6. 3 Tips for getting more bang out of your instructional minutes

<p><strong>Summary: </strong></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As teachers, it feels like we are always strapped for time! There’s a mile long list of things to get through, beyond just our standard curriculum, and it feels like there is never enough time! Today I want to highlight 3 things that help me really squeeze the most out of those educational minutes, and really make an impact in my students’ learning:</span> <strong>hit the ground running, overlap the big ideas and with little strategies, and take advantage of small windows of unexpected opportunity.</strong></p> <p><strong>Key Points:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">It is so tempting to spend so much time at the start of the year teaching HOW to use various strategies, and we keep working at them until we feel like our kids have a solid handle on them and can use them independently. But spending long, laborious lessons teaching students HOW to use a certain type of outline or graphic organizer or HOW to annotate a text really takes away from the time that THEY can apply it. And that’s where the real magic happens! </span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">My next piece of advice for really maximizing your time while maintaining powerful instruction is to really be thoughtful in how you weave together your content. Use your big idea as your driving force, then think of ways you can organically incorporate little mini lessons on skills, strategies, topics. This gets you more bang for your buck out of whatever text or big idea you’re focusing on, and the mini tidbits of information or practice feel more natural and relevant to your students</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">My next tip is to stay alert to little windows of unexpected opportunity for a mini-lesson! As teachers, we are such planners and are so used to having our daily checklist of what we have lined up, but I challenge you to keep an open mind and be ready to spare