7 Ways to Increase Teaching Time for Educators

Raise your hand if you tend to end class thinking “How did the time go by so quickly, when there’s still so much to cover with my students?!” Maximizing teaching time inside and outside the classroom can sometimes feel like an impossible challenge. With administrative tasks, paperwork, and unexpected disruptions, the actual time spent on delivering quality instruction often feels far too limited. Fortunately, I picked up great strategies from some amazing directors along the way that have worked wonders for optimizing both my preparation and classroom time that don’t require a big lift in order for you to implement. Read on for seven tiny but mighty ways to increase teaching time and your overall effectiveness in the classroom.

1. Stick to a List

As teachers, we know routines are key to classroom management. Once students know how to set up, it's on us to do that one most important thing our mentors kept telling us to do: “talk less.” As many of us know, when you are starting out as an educator, this principle is not as easy to follow as it sounds!

The biggest change for me in ‘talking less’ was when I started writing down everything I needed to cover before I started my class period. I began by jotting down a simple bulleted list. Next, I trained myself to trust the list and stay on topic. However, the first time I read from an unrehearsed draft during class, I’ll admit that I crashed and burned. If you're talking about something for longer than 90 seconds, it might be better to plant a seed and then revisit the topic again later. I soon realized that a simple verbal ‘run through’ either the night before or morning of, would help me to whittle down the words to what I really wanted to get across. Pro tip: Set a timer on your phone for five minutes to help you stay focused and on track. When that alarm goes off, it’s also a great signal to your students that the main lesson portion of the class period is getting underway.

2. Make Announcements Interactive

To boost everyone’s content retention, make your announcement content interactive with your class. For example, when reminding students about the trip next Friday, ask, “When is the trip?” and have the class respond, “Next Friday.” Do it again. And then, do it again. Some students might think it’s silly or lame to repeat things like that, but they’ll remember the trip is next Friday!

Most importantly, make sure your students know and understand what actions they need to do after your announcements. You can always add an exit ticket at the very end of class as a verification step and give a small award like peppermints or stickers to the first person who answers correctly.

3. Add Visual Reminders

Many people retain information better when they can also see it. Jot down your main announcement bullets on your classroom board or a poster if that’s easier. This way both you and your students have a visual reference as you are talking or for when questions come up later on. Even better, use CutTime’s Announcement feature to compose your list ahead of time in ‘draft’ mode as things come to your mind. Then edit on the fly as you rehearse. Show the ‘final draft’ live on screen during class. You may actually get a question or comment that you can annotate as you are talking! Finalize and then schedule the Announcement message to send later that day as an additional reinforcement to the group(s).

4. Make your Transitions Specific

For a long time, my transitions between subjects or sections of music often looked something like this: “Go here, Move quickly! Come on, let’s go! Why aren’t you there yet?” As you might guess, this communication style created a lot of frustration for me, and my students felt rushed and annoyed too. Instead of advancing the learning, I was cannibalizing precious teaching time! In the end, everything I wanted to share took longer than necessary and no one was bought into what I was doing.

The remedy came when I learned to provide simple, clear instructions to my students while I had their undivided attention. I went from vague, frantic commands to calm, specific prompts that were tailored to each section. An example of what the latter style looks like:

“With your mouth closed, pull out the Grainger and find measure 122. Pick up your pencil and mark ‘mezzo piano’ unless you play the clarinet, in which case, mark ‘forte’. You have 30 seconds to do that. Percussion, you are now moving efficiently to set up for your entrance at ms.154 of the Grainger.”

You should have seen their faces! Instead of puzzled and anxious looks, I saw concentration and focused movement. With this new communication habit under my belt, we started covering way more ground during class time and my students became more relaxed and at ease with what they were being asked to do.

5. Add Attention Grabbing Phrases

“Look at my face”

I like attention grabbing phrases like “look at my face” because they are short and clear, and unusual enough to make young brains think for an instant about what I just said rather than tuning out a common phrase like “listen up.”

“Breathe with me - in, out, in, out…”

This particular method has the added benefit of being able to control the pace of the breath to transition the energy of the room where you need it. Going from fast breath to slow breath is immediately calming in a way that just a calming voice can’t quite match.

“If you can hear me, clap once. If you can hear me, clap twice”

This is great for a scenario where you want to avoid raising your voice, but you need to reliably get everyone’s attention. This usually works better when you’ve communicated that desire beforehand, perhaps due to sickness or voice strain.

Again, these are not examples I came up with myself, but ideas I copied from people smarter than me that work in my classroom! Always time these ‘attention getters’ with something your students can either see or something that they can see that you are actively tracking.

6. Lean on your Student Leaders

Maximize your teaching time by moving efficiently, just like the rest of your lesson plan. That might mean having a student who consistently shows up earlier than others help you pre-pass out new music. Or prepping some student leaders on a new seating chart before class so they can help set up and lead their peers to the right place when you introduce it to the class. With a little effort, you’ll provide extra opportunities for accountability and growth while making your teaching time even more optimal.

7. Tighten up your Admin Routines

The things that really slowed me down in class were the days that I had to handle cumbersome administrative tasks. I’m sure you can relate! Some of these tasks ended up consuming most of the class period. I quickly realized that with a little ‘pre-planning’ for these administrative activities, I could speed through them more efficiently and reduce everyone’s stress. A quick example of where this approach really benefited my classroom time. For instrument check in and check out, I’d map out my workflow ahead of time (such as by calling on students by row/sections) and have either a booster volunteer or student leader prepped and ready to assist me with logging in each item. If you have barcodes in place, CutTime can help expedite this entire workflow - just scan the item with any mobile device to pull up the inventory record, then assign and send a rental agreement in two quick clicks. Similarly, you can establish more efficient routines for manual collection of document signatures and fee payments or eliminate these headaches altogether from your classroom time by going digital with CutTime.

Your classroom time is what you ultimately shape it to be. The more you can envision the outcomes before walking into the classroom, the better. Tailor your words to these objectives. Delegate administrative chores to technology tools like CutTime and pull in your booster volunteer and student leader helping hands for the rest. Many of us work so incredibly diligently to plan our rehearsal time and which learning objectives we want to reinforce. It’s important that we take just a few moments to make sure that we get to maximize that important instructional time by keeping our non-teaching tasks concise and effective.