Prioritizing Learning Time Post-Pandemic

“Time,” the buttery baritone of Darius Rucker croons on Hootie and the Blowfish’s 1995 album Cracked Rear View, “why you punish me?/Like a wave bashing into the shore/ You wash away my dreams.”

Looking back on the past year and a half of schooling in America, those words feel unfortunately apt. The coronavirus washed away precious time that students needed, and as we look to schools returning in the next month or so, it will be incredibly important to make sure that they make the most of the time that is available to them.

As I have written before, I don’t think schools make the most of the time that they have with children, and they could do better. New research published in the journal AERA Open buttresses this argument.

Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum used survey data and classroom observations in the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island to study how many times classrooms were interrupted in the course of a school year. They include “announcements made through school intercom systems, calls to classroom phones, classroom ‘drive-bys’ by school staff, and student pullouts” as examples of interruptions.

Care to hazard a guess as to what they found? Remember, schools are in session for usually around 180 days. Is it once a day, so around 200? Twice a day, so around 400? They found that the average classroom was interrupted more than 2,000 times in a year. In total, they estimated interruptions costing between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. As they state, missing that many days of school would classify all of the students as at least truant if not chronically absent.

And these are only “external” interruptions. Classroom instruction is disrupted for myriad “internal” reasons like student behavior, disorganization, technology hiccups, and more.

Unfortunately, this is not new. A Nation at Risk, published nearly 40 years ago, devoted an entire section of its recommendations to time. It argued that the schools of the mid-1980s needed to more effectively use the existing school day and even argued for longer days and a longer year. Presaging Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum, it also stated that “Administrative burdens on the teacher and related intrusions into the school day should be reduced to add time for teaching and learning.”

So what can we make of all of this?

As a result of the coronavirus, parents are looking into their own ways to extend their children’s learning time. According to EdChoice polling data, 45 percent of American school parents either have their child currently enrolled in tutoring, are actively looking for tutoring, or will soon be looking for a tutor. If we ballpark the number of American school children at roughly 50 million, that is a lot of tutors. School districts are being encouraged to invest in tutoring because the research base is so strong, but it is going to be a challenge to scale up high quality tutoring to the level that is already being demanded, let alone to the level that might be necessary. Maximizing existing learning time will be of utmost importance.

There appears to be a simple fix to the problems that Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum (and the Reagan administration before them) identify: Stop interrupting classes when they are in session! Remove the intercom button from the principal’s desk, unplug the phones, save all announcements for the beginning or end of the day, wait until periods between classes to pull students out, whatever you need to do to leave kids alone while they are learning. It is so obvious that it strains credulity that no one has thought of this before.

And that is where the real problem lies. Schools that interrupt their teachers a half dozen or more times per day simply do not take teaching and learning seriously. They do not respect their teachers’ or their students’ time. They do not respect their teachers as professionals. At best, they are simply not thinking about the disruptive effect of their actions. At worst, they just don’t care. Either way, the school’s culture needs to change, particularly when time is of the essence, which it will be this year.

Schools looking for a culture change can take a lesson from hybrid homeschools. Because they have a shortened school week (many have students in school two or three days a week and have them learn from home the other two or three days), every moment with students counts. They are intentional about how they spend their days. They work to minimize interruptions. They encourage students to work at times that are most conducive to their learning. They work with families to develop strong community bonds and shared expectations inside and outside of the classroom.

Schools have a limited amount of time with students. They should make the most of it. The pandemic has supercharged this reality, but it was true long before the pandemic. When schools waste time, they send a signal to students and teachers that what they are doing doesn’t matter. If it mattered, it wouldn’t get interrupted.

Fixing the problem will take a shift in mindset, and schools are running out of time to make it.