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To understand time, we must understand the meaning people attach to it. For the purposes of this discussion, then, it is useful to review time for teachers using three general theoretical lenses: the personal and social construction of time; time as a variable in learning and teaching; and time as a political variable. As we will see, these lenses by no means exhaust the possibilities for analysis, but provide a starting point for the discourse on the time dilemmas of teachers.
Technical-rational time
When we discuss time for teachers in restructuring, we usually are referring to technical- rational time. Once the desired ends of an activity have been determined, the means for reaching those ends can be designed scientifically and administered rationally, according to this line of thinking (Apple, 1983; Habermas, 1970; Schön;, 1983). Regarding time in schools, Hargreaves writes that technical-rational time "is a finite resource or means which can be increased, decreased, managed, manipulated, organized, or reorganized in order to accommodate selected educational purposes" (Hargreaves, 1990; p.304). Thus, as problems in school organizations arise, it is believed that time can be altered administratively to meet those needs: schedules can be changed to accommodate fewer periods, the school day can be extended, collaboration time can be scheduled into the day. It is this way of conceptualizing time that has dominated the means by which reformers seek to construct time for restructuring schools.
In schools attempting shared decision making, such as those in the NCEL and NCREST studies, usually one of the first orders of business is to find time to meet; in schools revitalizing curriculum, time must be found to conduct research and to develop plans; in schools that focus on pedagogical change, like the Essential Schools, means must be found to extend the learning periods. With the exception of extended school day or year programs, the resource of time must be increased and managed within the confines of pre-existing time boundaries, and administered with no small amount of precision.
The notion that time is a commodity or resource that can be managed toward desired out- comes looms large in the thinking of reformers and school personnel alike. Once time is made for an activity, the expectation is that the activity assigned that slot will be accomplished. But there is ample evidence suggesting that this is not always the case and time assigned to a task is not always used for that task. Hargreaves (1990) points out that, in schools he has studied, the time scheduled for teacher collaboration was not always used for such; and he cites a study by Campbell (1985) that demonstrated that time set aside for collaboration in some schools was often used by teachers to relax or to do personal business.
We will see that time is not always used for its administratively intended purpose for a panoply of reasons. Teachers and administrators construct time somewhat differently, given their differing needs, work, and preferences. It is the subjective experience and use of time that often foils its technical allocation.
Phenomenological time
Phenomenological time may be described as lived time. It is the subjective experience of time "where it has an inner duration which varies from person to person" (Hargreaves, 1990; p. 307). For school people, it can be captured in that experience of time that makes a 45 minute detention study hall longer than a class of the same clock duration spent with 25 highly motivated students. Phenomenological time is also intersubjective: the reform-minded administrator may experience the time elapsed in implementing a new plan as considerably longer than the teachers who were asked to implement that plan (Werner, 1988). Thus, both the subjective and intersubjective construction of time play a key role in how school people come to understand time in school restructuring.
Our construction of time is intimately connected with the work we do. Much teacher activity is made up of a variety of concurrent tasks. The busy elementary teacher who is juggling her relationships with different children, asking and answering questions, setting individualized tasks, and making the myriad decisions such teachers make in the course of a day, experiences time in what Hall (1984) refers to as a polychronic time frame. Polychronic time is characterized by doing several things at once, the completion of transactions, a high sensitivity to context, and an orientation toward people and relationships. Hall, an anthropologist, shows that polychronic time frames are common in smaller organizations, Latin and Amerindian cultures, and among women.
In contrast to the polychronic time frame is the monochronic time frame. Those who work within this time frame tend toward linear arrangements of activities. There is a low sensitivity to context and an emphasis on the completion of tasks, schedules, and procedures. Such time frames are characteristic of Western cultures, large organizations, and males (Hall, 1984). The busy school administrator may be likely to organize his or her time in a monochronic time frame. Indeed, the larger U.S. culture places extraordinary pressure on administrators of all kinds to use time efficiently and in a linear way - in essence to become the "one minute manager" (Blanchard & Johnson, 1982).
It is in the juxtaposition of these two subjective time frames that we begin to see the kinds of difficulties that can arise in school reform efforts. The differing conceptualizations of time held by teachers and administrators may be closely linked to the kinds of work they are called upon to do. While administrators often conceive of time as a commodity that can be managed to render tasks complete, teachers' work is highly context-dependent and individualized. In these differing time frames Hargreaves claims, "can be seen much of the reason for the apparent failure of administratively imposed reforms in education" (Hargreaves, 1990; p. 311). He offers examples from his study of preparation time for teachers to demonstrate how these two time frames can conflict. He explains instances where administrators scheduled time for teachers to "collaborate" without reference to the compatibility of the people that have been co-scheduled, or to the utility of that particular collaboration. Similarly, teachers may be scheduled to collaborate at times of day that they would prefer to use for doing other tasks - to phone parents or copy materials, and the like.
