In yesterday’s post, I referred you to Larry Cuban’s article, The Perennial Reform: Fixing School Time In the article, Cuban raises questions about many of the time-related debates, including the idea that spending more time in school will increase the success of students and the overall effectiveness of schools. Longer school years and longer school days have long been promoted as a viable option for school reform but, for a variety of reasons cited by Cuban, the ideas have never really taken root.
I wanted to connect something that Cuban addresses in the latter part of his article, something that resonated with the focus group work on which we just reported in Teaching the Way We Aspire to Teach: Now and in the Future and something that has long been an irritant to many teachers that I know.
While I have no doubt that tacking time onto the school day, or onto the school year may have an impact for some students, I don’t think that it’s the answer. Instead, I believe that we need to start treating the time that we do have with a lot more respect and care. It’s my experience—and I’m speaking from an elementary K-8 perspective—that we could find ways to approach the time that is currently at our disposal.
From my experience, here are four of the biggest time thieves:
- Currently, many schools have students line up (cue up!) outside the school and wait for their teacher to come before being allowed to proceed into the school. This is done first thing in the morning, after lunch, as well as after morning or afternoon breaks. The way I figure it, we spend a good 10-15 minutes a day lining up to come into the school.
- I find that the first 10-15 minutes of each day can be a hectic period of collecting money for trips, book orders, pizza, milk and a whole host of “other” things. A huge “time vacuum”, these activities usually require at least minimal amounts of attention by the teacher and can often delay the ability to “get going” right away.
- Morning Announcements. Part of the ritual of school, I know but, again, these can be real time suckers.
- P.A. interruptions throughout the day. The biggest “flow-breaker” of them all, the call over the intercom for a teacher or student to report to the office, for someone to return the gym storage key, or reminders about dressing warmly on cold days are commonplace, at least in my experience.
A couple of comments. First, I think that we can do a whole lot more in our school days/daze, the way that they are currently structured to allow for, and even encourage, a greater sense of flow. Second, I’m confident that some of you may have tackled these issues already, and I would invite you to share some of the things that you’ve tried in your local context.
I’m pretty sure that we won’t be seeing year-round schools, extended days, or weekend schooling coming to a public school near you in the near future. But, I’m equally confident that the time that we do have at our disposal each day can be organized, structured and protected in different ways.
What do you think? I look forward to the conversation.
It’s my experience (I’m speaking from an elementary, K-8 background) that the idea of time is not given the amount of respect that it deserves.
Interesting list of time thieves. Let me add a few more.
1) Checking homework;
2) Waiting for a computer to log into the network with all of the things that are setup for all – map drives, pre-load things that may or may not be needed for that session;
3) Related to your lining up – transition time between class changes;
There’s undoubtedly value in all of these things so you need to weight the amount of time versus the benefit gained.
Thanks for these Doug. I remember the “checking homework” from my own school daze, and from my early years of teaching. Interesting connection between the two in that, when I began in the profession–and despite everything that I was taught in the faculty–I still fashioned my practice around what I remembered from my own schooling.
I realize that I had different teachers growing up, but by the time I walked into my own classroom, it seems that I had built up this wonderful amalgm of what it meant to be, act, and sound like a teacher. (Kind of like becoming a parent, I suppose)
That image was very hard to “move”, not because I didn’t have ideas of my own, but probably because I didn’t want to rock the boat and draw a lot of attention to myself in those early days. I didn’t want the attention of parents; I didn’t want the attention of my principal…I just wanted to fit in.
ALL of that has changed now and I’m much more willing to push the envelope on many things, but reading some of the tweets on this post, and reading your list makes me wonder whether we’ve set up some pretty strong parameters and it will take a lot of effort to change some of these practices.
I know that I’ve moved off in a totally different direction in this response to your comment, but you opened up a different line of thinking for me!
