time management for project advice

1. Mid-Institute Check-In
Innovation Institute 2015
Day 5

2. Think / Pair / Share
Pairs
Chris Micklethwait
& Yuliya Lanina
Kate Lopez & Mary
Kopecki-Fjetland
Jimmy Luu & Jason
Rosenblum
Rachael Neal &
Richard Bautch
Alex Robinson &
Gary Slater
Choose Your Own Adventure
• Share your answer to at least 1 of the
check-in questions
– What have you learned?
– What progress have you made?
– What do you need to accomplish next?
– Joys or worries?
• Articulate your biggest question right
now about how to proceed
Peer’s job:
• Help generate ideas about how to solve
problem

3. Strategy 1: Prepare Reflectively
--Robert Boice, Advice for New Faculty Members (2000)
“A growing reflectiveness, especially in terms of audience
awareness, helps simplify teaching materials to their most
memorable and connectable essentials.
As teachers grow more calm and contemplative, they more
often organize lectures and discussions into a few central
points they hope to make for the day.
They replace the additional points they were tempted to
make with more examples and applications of the central
points.” (Boice, 23)

4. Essential or Not?
Reflect
• Draft clear goals for
students’ learning
(learning objectives)
• Reflect on your
learning goals
• Consider how they
apply to the material
at hand
Simplify (and Reduce)
• Consider ways to “cut
to the chase”

5. Solve the “right problem”
“Research distinguishes
expert problem solvers
as people who
take time to pause
and to
consider alternatives,
who make sure they are
solving the right problem
or answering the right question.”
(Boice 24)

6. Strategy 2: Prep early and informally
• Use pauses in other activities
to think about teaching ideas
• Do prewriting or preplanning
activities, like creating rough
drafts of conceptual outlines,
then successively revising
these
• Talk through their ideas with
others
• Set early deadlines for
completing preparations
• Begin collecting and connecting
materials long before formal
planning begins: put notes into
files, rearrange ideas and
categories in files, look for
illustrative cases, tentatively
arrange materials for classroom
presentation

7. Outcomes of early, informal starts
• “[efficient] participants translated their
prewritten and pre-diagrammed notes into class
notes well before the [inefficient] nonparticipants
began preparing their classes of similar dates.
• [These] participants [spent] less total time [ . . .]
getting ready for class, usually a savings of at
least half the time spent preparing by matched
nonparticipants.” (25)

8. Strategy 3: Prep in brief, regular
sessions
• Prep in brief, regular sessions
• “Initiating early work in sessions so
brief they necessitate no major
scheduling (ie, during interstices of
existing schedules). Only later, when
early preparations are habitual, are
they more formally scheduled.”
• Starting “early, before feeling in the
mood . . . .
– Use freewriting;
– build on notes or conceptual outlines from
prior session.

9. Brief, regular sessions . . .
• “. . . keep efforts unpressured, reflective,
constant, and timely.
• “ . . . keep teaching prep limited to durations
that do not interfere with other important
activities during the rest of the day, such as
exercising, social life, and scholarly writing.”

10. Long, uninterrupted work sessions?
Are hard to find!
&
Can cause:
(1) Rollercoaster energy: “working under pressure and excitement
until hypomania and [. . . ]sadness and disinterest set in”
(2) Inefficiencies: “preparing materials beyond the point of
diminishing returns”
(3) Stops & starts: an “inconstancy of working” (Boice 40).
How to fit in brief, regular prep?
• Allot daily time.
• Schedule the sessions if necessary.