Scaffolding+Time+Management+for+Students

The key to the success of one room school houses in the twenty-first century is that each student must learn to work independently. If you are naturally a well-organized person, you might be surprised at the fact that many people need to be taught time management skills and organizational skills, what is called "executive function." Fortunately for the reader, your authors have both struggled with this and are able to articulate the skills that need to be taught and how they might be taught. These skills are not only critical to the functioning of a classroom, but if you can instill these habits in students, they will have a strong foundation for being able to handle work as adults because they will be able to stay organized.

What needs to be organized? Supplies, short term time, long term time, short term projects, and long term projects.

Supplies When we developed our own model classroom--a college classroom that could be set up like an elementary classroom so students could learn about classroom management, one of the first things we did was to have the students organize our many supplies. The key to the success of this project is that we had plenty of organizational units in which supplies could be put and which could be labeled. Because the students did the organization themselves, they knew what we had available for them and where it was located. That means if they were doing an independent project, they could get the materials themselves and put those materials away properly when they cleaned up.

The last part of each day or the last couple of minutes of each class is the time where people put the things away that they were using. Putting away things is a great skill for students to learn because it is a part of taking responsibility and respecting materials and it keeps the teacher from having to be the janitor.

Another thing students should be taught is that if a marker or a gluestick (or the equivalent supply) is not working, it should be thrown away. That way you don't end up with a bin full of faint markers. It would be a good idea to have a clipboard somewhere in the classroom where students can write down what supplies will be needed in the near future. Not only is this an authentic literacy activity, but it also keeps you out of the situation of needing glue and not having any. One of your classroom jobs could be supplies monitor, a person who makes sure things are put away properly at the end of each day and who ensures that the clipboard is up to date on the supplies needed.

Finally, for every supply, there needs to be a place to put it. Now this can be fancy, as in plastic bins that cost money, or it can be simple as in labeled shoe boxes, photocopy paper boxes, and donated new pizza boxes. Things need to be sorted out--markers in one bin, crayons in another. You might find that it is handy to have commonly used supplies such as scissors, tape, markers, crayons, pencils, and pens in an organizer on each table for each group of students. Every child can have a pizza box to hold art work or portfolio materials. Liquor boxes can be covered in contact paper and the cardboard slots used as mailboxes if nothing else is available. Check thrift stores for inexpensive organizational items.

The bottom line is that all classroom supplies need to be accessible to students independently--so they are not constantly asking you for something. They need to be put away neatly because neatness counts. Every item has to have a home and students need to be taught to put it in its home when they are finished using it. Many children live in chaotic homes and they are hungry for predictability. Chaos contributes to depression, which is more common than one might think, and it contributes to the lack of focus many childern have. It is amazing what five minutes of picking up and cleaning up will do for a classroom--it means that the custodian can do his or her job better in your classroom.

Time Every day we have to organize our time. We have to think about the classes we are currently teaching, the classes we plan to teach, the events of today, doctors appointments, paperwork for our jobs, paperwork for our homes, keeping our houses clean, and so forth. We have short term projects such as planning our classes over the next few days and long term projects such as writing this book. Our students have the same challenges: long term class projects, daily work, "specials" or assemblies, pull-outs, and long term personal projects. What we do every day has to reflect short term and long term goals.

There are many tools that can help a student manage time and goals and each person has to find out what works for him or her. There are electronic tools such as PDAs or software on laptops, there are notebook-type planners, there are web pages designed for planning, and there is even a web page devoted to creating pocket planners that use a single sheet of paper to create an eight-page book that can be kept always handy (http://www.pocketmod.com/). What works for an individual depends a lot on that person's personality, likes, and dislikes. The important thing is to keep trying different tools until something seems to work and analyze as much as possible why things are not working.

For example, one of us (Carolyn) ran a battered women's shelter for awhile and therefore came face to face with the endless "to do" list. Every time Carolyn did something on the list, she had to add two or three more things to do because of the first thing she did. She kept the list in a notebook planner and frequently had difficulty getting started on her work because the length of the list was overwhelming. The length of the list was a barrier to her working on it.

Now she has a record of all the things she is working on (and this can be in many formats--paper, electronic), but every day she chooses ten or so things to get done that day, all of which will lead to progress on the variety of home- and school-related projects she is doing. If there is an item that will take a long time, such as a doctor's appointment, she schedules other items that will take a short time, such as paying a couple of bills or dealing with e-mails.

