Time management for teenagers and not only

How to manage our time better in the classroom and how to make sure that our teenage learners make the best use of the class time? — a question that we ask ourselves once in a while. A lot depends on our classroom management skills — the material we cover, the progress students have, the efficiency of the lesson, how interested the students are, etc.

Sometimes, we take a lot on our shoulders trying to think for everyone, predict all the issues, etc. However, everything gets easier when we think of ways to make the learners take responsibility for their learning. The best way to do it is to develop habits.

One of those habits is to teach our students, teenagers especially, the importance of time management from day 1. It can be done through several activities and methodologies, some of which we’ll share today.

Below are the two basic ideas behind the whole topic of time management.

Use timing

What’s the best way to teach your learners how to manage their time better? Time the activities! This can sound cliche, however, all the teacher development courses (e.g. CELTA, TEFL) teach us to keep the timing of the activities and tasks right .

From our perspective, we do that to make sure we cover several skills during a session, to keep the flow of the lesson as varied as possible and to keep up to the plan. From the learner’s perspective, however, they learn to work faster/slower and try to fit in the time frame. In both cases, we need to do our estimations clearly, not to overtime or give them less time than necessary. This, surely, comes with experience.

The accepted approach here, according to the CELTA course, is to:

1. Set the time limit for the students before they start an activity.
2. Make sure they know how much time they have (share a timer on the screen, sand watch, etc.).
3. Remind them periodically how much time they have left.

This definitely shapes the learners’ sense of time. Meanwhile, using visual aids to do that gives them a better chance of developing self-management skills.

Hold competitions

What do teenagers love the most? Competing! Use this drive to make their time management skills better. Create competitions (crosswords, puzzles, guessing games, etc.), time them for several minutes, see who gets to finish the first.

To encourage all the learners to take part I personally don’t expect them to finish all the activity within the limited period of time. My instruction sounds like this:

“You have 10 minutes to complete at least 12 sentences. Do as much as you manage to.”

To me, it sounds more humane 🙂 as in this case, we don’t push the students to necessarily finish all the sentences, but to work within their capabilities. It also doesn’t discourage the weak learners who normally refuse working if they feel the challenge is too big.

Now, let’s have a look at two activities that I’ve been using with my teenage groups quite efficiently.

A Minute?

This activity serves as a very nice warmer. Right at the beginning of the class ask the students to look at the clock for one minute and sit down as soon as the time is up. Everyone will follow the instructions successfully.

Next, ask the students to close their eyes for one minute and stand up as soon as they feel that the time is up. You will see that people stand up at various times depending on their understanding of a minute :). A great idea is to film this and play it right after the task for the students to see how their experiences differed.

During this one minute, you may ask students to do different tasks like writing down all new vocabulary from the previous lesson.

Minutes Talk

This is a great activity not only to polish time management skills but also to work on enhancing speaking skills.

Set the students in 3s, give them topics of discussion (football, free time, holidays, travelling, last Christmas, etc.), tell the students that they need to talk about each topic for 2 minutes. So, you have 3 roles in the group:

Student A — talks about one of the topics for 2 minutes (using target vocabulary if required)

Student B — takes the time and stops the speaker as soon as the time is up

Student C — counts the sentences/key phrases the speaker used

I personally love this task as it requires little to no preparation, is impromptu for the learners, thus they’ll need to be more focused, keeps everyone bust as all of them have a task and are responsible for it.

Here are some more ideas on time management activities that can be used both for teenage and adult Learners.