Time Management for Music Teachers

Here are a few tips to help music teachers who have a hectic schedule managing their time most effectively.

Organize and Conquer

The music classroom is not a place where you can be disorganized and get away with it! With instruments, sheet music plus hundreds of other bits of paper floating about if you are not organized then it will quickly get out of control. Make sure you have a place for everything at the start of the year, and encourage students to respect and place everything in its appropriate place when they have finished using it. Organization is key, and students will come to know what the expectation is if you are rigid on that for the first few weeks of the year. Clean and organize it once, then enforce it rigourously for a while and you won’t have any further problems. Good Organization will save you many hours looking for things that might go missing if you are not organized.

Batch Similar Tasks Together

A basic of time management is the ability to “batch” tasks. If you have to make a lot of phone calls for the band, then make them all at one time, and don’t stop until they are all done. This will take far less time than if you are distracted trying to do it in the middle of planning your next lesson or reviewing a new band chart. Make sure that as much as possible you put all your tasks together for the best effectiveness.

Teach the same lesson many times

If possible, make sure that you are timetabled to teach all the year level classes of a particular grade, so that you can prepare a lesson once, and then teach it three or four times. It is no use you sharing a year levels classes with your colleagues - you should do all the classes from one year level, so that you can re-use the same lesson. When you’ve taught the same lesson four times you’ll become pretty good at it!, then you’ll be able to do even better when you come to do it next year.

Use Prepared Resources where possible

There are a wealth of prepared resources on the internet, so make sure you avail yourself of the prepared fact sheets, worksheets and lesson planning ideas that are out there. If you insist on doing everything yourself you might find yourself never having time to stop and breathe! Make sure that you enjoy the best possible amount of free time by using prepared resources from other teachers.

Hopefully these couple of ideas can help you with time management for music teachers. Please check through the resources below for a few more ideas on this important topic.