Real Talk About Time Management

35 Best Practices for Educators

Pariser and DeRoche draw from their own classroom experiences to provide a practical time management resource for classroom teachers. With thought-provoking questions at the end of each chapter, this text is a great springboard for collaborative conversations. Real Talk About Time Management is a resource I look forward to sharing and utilizing with the teachers in our system!

As a middle and high school English teacher, I often felt like there wasn’t enough time in the day to get everything done. This struggle against the clock is one of the practical challenges I try to help the preservice teachers I now work with to prepare for, but considering time management frustrates even seasoned teachers, Real Talk About Time Management is a helpful tool. With assistance from sources as varied as Marie Kondo and YouTube car commercials, Serena and Ed provide accessible and applicable strategies for time management as well as tools for self-reflection and planning. Along with honest reflections and anecdotes, this book includes advice from actual teachers and realistic consideration of how preparation allows for successful teaching. Serena and Ed’s applications are presented alongside a sense of respect for the significant workload and varied demands on teachers’ time, which they also use to provide specific advice for tasks like grading, communication, and considering our workspaces. Two specific pieces of advice I appreciated from the authors were filtering the advice from others to best fit our needs and personalities and distinguishing between being busy and being productive. Ultimately, Real Talk About Time Management will help teachers to reprioritize their tasks and priorities and to optimize their work flow.

Real Talk About Time Management is exactly what busy teachers need! Even after nearly two decades of teaching, I found so many tips and strategies to streamline all the busyness of planning, grading, collaborating, interacting with parents, engaging students, and even the layout of the classroom. Ideas for dealing with mountains of paper as well as making sure to connect with colleagues are interspersed with heartwarming and hilarious stories of Ed’s and Serena’s classroom experiences. What a joy to read!

Real Talk About Time Management is written in a comforting, practical style complemented with many thought-provoking, meaningful anecdotes and quotes. Offers excellent reminders and tips for K–12 teachers of any subject desiring to better manage their time in order to be more effective, more efficient, and more healthy caretakers. Deftly differentiates being busy from being productive and from tasks being important versus being urgent, and will help the dedicated teacher balance what they can control from what they cannot. The authors offer pragmatic resources, sharing perspectives from both a classroom teacher and a school administrator’s lens. This book is a wonderful reference that will help educators work smarter, not harder. No-nonsense, applicable, and full of great tools and strategies for helping teachers better manage their time so that they can be their best in and out of the classroom.

An organized, thorough, and insightful book that captures real-life situations and strategies. A great read for any educator and administrator looking to make an immediate difference in the lives of children. A perfect read on strategies for establishing a work–life balance.

Serena Pariser gets right into the guts of our perennial problem: we don’t have enough time! I can’t imagine a more comprehensive or helpful book on time management for teachers. I hope it gets a wide and earnest reading.

The daily demands of elementary teachers such as responding to student and parent needs, curriculum preparation, academic reflection, collaboration with colleagues and administrative requirements can seem daunting. How necessary, important and valuable to have Real Talk About Time Management, a resource full of tools and practices to help balance the personal and professional lives of teachers!

Great read for someone just beginning their career and those that have been in the profession for years! I’ve been teaching for 22 years and learned so many new time management strategies that I am excited to implement in my classroom. I love how it uses real experiences and real life classroom situations making it relevant to teaching today. Thought provoking. Really gets you to reflect on yourself and how this translates into your teaching style. The strategies in this book can be applied not only in the classroom but also in everyday life.