How to Get Through Your Curriculum This Year (Credibility Booster)

Toward the end of last school year, I published a video for teachers who found themselves in a common teacher predicament: they didn't have time to finish their curriculum.

If this has never happened to you, congratulations: you are part of a prized minority. Schedules get disrupted, tangents get taken, rants get ranted, projects go over, and deadlines get shifted. Before you know it, you're weeks behind where you need to be to finish the curriculum, and so you end up either rushing your way through the final unit(s) or skipping them altogether.

It's a common problem. I'd even argue it's a default problem — without the right tools, it'll happen year after year after year. And I'd also argue that it undermines our Credibility, which is both the most fundamental and the most controllable of the student motivation beliefs that exist in our classrooms.

But now it's a new school year, so you and I get to be proactive about making sure that we use class time as well as we can. Here are the two tools that help.

Tool 1: ⏱️ Use a stopwatch to improve time management at the lesson level.

The picture folks get when they read this tool's title is of a maniacally time-obsessed teacher, sweating profusely, rallying students to constantly hurry, hurry, hurry while steeping in stress, stress, stress.

That's NOT what we're after.

Instead, we're after what I call Gentle Urgency (Strategy 3 in The Will to Learn). The whole idea with gentle urgency is that Credible teachers have to balance two conflicting realities:

• On the one hand, we're faced with the complexities of classroom time that come with the task of teaching diverse groups of human beings. Humans are creatures who do things at varying speeds. One student can read a two-page article in five minutes, whereas another takes fifteen minutes. One class comes in and gets right to work on the warm-up, whereas that persnickety after-lunch class tends to take a few minutes to calm down. If we approach classroom time use with too much urgency, we end up creating unhelpful stress levels for both ourselves and our students. This is where the Gentle part comes in — we need to be gentle, with ourselves, with our students, with the realities of the job.
• But on the other hand, we're faced with the reality that deadlines produce solutions. Give me no deadline, and I'll write you a book when I get to it. Give me deadlines, and I may miss the first few, but I'll get that book out way before I would have had I not had any deadlines. To put this into classroom terms: set no time limits for your direct instruction, and your direct instruction will go longer than you intended. Create and reinforce no norms for how to get started with class at the bell, and you'll lose minutes that become hours that become days of class time. This is non-optimal at best, but it's a betrayal of the trust our students and families give us that we'll use our time as best we can to promote their students' long-term flourishing. This is where the Urgency comes in.

So what you do with the stopwatch is simple:

• When planning your lessons each day, you set a time limit next to each portion of the lesson.
• As you're facilitating each lesson chunk, you use a timer (or a stopwatch) to keep track of how time is going.

Just by doing this, you'll become a better master of how time moves in your classroom. You'll learn to end activities a bit earlier, to keep class discussions tighter, to make your lesson starters stronger and swifter.

Tool 2: 📆 Use a calendar with predetermined assessment dates to improve time management at the school year level.

The stopwatch will help us produce more efficient lessons, but it doesn't do much for helping us keep our Unit 1 from taking time from Unit 2, and 2 from 3, and ending the year short the days our curricula need.

This is where assessment dates come in. Before the year starts, look at your curriculum. If it's a purchased curriculum, it will likely have recommended instructional days per unit. If it's not or it doesn't, you'll have to take a professional guess at these. But the important thing is to set an end date for each unit — this is when the project is due, the test is given, the essay gets turned in.

Next, make sure these deadlines are indicated in wherever you keep track of your calendar. I've got a spot on my whiteboard dedicated to this; I've got a Google Calendar dedicated to it. I put my unit end dates on both calendars so that I'm constantly bringing to my awareness how much time I have left in the unit. This helps me make mid-unit adjustments, like:

• Where can I speed things up if I'm short on time?
• Where can I linger if we've got extra time I hadn't planned on?
• Where do I need to adjust my during-unit plans to help my students be ready for that summative assessment?

What we're doing is partnering with the reality that human beings exist in time. I'm not the master of time; I'm a creature that lives in time. Time won't adjust for me, so I must adjust for it.

As you use these two tools over a number of months, semesters, and years, you may see places where the curricula needs changing. This is all well and good because now you know that you are, in fact, using time intentionally, that you're keeping track of it.

Now you'll know that you're not the problem, the curriculum is. And you can make or advocate for the adjustments that need to happen.

But until you use these two tools, I don't think it's accurate to point the finger at the curriculum. Until you use these two tools, it's more realistic to point the finger at your practice and examine your own work.

All said with love, from a person who has learned these lessons the hard way.

Best,

DSJR