Time, a precious commodity in our world.

The more I think about what needs to change about education, I think the concept of time and its usage in learning needs to be evaluated. The school year often feels like a rush, and I think there’s great value in “putting on the brakes” on the frenetic energy as we charged through our outcomes to ensure we’ve “covered” everything.

Clearly, this is not the spirit that we want for learning, but often schools are bathed in this sort of state of mind, as we hurry to complete all the things on our school calendars and tick all the boxes for our curriculum to be “delivered”. So how might we begin to address the concept of “time” in our schools? I think it boils down to 3 things:

• Understanding how much time we have
• Evaluating our use of time
• Appreciating the time we have

Understanding Time with Time Management: Student View

I remember my first day in Language Arts in 8th grade at Largo Middle School in Clearwater, Florida. I was given a personal planner, with our ferocious tiger mascot emblazoned on its cover. I had never seen nor used one of these before. As I thumbed through its thick pages, I noticed all the months with its special dates already logged inside. It felt like such a gift until…..the teacher told us that it was designed to log our homework each night. Buzzkill! Yes, I learned how to use a planner for homework, but how I wish now that it was “sold” to me with more benefits than using a log of all my homework. What about my friends’ birthday? What about fun events at school? What about tracking other important events like when I got my “monthly visitor”?

So with this said, students need to first and foremost come to understand and appreciate time. It’s really hard to learn how to manage time when they have no concept of it–that planner was really helpful but it needed to be presented in such a way that helped me to personalize it beyond our teachers’ homework assignment. It felt like it was THEIR planner, not MY planner.

Of course, since I’m Google-y, I think we should also teach our students to use Google Calendar or other online calendar apps and tools for helping them develop productive digital lives. Time management is a critical skill, and we often forget that it needs to be taught explicitly. But time is also deeply personal, and we need to recognize and honor that.

With that in mind, how often do we ask students what’s worth their time? There are so many things that fill up our school events calendar–what if we asked students what they wish they got to do as a school community?  How would they choose to celebrate or commemorate…

• 100 days of school
• International day
• Earth Day
• Hour of Code
• National Day
• Holiday celebrations (Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Christmas, Eid, Hanukkah, Martin Luther King, Chinese New Year, etc…)
• Day of Design
• Teacher appreciation day
• Birthdays
• Spirit week

What about concerts/performances, assemblies, and learning fairs? All of these events are in service to the learning of our students, but we never ask them how they would like to design THEIR school calendar? We often ask parents and teachers when we design our school calendars but have you ever asked students? Now I’m not suggesting that we ask students to trim things off the calendar–for all we know they might want to add new events like “High Five Day”–but it starts to create more ownership of the time we spend as a school community and invites them into the planning of these events. Not only is it empowering, but then it opens the doorway to have more support of the parent community, which could lighten the load of our teachers, who often get the lion’s share of organizing school events. This is truly a school community event when its organization is shared by all members.

Evaluating our use of Time and Developing Priorities: Reflection and Planning for Teachers

Let’s face it, there are a lot of paperwork demands that often dampen the brilliance of teachers. Personally, I spent 1 hour on “highlighting” one unit of inquiry electronically on our scope and sequence documents to ensure we tick all the boxes for accreditation visits. That was precious, precious time on a redundant task. We have to ask ourselves as leaders what do we need to STOP doing and START doing so that our teachers work smarter not harder when it comes to ensuring that we have learning documented? And then gain their feedback to ensure that our attempts to do so are actually effective.

Since reflection and creativity have its own clock, it requires a pace that allows for connecting ideas that seem unrelated to its other. Space in our minds and our schedules are necessary in order to respond to the needs of students and develop new approaches and ideas in the learning. When we are stressed out, feeling rushed, our brains are in high beta, an anxious state in which we go into “survival mode”. We are living in a state of impatience, anxiety, and frustration.  I can’t remember a moment in which my teaching was improved by stress. Can you?

So how do we use time to foster a culture of reflection in our schools?

Thoughtful and reflective teaching practice only comes from having room in our schedules to do this. Responsive teaching, in which teachers have time to look at student data and consider what are the misconceptions that are coming out of the learning from well-designed formative assessment, take time to unpack thoughtfully. We have to make sure teachers have the time in their planning schedules to do this.

 

We want them to reflect and develop a better understanding of learners. This is critical, to not only developing a relationship with students but to appreciate the trends that might be emerging as students grow in their skills and knowledge of the conceptual understandings. Where in the non-contact periods is there room for reflection? How often do we have teachers bring student work to meetings and have thoughtful discussions about the learning? As leaders, we need to take inventory of these habits and practices which create a foundation of reflective practice in our schools. As teachers, we need to advocate for ourselves and make known that we need some room in our meetings for deep thinking around why we do what we do with students.

Appreciating the Time We Have: Whole School Approach

I think we need to dig into the research to determine how schools may reconfigure the calendar and class schedules. Here is a summary of some key findings:

1. Year-round schools that distributed their allotted 175-180 days over 12 months have better academic achievement.  Loss of learning gets diminished, and when time is spread thoughtfully over the school year, there is the potential for less teacher burn out.
2. 4-week school week not only decreases school costs but has other benefits such as reducing disciplinary problems, greater collaboration among teachers, and higher morale.
3. Older students benefit from a later start of the day due to the research on brain development on optimal learning time.
4. Block schedules for language and math are helpful for struggling students.
5. Block schedules that are longer than 90 minutes do not seem to improve academics.
6. Block schedules benefit teacher collaboration by having at least two- to seven hours of staff planning and professional development.
7.  PE cannot replace recess due to the important social-emotional learning that happens on the playground.
8. Flexible library schedules have the capacity to grow more avid readers.

So this is only what we know so far about what is impactful but it’s hardly a template for re-designing our days. However, I find schools like these really inspiring in how they’ve approached making the minutes matter in their schools. Whether these schools brought in outside providers to come and “teach for a day” so that teachers have time off for professional development and planning or changing the roles of teachers for more student self-directed learning, they thought outside the “clock” to inspire new ways to make the most out of instructional time.

When I consider these groups of professionals, I believe that the dream of teachers and students come skipping to school alike, eager to engage in the heavy cognitive lifting of the day, is really within reach. When we thoughtfully consider what we know about “best practice” as it relates to time in our schools and have a willingness to reconfigure our school-days, the impossible seems possible.