Touchstone 9: Make the most of every minute

It is the most overlooked but most obvious fact in education, that the amount of time spent on instruction is one of the strongest factors in determining the quantity and quality of education that a child receives. However, it is also true that the modern educator is pulled in several different directions within the classroom. An effective teacher must juggle many different types of instruction approaches and find time to assess that students are progressing towards mastery. In addition, many teachers must deal with the bureaucratic demands of the school environment and attend countless meetings. Goodwin and Hubbell (2013) differentiate between the allocated time for students being in school and the instructional time that students spend in class. The authors further differentiate between engaged time, the instructional time devoted to learning activities and academic learning time, the precise period where the instructional activity is aligned with a student’s readiness. Instructional time is precious and the amount of time that students spend engaged can vary, which puts the seemingly meaningless statement that a student learns more when they spend more time in class into proper perspective. Teachers must be extremely deliberate with the time they spend in the classroom. An effective educator must use every minute of time, even periods where instruction may not be happening, as during clean up at the end of the day, to have intellectual conversations with students and continue to prompt their learning (Goodwin and Hubbell 2013). In my own practice, the most important step I have taken to ensure proper time management is to conduct a time audit. I used the Classroom Time Analysis Tool from the National Center on Time and Learning to provide proper perspective on where my time was going. I worked with my instructional coach to find a time where they could observe my class and use the tool to analysis the activities in my class. I discovered that I spent almost twice as long on my entry routines than I had previously thought and that I missed almost all of my posted timestamps in my lesson. I do not think that there is any teacher that would say that they set out to waste instructional time, but I would encourage all teachers to conduct a thorough analysis of how time on an average day.

References:

Classroom Time Analysis Tool. (2015, March 25). Retrieved October 19, 2018, from https://timeandlearning.org/school-resources/classroom-time-analysis-tool

Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. (2013). The 12 touchstones of good teaching: A checklist for staying focused every day. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.