Teacher, I'm Done! Tasks for Fast Finishers
How to keep students who finish tasks quickly busy
Keeping our students busy during lessons is one of the most effective ways to deal with problems such as bad behavior, boredom and low motivation. But what if your group has students who finish tasks quickly and then wait for the others? Can this cause the problems mentioned above? Quite possibly!
Let’s look at what you can do if you are lucky enough to have fast finishers in your groups.
Sooner or later, every teacher comes across the phenomenon known as “fast finishers”. So who are they? They are students who usually complete tasks and exercises before their classmates. To avoid demotivation and boredom, teachers need to come up with ways to keep these students engaged.
It is not always possible to create a task that all students will finish at the same time. There are several reasons why some students may finish tasks earlier than others.
Let’s look at them in more detail:
- A higher level
This is one of the most common reasons why students finish some tasks earlier than others. In the first lessons, we should assess our students’ knowledge and level of development. Differences in students’ pace may not match differences in their skills. If the teacher finds that most tasks are done quickly and perfectly, the student’s level needs to be reviewed. If a student is ready before the others only occasionally, or does not always complete tasks perfectly, the reason may be the type of task, which affects speed.
- The type of task
Taking students’ learning styles into account (according to the VARK model: visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic), we can conclude that, depending on the format or type of task, students will have stronger or weaker skills, so they may need different amounts of time to complete tasks. In primary school this is more obvious, for example with reading tasks. Those who find reading hard will need more time to read a text and complete the task than those who read easily.
- Temperament
Temperament gives us teachers information about a person’s typical behavior, which we can take into account both when planning a lesson and when choosing activity formats. Temperament also affects the flow of speech, speed, intensity of reaction and so on. As a result, the time students need to complete a task will vary.
- The quality of the work
Have you ever noticed a student telling the teacher they have finished, and when you start checking, it turns out everything was done in a rush? This means students are not working properly to complete the task successfully. The teacher needs to do everything possible to avoid this situation and make learning more productive and complete. More detailed instructions and ICQs (instruction-checking questions) can help.
Whether we like it or not, we cannot exclude students who finish faster than others, because this is a typical phenomenon in any learning environment. We have to learn to work with it. Many extra activities can help teachers keep fast finishers productive without distracting those who need a little more time.
Here are some types of extra activities:
- For YLs/Teens (young learners and teenagers)
It is quite obvious that the tasks and activities for a 14-year-old B1 student and a primary school student should be different. Students of these ages differ both physically and in their interests and needs. No abstract concepts or analysis for the youngest learners: pictures, rebuses and crosswords are what they need. Ask them to draw objects related to the lesson topic or their interests. Let them show their creativity. For teenagers, tasks related to the lives of other teenagers, or tricky puzzles, will be very appealing. You can ask them to make a plan of a text, or to watch a video and complete a task.
- Prepared/on-the-spot/extended
Tasks for fast finishers can be prepared in advance, at the stage of anticipating problems that may come up in the lesson, or made up on the spot. Tasks for these students do not have to be created specially; they can simply extend an activity, for example “banana” sentences (sentences that keep getting longer), adding extra examples, writing questions and so on.
- Academic/non-academic
Depending on the aims and needs, the teacher can come up with both academic tasks (directly related to the target topic of the lesson) and non-academic tasks. A student can be asked to help organize feedback after a task or to help other students (but do not do this regularly, as it can lead to misbehavior, conflicts or competition among students). Teachers can ask them to help hand out or collect worksheets, or simply ask them to carry out the agreed classroom procedures. In addition, checking never hurt anyone, so offer the student self-checking or peer checking.
- Additional worksheets
To fill fast finishers’ free time, you can also use ready-made tasks on the TalkEn.Cloud platform. There you will find a whole section of free ready-to-use worksheets for schoolchildren and adults, on different topics and for different levels. You can choose a worksheet related to the lesson topic, a task reviewing material from previous lessons, or even fun topics such as Black Friday, the TV series Wednesday and others. Platform users often use these very materials to keep busy the students who finish exercises earlier than others. For example, this worksheet about the iPhone 15 was a big hit with our users and their students, because it was added to the platform right after Apple’s presentation. The platform already has more than 150 ready-made worksheets, and the number keeps growing. To use TalkEn.Cloud’s free ready-made materials, all you need to do is sign up on the platform.
So we will never be able to make our students all the same, but we can always adapt to the conditions and to our students’ different needs. We wish you success and inspiration in your teaching!