Holding Instructional Time Sacred

I was coaching a 6th grade teacher last week during her 60-minute math block (luxurious, right??). During those 60 minutes, she fielded two knocks at her door from other adults in the building and three phone calls about student absences. Two students got up to use the restroom, then knocked to get back in when they returned (the school has her keep the door locked). Her SmartBoard glitched a few times but ultimately limped through after a computer reboot.

This was a pretty typical period for most teachers that I work with, all of whom teach at public schools in large urban districts. I’ve been in classes, mostly high-school ones, where the interruptions eclipse the teaching time. Students straggle in — sometimes dramatically! — for twenty minutes after the bell rings; the loudspeaker crackles on with a non-urgent message (“Please congratulate the boys basketball team on their win yesterday! And don’t forget that the student council will be selling carnations next week!” ); the front office calls to tell the teacher they have a coverage next period; someone comes by to pull a few kids out for testing. The interruptions are endless. And that’s not even including the frequent lockdowns at some of the schools I go to.

How are teachers supposed to teach in this setting?

When I first started teaching in the year 2000, this kind of non-urgent interruption was rare. I might get a call saying a student had to be picked up early for a dentist appointment, but usually I had the full 40 minutes (or maybe 35, with transitions) to get through a lesson. This was at a small progressive school; I don’t think we even had loudspeakers in all the classrooms. Any timely messages, like the need to cover another teacher’s class, would be handled right at the beginning of the day, at lunch, or at our common planning period. If an administrator or front office person showed up to my room in the middle of a class, something was most definitely wrong.

Maybe my school was the exception, but I like to think we as a society used to hold teaching time sacred. Not even well-meaning administrators hold teaching time sacred anymore. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been talking to a school leader who has nonchalantly picked up the phone to ask a teacher a question that could most definitely have waited in the middle of class. I want to grab the phone from their hand and slam it down. That teacher is teaching! Depending on the class and the teacher’s management, every little interruption is an opportunity for the lesson to be derailed. Kids start talking, the conversation loses momentum, the question someone asked is forgotten…The time lost to these interruptions is much greater than the sum of its parts.

There’s no lack of research showing that more instructional time is crucial to education outcomes; research also shows that the quality of the time is critical. Education Week summed it up by saying. “Not all classroom time is created equal. Even when their states have steep classroom time requirements, schools may be losing hundreds of hours of instruction each year to minor, avoidable disturbances and teacher absences, according to the researchers.” You could keep students in class for ten hours a day twelve months of the year, but the constant classroom interruptions would still limit their learning.

I’m not blaming administrators here, but I do want to send them a message: Hold instructional time sacred. Before you pick up the phone to tell someone they have a coverage later in the day, ask yourself if the message could wait until the end of the period. Maybe even send an email or text (for those Gen Z-ers that don’t read emails) that they can read when they’re ready to. Or use Slack or GroupMe or some other communication tool. And be sure to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s not.

Actually, maybe going analog is the solution. When I was in high school (wayyyyy back in the twentieth century) we had a bulletin board by the front desk that we could check every time we walked past. Important notes (like “your mom is picking you up at 1:50 today” or “you can finish your English test in Mr. Johnson’s room 8th period”), schedule changes, and announcements (early dismissal for the track team!) would go up there throughout the day.

Perhaps we need a modern equivalent to the bulletin board, but I think a bulletin board would still work perfectly fine. Put up a board like that somewhere central in your school, and incentivize students and teachers to use it. Use the board for any and all announcements – force people to interact with it. If it’s really critical that a teacher sees a message by a certain time, sure, send a text. But for God’s sake, save the loudspeaker announcements and phone calls for true emergencies and let your teachers teach.