With students shaken by more than two years of pandemic-related disruption, schools are scrambling to reconnect with students, get learning back on track, address social and emotional needs, and much more. A thread running through all this, of course, is the need for more time to instruct, support, and engage with students. That鈥檚 part of the appeal of summer school, tutoring, added staff, and such鈥攖hese are all strategies that create more time for educators to invest in their students.
Of course, a complementary approach to tackle this challenge is to ensure learning time (new and old alike) is being used effectively. This isn鈥檛 an either/or; it鈥檚 a both/and. With that in mind, it鈥檚 worth flagging a few of the ways in which teacher, leader, and student time can get consumed in unproductive ways. I find it can be useful to think of three big sources of lost time: structural, operational, and behavioral.
The first is the loss of time on a structural level: For starters, while data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggest that (contrary to popular thought) American kids spend in school than most of their international peers, that figure doesn鈥檛 necessarily tell us a lot about the amount of time students are actually learning.
One telling sought to tease apart the difference between actual teaching time and the OECD figures. The study took a high school in Holyoke, Mass., with 180 days in its academic calendar, and tallied up all the lost instructional time over the course of a year. There were seven early-release days for professional development (with class periods compressed by 14 minutes), eight days for exams (four at the end of each semester), and another seven mornings set aside for the Massachusetts state test (all classes were paused on these mornings even though only 10th graders took the state exam).
When all was said and done, the analysts estimated that total instructional time in this school during a given year would actually come in at about 660 hours鈥攐r 410 hours (38 percent) below the OECD estimate. In other words, decisions about policy, practice, and programming can have a massive impact on how much time kids spend learning鈥攔egardless of what the length of the school year or school day appears to be.
The second source of lost time is operational. A number of years ago, Nevada鈥檚 lawmakers enacted the , which required a series of classroom observations and debriefs. So far, so good. Most school leaders find value in regular classroom observations.
But lawmakers wanted assurance of universal compliance. The result? A mandatory, summative 16-plus-page evaluation for every single teacher, with dozens of indicators that each required multiple 鈥減ieces of evidence.鈥� School leaders were spending more than three hours writing each teacher鈥檚 summative evaluation (in addition to the time spent on observation, note-taking, and debriefing). As one principal asked: 鈥淚f you have already gone through the standards and observations, the final document is meaningless 鈥� so why are we spending three hours writing it up?鈥�
One administrator sighed, 鈥淚 had 567 pages of evaluations on 31 teachers I evaluated. 鈥� We have to initial every single page, and have teachers do the same.鈥� An internal analysis that principals were spending 150 hours each鈥攐r 19 eight-hour work days per year鈥攐n paperwork that rehashed what they鈥檇 already observed, recorded, and discussed with teachers.
And a third source of lost time? Behavioral factor. In 2021, in an invaluable and far-too-unusual study of Providence, R.I., researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum just how many disruptions there are in a school day. They estimated that a typical classroom in Providence public schools is interrupted over 2,000 times per year and that these interruptions wind up consuming 10 to 20 days of instructional time.
Major disruptions included intercom announcements, staff visits, and students entering (or reentering) class in disruptive ways. In explaining the impact of tardiness, for instance, the researchers observed that 鈥渋n many classrooms, locked doors required late and returning students to knock and a teacher or student to stop what they were doing and open the door. Late students often resulted in taking the teacher away from whole-class instruction to orient the student to the current task.鈥�
Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum noted that more than half the interruptions they observed led to spillover disruptions that extended their impact. And yet they found that administrators appeared to greatly underestimate the frequency and consequences of these interruptions, consistently undercounting the actual number and the amount of time they absorb.
Making sure that time allegedly earmarked for instruction is actually being used for it requires looking at how that time is actually used鈥攏ot at how time is labeled on the school calendar or master schedule. It doesn鈥檛 matter whether the school calendar says 180 days or the schedule says there鈥檚 an 80-minute reading block; what matters is how that time is getting used. And that requires digging into complicated, messy questions about where time is being used. Unfortunately, neither researchers nor school systems routinely do nearly enough of that.
So, for districts looking to maximize learning time, here鈥檚 a two-step action plan. Step one: Figure out when and where time is being lost. Step two: Start to reclaim that time and put it to better use. I know it鈥檚 on the simple side, but, as they say in Silicon Valley, 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not a bug, it鈥檚 a feature.鈥�
