7 Strategies to Deliver Your Lesson in 5 Minutes

“Mr. Barnes, I didn’t feel time passing in this class, unlike other classes in which time passes slowly.” That's what a young man told his teacher, Mark Barnes, in the last minutes of class.

Reaching this level of immersion, passion, and true desire for learning in a student is not impossible. It requires a skilled teacher like Mark Barnes (The Five-Minute Teacher).

This philosophy is based on five pillars:

Strategies for delivering your lesson in 5 minutes:

While you might wonder “What lesson takes only five minutes to teach?” and “How can a teacher cut the class time to five minutes?” you will be amazed by the five-minute teacher method because of its benefits for the teacher and students alike.

In the following paragraphs, we will introduce the indicators of success in applying this method of teaching and the seven strategies on which it is based, then we will reach the most important goal, which is leaving a strong impact on the minds and hearts of your students because you will help them connect with their human instinct in order to become the center of the learning process within a clear, exciting, and enjoyable learning environment, of which you are a part.

The “five-minute teacher”:

This term refers to the idea that teaching should take place in small doses of no more than five minutes presented by the teacher, and it should allow students to explore the content individually and collaboratively by using rich activities based on projects, student discussions, digital tools, and social media. 

The benefits of applying this learning strategy for teachers and students:

You might think this approach is new to your professional field, but it is not. Many countries have applied it, and it has proven clear success in the field of Accelerated Learning and offered both the teacher and the student many benefits. The most important of which are:

• Multiple sources of knowledge acquisition, as the process of acquiring knowledge is no longer limited to the teacher as a single source, nor to collective indoctrination as a sole method of communicating information.
• Students immerse themselves in the process of learning that is based on asking questions and searching for answers.
• Ensuring students’ enthusiasm for learning and self-discovery experiences continues right up to the last minute of the class. 

How to measure your success in this strategy?

If you do this kind of teaching, you will be an extraordinary member of the class. You will need two keys to achieve your impressive successes from now on, which are:

• The inner key: Abandon the illusion of control and the belief that the teacher is the only source of knowledge and information, by changing the way you think as a teacher, using thinking, researching, and talking about the best ways in which humans (and young people in particular) learn.
• The outer key: Encourage your students to discover concepts and skills by themselves because this method of teaching depends on students and their self-discovery of knowledge through research and group discussions. 

5-Minute teaching strategies:

If you fully believe in the joint role of you and your students in leading the lesson, here are the seven strategies that will make you the new Mark Barnes:

1. Identify the most important parts of the lesson:

Educational theories have proven that the key to the success of any lesson is the students’ self-discovery of information. In order for this to happen, you as a teacher have to give up your control over the students’ thinking style and to direct their focus on one side of the lesson. It will also be very easy if you decide to get rid of the boring traditional activities based on rote memorization of the courses, slides, and worksheets filled with information.

All you have to do is turn a new page and start anew with the style of a masterful teacher:

• Identify the most important parts of the lesson, and plan how you can talk in the least amount of time possible in order to have more time for the students to spend on research and group discussion.
• Create ways to keep the class moving and alive with active discussions. You can use simulation and role playing, which will engage the students in planning and joint problem solving.
• Provoke the students’ enthusiasm and curiosity for learning and using different essential question techniques, which keep the enthusiastic discussions circulating among students non-stop.

This is your new task.

2. Let the students teach themselves:

Learning “when to stop talking” is the art you have to master if you want to be a “five-minute teacher,” and it is the key to the success of a student-centered, results-based lesson.

Remember that the longer you talk, the more the students will zone out of the lesson. This is the struggle in traditional education. Stay natural and keep your teaching vibrant, and don’t overdo it.

Once you have learned how to break your lesson into small parts and to schedule them accurately during the lesson, students will begin to explore and help each other; thus, your intervention will be simple and limited to making sure that what the students discuss is close to the topic of the lesson because peers are more influential on the learning process than you are.

You will see the student who was a silent recipient earlier be an active participant in education today, and you will realize that those challenges that you once faced, such as the intensity of the curricula, the assessment standards, the pressures of management and parents, and helping students pass exams and obtain the highest results have become an easy task to achieve.

3. Plan carefully:

The rules you use in daily lesson planning will still apply, but you will need to be more precise about the questions directed to students in order to work in collaborative groups where they find the answer after being provided with the necessary resources for research and investigation.

Plan the video you will show them by choosing its type and duration and plan the task of the small groups in the research, then imagine the stage of sharing the results at the end. Do not forget to give them enough time to reflect on what they have learned and its results and impact in reality and its relevance to daily life.

You are not required to plan for every minute. On the contrary, you have to be flexible to move from one activity to another and to give a break after any long activity. With experience, you will find that some parts will exceed the estimated time due to the students being so immersed in learning. There is nothing wrong with that, as the student is the one who leads the class. This is considered a positive sign because having extra minutes for the core of the lesson is part of skillful planning.

Know that the secret of good planning is providing  an excellent learning opportunity for all students with a high motivation to learn, who easily immerse themselves in lessons, as well as students who are less motivated to learn, as their lives will change in this type of classroom.

