Making Time for Success
As teachers, there are rarely enough hours in the day for us to accomplish everything on our To-Do lists. As if our responsibilities on campus weren't enough, we also need to take care of our families, read professional publications, relax with loved ones, prepare for the next day's classes, run a household, attend Back to School night, and somehow find time to exercise and take care of our souls.
Besides implementing classroom management techniques, teaching lessons, and designing curriculum, managing our personal and professional schedules is a critical skill that all teachers should strive to master.
The first step in time management is to understand how much time we actually need to accomplish key tasks on a daily basis. Tools, such as a Personal Time Survey, can serve as a guide for approximating schedules during a typical 24-hour period. It can be surprising to find out how long many mundane tasks actually take. Even easily overlooked tasks, such as grooming, packing lunches, and transportation time, must be taken into account during this exercise. This is a crucial step in time management because time can't be managed effectively if the day's hours aren't realistically accounted for.
Next, we set priorities by carefully considering which tasks absolutely can not wait and which ones are potentially optional. It can be difficult to learn how to say "no" to those commitments which are of marginal importance to our lives; we must avoid being bullied into endeavors which fail to enrich our lives or which clutter our minds and schedules. A basic principle of effective time management lies in the fact that we cannot accomplish every single thing that we would like to accomplish. By examining our personal value systems, we can better make decisions that simplify our schedules and give us the freedom to accomplish our goals with less stress on a daily basis.
As classroom educators, time management is not just something that affects us and our families, it can affect our students as well. If classroom hours are managed poorly, our students can suffer the consequences of a poorly planned day. Teachers need to implement more specific time management tricks into our classroom routines. Learn from colleagues; seek out the teachers that always seem to have everything under control and ask them how they do it. Use Internet mailing lists and web sites to share ideas with fellow educators. Colleagues can be a source of terrific time saving tips that can easily be adopted right away.
Please feel free to email me if you would like help in finding more Internet links on this or any other topic related to Elementary School Educators. Or, use our Chat Room on Monday nights to pick the brains of fellow teachers from around the globe.
