How To Gain Time

A colleague of mine works in secondary schools. He has recently been reading Teach Like A Champion by Doug Lemov.

I love talking to colleagues who work in different education sectors, as I feel we can always learn from each other.

I asked him what was the standout piece from the book, and he shared with me how one teacher managed to gain time.

In an American school where the results far out did what would have been typical for the area, a teacher employed a genius strategy. He turned starting lessons into a competition, so that he could gain time at the start of each lesson. He timed the children and found they were taking nearly 2 minutes to get ready, he wanted to get this under a minute so that they had 1 minute extra learning each day. So he set them the challenge and timed them each lesson. It did take some teaching, as does everything, but he achieved it.

On the face of things, it is hard to imagine how just one minute per lesson can make a difference. But if you start to consider it over a child's education it really starts to build up. If there were 5 lessons a day, that would be 5 minutes a day, so 25 minutes a week. In the UK we do 39 weeks, so if we did that it would be 975 minutes of learning over the year. That is over 16 hours of teaching and learning! It really makes you realise that every minute counts.

My colleague said it was actually hard to choose one favourite, and recommended i read the book, so I am suggesting it to you too! It can be bought on Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Teach-Like-Champion-2-0-Techniques/dp/1118901851/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1503134797&sr=8-2&keywords=teach+like+a+champion