Schools Need to Reclaim Lost Learning Time. Here’s How to Start (Opinion)

As students have been rocked 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 more. A common thread running through all of this, of course, is the need for more time to teach, support and engage with students. That’s part of the appeal of summer schools, tutoring, extra staff, and the like—all of which are strategies that give educators more time to invest in their students.

Of course, a complementary approach to addressing this challenge is to ensure that learning time (new and old alike) is used effectively. This is not an either/or; it is a both/and. With that in mind, it’s worth highlighting some ways that teachers’, leaders’, and students’ time can be wasted in unproductive ways. I find it can be useful to think of three major sources of lost time: structural, operational, and behavioral.

The first is the loss of time at the structural level: First of all, data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development suggests that (contrary to popular belief) American children are spending time more time in school than most of their international peers, this number doesn’t necessarily say much about the amount of time students actually study.

A meaningful study from 2015 attempted to identify the difference between actual teaching time and OECD figures. The study took a high school in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with 180 days in its academic calendar and totaled the total lost class time over the course of a year. There were seven early release days for professional development (with class hours cut by 14 minutes), eight days for exams (four at the end of each semester), and an additional seven mornings for the Massachusetts State Test (all courses suspended). on these mornings, although only the 10th grade passed the state exam).

Ultimately, the analysts estimated that the total tuition time at this school during any given year would actually be about 660 hours – or 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 children spend learning — no matter how long the school year or school day seems to be.

The second source of lost time is operations. A few years ago, the Nevada legislature enacted the Nevada Educator Performance Framework (NEPF)., which required a series of observations and debriefings in the classroom. So far, so good. Most school leaders find regular classroom observation valuable.

But lawmakers wanted assurances of universal compliance. The result? A mandatory, summative assessment of more than 16 pages for each individual teacher with dozens of indicators, each requiring multiple “evidence”. Principals spent more than three hours writing each teacher’s summary evaluation (in addition to the time spent on observation, note taking, and debriefing). As one principal asked, “If you’ve already gone through the standards and observations, the final document is meaningless… so why are we spending three hours writing it?”

One admin sighed, “I had 567 pages of reviews from 31 teachers that I rated. … We have to sign every single page and have the teachers do the same.” An internal analysis calculates that principals each spent 150 hours — or 19 eight-hour workdays a year — on paperwork rehashing what they had already observed, recorded, and discussed with teachers.

And a third source of lost time? behavior factor. In 2021, researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum documented an invaluable and far too unusual study from Providence, RI how many disruptions there are in a school day. They estimated that a typical Providence public school classroom is interrupted more than 2,000 times a year and that those interruptions end up consuming 10 to 20 days of class time.

Major disruptions included intercom announcements, visits from staff and students entering (or re-entering) classes in a disruptive manner. For example, in explaining the effects of being late, the researchers found that “in many classrooms, locked doors prompted late and returning students to knock, and a teacher or student stopped what they were doing and answered the door. Late students often resulted in the teacher being pulled away from the whole class to keep the student focused on the task at hand.”

Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum found that more than half of the disruptions they observed resulted in spillover disruptions that prolonged their impact. Yet they found that administrators appeared to grossly underestimate the frequency and impact of these disruptions, and consistently underestimated the actual number and time they take.

To ensure that the time ostensibly allotted to instruction is actually being used, it is necessary to examine how that time is actually being used – not how the time is stated in the school calendar or master plan. Regardless of whether there are 180 days in the school calendar or 80 minutes of reading blocks in the timetable; What matters is how this time is used. And that requires grappling with complicated, messy questions about where time is being spent. Unfortunately, neither researchers nor school systems routinely do nearly enough of this.

For districts looking to maximize study time, here is a two-step plan of action. Step One: Find out when and where time is lost. Step two: Start reclaiming that time and making better use of it. I know it’s rather simple, but as they say in Silicon Valley, “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”