4. Utilize the power of video:

The most important aspect of a video is its brevity, so choose videos carefully and plan ahead. The most powerful videos are the ones that promote values ​​such as friendship, love of discovery, and collaboration. It engages them in learning and instills in them a genuine and deep interest in the subject.

Choose a clip that takes one to four minutes maximum. You might need to break down one video into clips that you use in multiple lessons, and you’ll need a website to host the videos as a kind of reference that students can come back to at any time. You can also search through the free educational video libraries available online.

Barnes suggests TED-ED, which contains questions to test comprehension and discussion-sparking questions with each video.

5. Be an indirect guide:

The success of these strategies is based on the sincere desire of the traditional teacher to let go of the role of the lecturer, to abandon the illusion of control over the learning style, and to have the courage to admit that the methods they use do not only fit the way students learn, but also they are useless in sparking their motivation or enthusiasm for learning. This success also depends on replacing the traditional grading system based on the students’ feelings of fear and intimidation, and adopting a system that is better suited to the new results-based learning environment, in which the student is the center of the learning process.

Now, all you have to do is be an indirect guide, point the students in the right direction, and open the way for them. Because this skill is the most important, you have to be patient, especially since it will take a lot of your time to acquire and master.

Know that students at all levels need encouragement and guidance from you to share responsibility with you. You will find yourself a member of some of these groups coordinating and participating rather than lecturing and dictating activities and evaluation methods.

To be a masterful guide, Barnes offers some tips for you to follow:

• Use a stopwatch to focus on the task and teach students to complete a short task with joy.
• Ask “what if?” instead of simply answering their questions, as this method teaches them how to come up with the answer themselves, and it helps them discover concepts and skills more easily along the way.
• Use web tools, mobile devices, applications, arts, and crafts, and make use of meditation and small group activities that provoke the search for knowledge.
• Assign a location in the classroom to teach from, and the students will get used to stopping what they’re doing when they see you standing there.
• Move in the classroom and keep up with your students moving from one activity to another, go around the class talking to your students to encourage them, and join groups or individuals because you are part of the learning process.
• Keep out of sight, so the students become more independent and less dependent on you. Find what to do in class to confirm your presence with them, and at the same time do not forget that they need to learn on their own. 30 to 40 Seconds will be enough to instill confidence in them.

With this you will have stepped out of the traditional style. Congratulations.

6. Help students become independent learners:

The most important foundation for the success of the Five-Minute Teacher is continuous collaboration, not discontinuous collaboration to complete one activity (as is done in classes today). This provokes self-motivation to learn, and creates independent learners who will take more responsibility for their learning. At the same time, the clever and skilled teacher designs a lesson that is less constructed and more interesting and effective, making the educational objective clear to the students and giving them the freedom to choose the method of learning.

When you try this collaborative method, you’ll see how helpful it is in boosting students’ independence. No one is telling them exactly what to do all the time because you – with complete comfort and confidence – have allowed them to choose their partners in the groups, which enhances their feelings of being real and influential members of the team. Allowing them to choose the final form in which their work or project takes will also enhance their positive self-image.

And know that you have a very important leader position. If students fail to reach results, that’s where your role as the teacher comes in, providing them with appropriate feedback that helps them focus on achieving results the next time. This way, students will change their direction and thrive through action and course correction, and this is an invaluable lesson to be learned, which will never be achieved if the teacher defines the form of learning, individuals in groups, and the form of expected outcomes.

7. Develop technological tools for student-led activities:

You will find a set of useful websites and applications that Barnes recommends in his book, which can help you build appropriate technological tools for your class, as they are user-friendly, free applications, and students can combine their features at the same time, such as: Voki, Avatar, Animoto, and Glogster.

This is where the real challenge comes in – which you must face – which is to fill the lesson with activities led by students and resources from which they can choose, and most importantly to understand how to locate or produce these tools, and how to effectively and appropriately teach related technology.

Do not assume that the new generation knows how to use educational applications. These applications need to be taught, and the teacher needs to know how to use these applications and tools first.

As a teacher, you should spend as much time as possible learning to use the tools available, and then teach them to your students. Once students have mastered these tools, it will help them choose the most appropriate tool, and you will find them immersed in the activities that they design to display learning outcomes.

In conclusion:

You have to know that the process of change requires a certain amount of sacrifice from you in order to master the application of these strategies in your classroom professionally. The lessons you design will be transformed into short lessons that flow smoothly through student-centered discussions led by you from afar and by carefully planned activities and research projects which rely on the students  to apply them individually, or collectively in a group.

Perhaps you will spend time every evening reading a book about the latest methods of provoking motivation to learn, or new methods of education, or looking at the latest studies on the brain and how it works, and how you can use all of this for the benefit of your students.

This will certainly help you in your new plan to abandon the one role you were playing every day, and prepare with a strong heart and an intelligent mind to play a mixture of roles in which you are sometimes a leader, and others a follower, a magician, an artist, or a comedian, and most importantly an expert and wise teacher who is not afraid to make way for their students to let them discover learning with very little intervention from them.

And if one of your students surprises you one day by saying, “Sir, I don’t feel time passing in this class, unlike in other classes in which time passes slowly,” remember to respond to them as Mark Barnes once said to one of his students with a confident smile: “Time flies when one is having fun.”