When Seconds and Minutes Matter

What does “productive” look like in your classroom? Go ahead, really think about it. What are students doing? How is time spent? How is time not spent? What distinguishes a productive day from an unproductive day in class?

No matter who you are, where or what you teach, my guess is that your description of “productive” had something to do with not wasting any time. In work as high-stakes as ours is, every minute, every second matters. Time is the one thing we wish we had more of and can never seem to get enough of.

But have you ever analyzed how time actually gets spent during a class period?

What tasks and activities become unnecessary time-sucks? Things that chip away at the class period but aren’t actually used for any productive learning purposes?

Here are a few that I tend to see frequently in classrooms I visit:

• Handing out papers
• Turning in papers
• Getting kids working at the start of the period
• Transitioning between activities that involve different materials (i.e., put this away/take this out, clear your desk, etc.)
• Transitioning between activities that involve different arrangement of students in the room (i.e., moving into groups, rotating between centers, moving into lab groups, returning back to full class from alternate arrangements, etc.)
• Regathering students’ attention
• Getting ready to end class
• Sharpening pencils
• Dealing with requests to go to the bathroom
• Handling interruptions (i.e., an unexpected announcement, visitor, or student behavior situation)
• Changing visuals
• Rewriting notes on the board

Need I go on?

Each of these activities, though essential for the daily operations of a classroom, are not in-and-of-themselves productive learning activities. And each of these activities tends to take waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy looooooooonnnnnngggggeeeerrrr than needed.

I challenge you to keep a timer on hand during a full school day. Start the timer whenever one of these procedural necessities that is eating into learning time begins. Stop the timer whenever you’re fully able to return to productive learning activities. (Yes, this includes time leading up to and following that dreaded and oh so counterproductive threat, “I’ll wait…”).

How much time is lost during a normal class period? A regular school day? The results may shock you.

Think of what you could accomplish during that time. How many more practice problems? How much deeper of a discussion? How many more opportunities for a student to explain his or her thinking? Then work to minimize that total time count at every chance possible through smarter procedures, tighter management, increased encouragement and investment in preserving every ounce of learning time, and a little bit of hustle and urgency from you and your students.

When it comes to CULTURE, every second matters. Especially the wasted ones.