2-Minute Mentor: Time Management
Managing your time for teaching
- Can I manage the time I need for class preparation?
- How do I control the time I spend communicating with students outside of class?
- How do I score assignments efficiently?
Click below to watch CTE’s 2-Minute Mentor video on this topic:
Managing Your Time for Teaching video transcript (doc)
Three steps to teaching efficiently
A key aspect of efficiency is obtaining a high ratio of output to input. If we apply this to teaching, we need to make the most of the time we have for it. Here are three steps toward teaching efficiently:
|
Identify your goals |
Determine which goals are short term and which are long term. |
|
Count your hours |
Look at your work week and identify the number of hours you plan to devote to your job. |
|
Identify the components |
Write down the components of your teaching work: preparing for class, reading and grading student work, etc. |
For more detailed information about scheduling your time for teaching, see Dan Bernstein’s article, Make the most of your time for teaching (pdf), in CTE’s newsletter Teaching Matters.
More about managing your teaching time
The following links provide more information about time management:
- Strategies for managing time during class.
- Taking a few hours after a semester to record your teaching work to save time when you apply for promotion or tenure.
Additional materials are available in CTE’s Essential Guide to Teaching.
These portfolios present examples of powerful assessment strategies that, among other things, allow for efficient and meaningful grading:
- Transitioning from Lecture to Group Problem-Solving Activities—Michael Murray
- Developing Evaluation Criteria for Quality Student Work—Jorge Perez
- Using Learning Goals to Guide Course Redesign—Michael Moody
Some useful articles on time management and college teaching are:
- Bass, S. (2005). On design and liberation. Reflections from the Classroom, 7, p. 3-5. (pdf)
- Brown, P. E. (2009, February). Be a more effective teacher: How to avoid overteaching in the collegiate business classroom. Proceedings of ASBBS Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV. (pdf)
- Noyd, R.K. (2005). Applying Aristotle’s golden mean to the classroom: Balancing underteaching and overteaching. Teaching Matters, 9.1, p. 4-6. (pdf)
