some non-linguistic aim to the lesson, or you might
have plenty of time.
However, if timing is an issue, then this strategy is very good for avoiding…
…the urge to plan according to materials. It focuses your mind on learners achieving an
outcome, not on bits and bobs that seem to fit together from the course book.
…front-loading, ie. where you pad out the start of a lesson too much, maybe to try to engage
learners or out of a subconscious fear of getting through your lesson plan too quickly.
4. Integrate activities
I often see teachers using various materials for each stage of their
lesson. A flipchart slide for pronunciation stage, a short writing
practice activity from the book, a gap-fill from somewhere else in the
book, etc. This can be very piecemeal for learners, often lacks a
unifying context and most importantly, it takes up valuable learning
time.
Take a materials-light approach. One excellent way to do this is to
integrate several activities into one. Here is one I made earlier…
5. Routines
Efficient classroom routines can save a lot of time, whether you’re teaching
adults or young learners. Learners get used to them and give you a shortcut for
all sorts of things that take time to explain. Here are just a few examples
of time-saving routines:
Attention getting routine: tap the board, countdown, silent countdown on
fingers, ‘hands on head’, turn off background music, IWB countdown, hand up,
etc.
Gestures: ‘work in a pair’, ‘work in a group’, error correction on fingers, etc.
Distributing/Collecting materials: distribute face-down while monitoring in
preparation for next task, nominate a student hander-outer, giving learners a
time limit to get a pen, etc.
Setting clear time limits: negotiate a time limit with learners, tell learners time
limit in instructions, show the time limit on IWB, reminders (one minute left),
learners use their own timer on their mobile, etc.
