It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?

The end of the year is so close…YAY! SUMMER BREAK IS ALMOST HERE!…but how in the WORLD am I going to cover ALL THIS CONTENT by then??

Add this to the fact that your students basically have one foot out the door in their attention spans at this point…and you’ve got quite the challenge on your hands.

Time to pull out that teacher wand and make the magic happen…

Here’s a little story of how my move to a new school helped me approach this annual challenge in a way that works and is actually enjoyable  for both myself and the students. And no matter what your grade level or content area, you can apply these same principles when you’re squeezed for time in the curriculum.

Borne of Necessity

17 years into my career, I moved to a new state and obviously switched jobs and schools. I was still teaching high school English as I always had, but there was a steep learning curve being a “new” teacher again for the first time in a long time. One of the major changes I had to make was going from a daily schedule of 8 periods a day, teaching five 45 minute classes daily, full-year schedule September through June (same roster), to a block schedule of 4 periods a day, teaching three 90 minute classes daily in two semesters: one roster August-January and a totally new roster January-May. 

Two years later, I can say that I actually prefer the block scheduling, much to my own surprise. The timing and pacing was definitely a shift, though, and my first semester it caught me off guard. 

My PLC meets every Wednesday during lunch, and I’ll never forget the day that I sat down in our weekly meeting and realized: I have 3.5 weeks of class left until the final exam, and I need to do ALL of Romeo and Juliet in that time (which would usually take me 6-7 weeks). AAAANNNNDDDD GO! 

It was a breathless pace, but actually turned out to be kind of a thrilling challenge…and it forced me to cut the fat and focus on the essentials in the unit. In fact, because it worked out so well the first time, I now do that unit in 3.5 weeks on purpose. And my students every semester consistently report that it was their favorite unit. 

How to Fit it All In

Let’s talk about how to do that when you’re faced with an ocean of content and only a pail’s worth of time to scoop it out.

1-Focus on the essentials.

We’ve talked before about considering your own survival and values-driven priorities when editing your schedule and time commitments; you can apply that very same principle to your curriculum. What is essential for the students to know/learn/be able to do? When faced with a calendar crunch, keep those things, and the rest has got to go. 

An example of how that applied to my Romeo and Juliet Unit:

All of the things on the “not essential” list ARE things I’ve included in my unit study of Romeo and Juliet over the years, and are great for enrichment! But if you don’t have time…you gotta GO.

You know I love lists 🙂 Break down your own learning priorities list for your content!

2- Look for ways to deliver content more efficiently.

Multi-media is great for this, and also has the benefit of keeping students more engaged. Here’s a real example of how I pace Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, which has 5 scenes (this is only a skeleton outline, not full lesson plans):

Original Way (Act 1 in 2 weeks): 

• Choose students to read parts aloud in class every day. 
• Stop at crucial points of understanding for teacher to translate, clarify, explain, ask students comprehension questions, or do translation worksheets alone or in pairs. 
• Use the original Shakespearean text with footnotes and a dictionary if needed. 
• Work through all 5 scenes this way.

New Essentials Way, covering all of Act 1 in 1 week or less:

Day 1: Prologue & Act 1.1

• Brief review of sonnet rules. Worksheet on the Prologue (sonnet). 
• Watch two different movie version clips of Act 1, scene 1 (10 minutes or less per clip). 
• Students fill out a 2 question exit ticket to demonstrate their understanding of what they just saw. (Teacher reviews these after class to assess student understanding).   

Day 2: Act 1.2 & 1.3

• 10-question kahoot that reviews class understanding of yesterday’s video. Use the kahoot results to re-teach on the fly as needed, moving ahead quickly past the parts that students get correct. 
• Choose student readers for Act 1 scene 2 (it’s a short scene)–use a side-by-side translation so students can reference as needed. 
• Teacher pauses on the most important parts, asking comprehension questions to informally assess on the fly. 
• Watch a short video (10 minutes) of Act 1 scene 3. Briefly summarize/discuss with class. -Students begin work on close-reading worksheet for Act 1 scene 4.

Day 3: Act 1.4

• More time spent on Act 1 scene 4 worksheet: this gives only excerpts to direct students to the most important parts of the scene, and leaves out the unnecessary lines (like the Queen Mab speech…which is a 42 line monologue about a fairy who delivers dreams to people who are sleeping…and the entire point is that the character is talking about NOTHING)…The Queen Mab speech is famous. But do my students REALLY need to know it in order to understand the play? Nope. Out it goes. Instead, I summarize it for them as I just did for you, explain its context in the scene, and we move on with our lives to spend our time on more important things. Students have access to the full text of the play if they want to read it all or see what’s been left out of the close-reading excerpts, but as a group, we gotta go! 

Day 4: Act 1.5

• Watch a 15 minute movie clip of the end section, where Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time. 
• Students independently work on study guide questions for all of Act 1 throughout the week as time allows (only 15 questions total in the study guide for scenes 1-5). Whatever we haven’t already done by this point in the week gets finished up and we go over the questions. 
• 17-question kahoot that reviews all of Act 1, in preparation for an assessment. 

Act 1, Done. The 5th day of the week is for flexibility, because you always need to adjust your pacing a bit to match where your students are at. And so at this point the students have hit every major bullet point on the essentials list. Act 1 is one of the longest acts in the play, so from here you can go even more swiftly. 

This method worked so well for me the first time (when it was born out of necessity) that I’ve now adopted it as my status quo for teaching Romeo and Juliet. Feedback from the students indicates it’s their favorite unit: it doesn’t drag, is high excitement, and we get right to what matters. This also has the side benefit of freeing up extra time in the beginning or middle of the semester when I might want to take a little longer on other things.

The Take-Away

So this is the granular example for what I’ve done with my own students; if you’re an English teacher, great; please take it! If you’re not, let me clarify the overarching principles here that should transfer to whatever subject, content, or grade you’re teaching:

1- Identify the essential knowledge and skills you want students to learn from this unit.

2- Chuck the rest. 

3- Focus on efficient and high-engagement ways to deliver the essential content (multi-media, gamify, stations, etc.)

Try these condensing techniques and tell me how it goes for you! 23 class days left on this end…!