I remember “checking homework” from my first year of teaching. I think I was fanatic about it. Then, I had a study hall supervision and watched one student copy “just enough” from another to be able to say that he had done his homework. From that moment on, I dropped checking homework and tried to make doing whatever we were doing more interesting and devoting class time to doing it. It worked well right off the bat and, particularly in Computer Science, had students wanting to work on the subject matter outside of class.
I’ve certainly noted all of the time wasters mentioned above. My colleagues. Struggle with letting students enter at the bell without lining up. Classroom transitions are notable. I’ve not made great progress here. We practice transition routines. One reason so much time is lost entering, exiting, and transitions, is that we generally suspend everything until we get 100% compliance. A hundred students shuffling their feet as the teacher stands glowering at three hyperactive people. Later in the classroom everyone waits fidgeting while the same few students putter. I’ve been learning to proceed before I have this 100% compliance. My hyperactive or disorganized students are not really class disrupters, they are just slow. I can catch them up, or they get help from a peer. Some are simply waiting for the activity so they can engage. They cannot engage in waiting. Our expectations can create the lost time. On the other hand, I think we need to take a deep breath and stop stressing the pace. It really is not a factory work floor. Sometimes learning takes time.
Had to comment – Not a factory work floor eh? Try it from a parent’s perspective, and it sure looks like an old school of the USSR. Time wasting on keeping out the parents, and especially parents who insist to walk their children to the their classroom. Time wasting on keeping parents waiting at the front door, to ensure that they are parents that have children attending the school. Time wasting on which students get to go to the library today, at lunch hour. Time wasting, chewing out students who forgot their things at the locker, but the school rules states, no going to the locker except within the time……….Time wasting, arguing with students to share their own supplies to students who cannot go to the locker to pick up their own supplies. Time wasting, to unlock doors to pick up supplies and gear, and even more time wasting to dropped off the keys to the holder of the keys.
School is more like a model of lock-down, prison like with attached privileges. Privileges can be taken away for infractions of the rules. Special attentions towards parents who are considered time wasters by most school administrations. “. A local school board won’t explain why it banned the mother of an allegedly bullied child from school grounds unless she has written permission.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2012/07/10/19969496.html
Time wasters, when school staff begin to act and behave as through they are wardens in a prison, No wonder teachers wonder about the stuff of time wasters, because they have no time to actually teach. No time to teach, because that too is being micro-manged by the wardens of the school board.
So unlike when I went to school starting in 1960. Doors open at 7:30, and anyone could walk in, and sit in the unlocked classrooms. I swear the janitor lived at the school, but it was part of his job to unlock and keep an eye out for the early arrivals at the school. In the fall and spring, there was always a gang of kids that arrived early to start the all-day scrub-games such as scrub baseball, Hell we even have champions games at the end of the week, and the teachers would get on it and referee for the champion scrub-games, and on their recess and lunch breaks. Can anyone imagine today, a teacher wolfing down their lunch in 5 minutes, to scoot outside to referee a game that for all purposes is a non-sanction activity? Or how about the marbles and jacks competitions that took place in the winter, on bad weather days? These days, the schools are closed for the little bit of snow that has fallen over night. Back in my day, the school administration actually trusted the students, and more importantly had respect for the parents. And even the ones who had a bee in their bonnet. Now they send out threats, without explanations to parents, and bullying is now called alleged bullying. Meanwhile in my day, bullying was not tolerated and the teachers were the leading examples on model behaviour. Hell, they even had time to teach us kids how to walk, act, manners and have respect for the elders. Parents and students always had their questions answered, and was never seen as a perceived threat to the administrator’s authority.
No wonder parents are not engage, a lot of them probably see engagement in their children’s schools as a time-waster from their perspective. By the way, the above link – normal procedures of not allowing parents to walk their children to the classroom, and not at all isolated. The day will come somewhere in Canada, where the video and audio evidence will influence the administrators’ to stopped wasting everybody’s time on procedural processes, and repair the damage for not trusting parents, students and teachers and the expense of lawyers fees.