Another key concept is the idea of making progress rather than focusing on the product. Some things in life are progress-centered. Take weight for example. If we focus on a goal weight, we can get discouraged and give up on trying to eat in a healthy manner. If we focus on progress, instead, and each day choose to do things that are healthy such as exercising and eating right, the weight loss will be a by-product of the general lifestyle that has been adopted on a day-to-day basis.

Some things are never done. We cannot clean a house or a classroom, flop into a chair and sigh, and say, "Whew! That job is done!" It is going to get dirty again. What we can do is to make progress on cleaning, such as being sure to put things away when we are done and every day choosing to clean something so that with a cleaning process, the classroom or house is always reasonably presentable. (For more ideas about this, see: http://flylady.net).

Some things take a very long time to do. One of us, Carolyn, wrote her dissertation in a month and a half, but that is not a good process to use, mostly because there are very few times in our lives when we can devote nine hours a day to a single project. For most of us, long projects have to be tackled a little at a time. That means long projects have to be broken down into steps--not necessarily a priori. In other words, as we are writing this book, we are not planning to do this or that part of the writing on this or that particular day. We work on the book daily but when we sit down to do that day's work, that is when we choose what to do. We choose what to do by what feels do-able. Sometimes doing the hard part first jump starts a project. Sometimes you have to start with an easy part. Some days you feel like writing a lot and some days you just edit or illustrate or do research or do something else related to the project because you don't feel like writing.

Students need to have the freedom and support to make good choices about how they work. They need support for a good goal setting process that involves them engaging with state standards as well as their own interests. They need help in monitoring how they are progressing and how they are using time each day. If they are having a hard time getting started on something, they need someone who can help them figure out why they are having a hard time and what they can do to solve the problem--change focus, change the activity, change the goal, etc. If they are procrastinating, they need to have someone to whom they are accountable and who can help them take daily steps so that they learn how to avoid procrastination (which is a very painful thing). If they have tried one time management system and it is not working, they need someone to help them figure out what is helpful and what is not helpful and to morph the system to a more helpful type.

A good way to implement this is to use the first couple of minutes of a class or the school day for students to make a list of things they need to get done for that period of time, based on some kind of record of their long and short term goals. They need to consider practical things, such as what else is going on in the school day or when certain equipment might be available for their use. They need to have "filler" items, e.g., practice on times tables or journal writing, that are productive and useful but that can be done easily while waiting for a computer to be open or someone else to finish using the paper cutter. They also need to plan to have breaks and they need fun, constructive things to do while they take a break. Offices and factories often have break rooms and perhaps classrooms should, too--an area where students can go and do something a little different for a few minutes to rest the brain.

Some students will be able to take a very few organizational cues and come up with an effective system for themselves. That leaves you time to scaffold the students for whom organization is a foreign concept. The very best person to teach organizational skills is someone who has had to learn them, so as students learn how to manage their time and their supplies effectively, these students should be coaching other students, which reinforces what they learn.

Younger students come to school with a shorter history and a lot of optimism, but older students may have a history of failure in organizational processes, a history of procrastination and the negative shameful feelings that accompany that, and a feeling that they are not capable of learning how to manage their time. For these students, a simple timer can change their lives. Ask them to work on something for fifteen minutes and then to take a break when the timer goes off. It will take these students awhile and a lot of monitoring and support from you to learn that big things happen when you take small steps. In other words, they don't have to do a large project all at once (which leads students to avoid getting started because of the overwhelming nature of the project). These students also need for you to set up plenty of short term successes to challenge their idea that they cannot work independently.

In sum, even young children can develop the skill of planning and following through with those plans. As children grow, they can learn longer and longer term planning and metacognitive ideas about the conditions they need in order to do their best work. As teachers, we need to realize that organizational skills have to be directly taught to many students and we cannot penalize students for skills they do not possess. Shaming a student for mismanaging time or failing to keep track of paperwork is not a good method for helping that student to do a better job next time. For many people, including teachers, executive function is a work in progress, and when we share our struggles and growth with students, it helps them to struggle and grow. Developing independent learners helps the classroom to be a constructive place at all times and it helps students to develop critical life skills.