The polychronic time that teachers spend in highly complex social interactions takes considerable concentration and effort to sustain. In the dense activities of their days, teachers often sense time passing quite rapidly. Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has demonstrated that people deeply involved in a project often enter a state of "flow" where time seems to pass unnoticed, and concentration is extraordinarily deep. Scientists, artist, and performers of all kinds talk of this phenomenon when they realize that they were so involved with their work that an hour or three has collapsed into a few moments. Although many teachers do not describe their experience as one of flow, some often experience accelerated time in their classes when a demonstration or discussion "takes off" and student, teacher, and subject work in concert, only to be interrupted by the period bell. The "flow experience" is one of synergy between self and activity, and it is not an entirely foreign experience to teachers.
A different perspective on phenomenological time, that of public and private time, is explicated by Zerubavel (1981). Although public time for teachers is regulated by union contracts and by the conventions of the school day, teachers must still devise quite personal ways to delineate that time which is private and public. When and for how long a teacher will spend time grading papers, preparing lessons, counselling students, writing recommendations, or chaperoning school activities on a Friday night are decisions that depend on how teachers understand and construct their private or public time (Sizer, 1984). Zerubaval writes, "Time functions as one of the major dimensions of social organization along which involvement, commitment, and accessibility are defined and regulated in modern society" (Zerubaval, 1981; p. 141). The internal rules by which teachers regulate their private and public time have a bearing on whether they will relinquish any private time for school restructuring activities.
Cyclical time
Connelly and Clandinin (1990) have studied the work of Zerubavel (1981, 1985) on the sociology of time and applied it to schools. Principal among all of Zerubavel's points is that "the world in which we live is a fairly structured place" (Zerubval, 1981; p.1) and that the structure of sociological time is cyclic. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) argue that the characteristics of these sociotemporal cycles are important if we are to understand time in schools, and the resistance that is engendered among school personnel when a change in schedules and calendars is implemented.
A key characteristic of sociotemporal cycles is that they have strong, resilient boundaries; in schools, the demarcations of the beginning and endings of periods, school days, and school years provide good examples of the boundaries that cannot be transgressed without incident (Connolly & Clandinin, 1990). Often, such boundaries are invisible until they are crossed. But in examples later in this paper, we will see that extending the school day and year, or changing the schedule of the day violates these boundaries and can have a remarkably upsetting effect on the lives of school people.
Sociotemporal cycles also have structure; they have beginnings, middles, and ends, each with some sort of routine and ritual. In schools, the day begins and ends in particular ways, with both students and teachers performing quite specific tasks. Teaching periods have their structure, as do semesters, and full school years. Changes in these structures are often difficult to make. For instance, changes in the times when homeroom takes place in high school, or instituting a school-wide program that requires everyone to read silently at 9:00 a.m., can disrupt sociotemporal structures of the day.
These sociotemporal cycles overlap, and many different cycles run concurrently. Annual, semester, monthly, weekly, and daily cycles all overlap in the life of a school, and the overlapping may vary by the job that one has. An administrator's cycles may overlap in ways that are quite different than a teacher, whose cycles are quite different from her students' cycles. Nevertheless, these varying yet overlapping structures, played out over time, lead to a strong sense of regularity and a deeply embedded sense of cultural rhythm in schools. Connolly and Clandinin (1990) point out that a sense of ritual and routine characterizes sociotemporal cycles in schools in a most important way. When one realizes that many overlapping, highly structured cycles are routinely at work in schools, it comes as no surprise that schools are as resilient to across-the-board changes as they are despite valiant efforts to do so.
As for the actual cycles in schools, Connolly and Clandinin (1990) identify ten: annual, holiday, monthly, weekly, six-day, duty, day, teacher, report, and within-class cycles. Each varies in duration, sequence, temporal location, and rate of occurrence. They also differ for participants in school life. For instance, the administrator is most likely to concern herself with monthly cycles because of monthly reports of attendance or lunch receipts. However, monthly cycles do not usually impact classroom life, where other cycles hold sway (Connolly & Clandinin, 1990). Similarly, the daily cycle of schools differs for students, teachers, and administrators with each keeping schedules different from the other.
Important to our discussion of teacher time in restructuring is understanding that school life is deeply cyclical, and that there are strong and enduring characteristics of the cycles that help to define school culture. Participants in schools derive meaning from the way time is structured and used, and they come to rely on its regularity and predictability. In allocating time for restructuring work, it is important to keep this in mind. It is wise to avoid creating time that is orthogonal to the cycles of time that are deeply embedded in the culture of schools, for such culturally invalid kinds of time will often end up being unused or extinguished in the day-to-day life of schools.
Learning time
Restructuring requires a fair amount of time for school people to learn new concepts, skills, and attitudes. But learning new ideas or ways of working is largely a volitional activity for adults, in the sense that adults can avail themselves of new situations or ideas, or willfully avoid them. Unlike an infant or toddler whose fascination with her environment grows as her neurological capacity grows, the adult teacher is not always so fascinated, not always easily induced to engage with new ideas. Certainly the time that is scheduled for adult learning isn't always used that way, and we can easily find evidence of teachers doing any number of "off-task" activities at in-service training, faculty meetings, or other venues meant to teach some new idea or skill. There are many possible reasons for such inattentiveness, and issues of time are among them. What kind of time is needed for adult learning? Of what quality and duration should it be? And in which contexts should it be offered?
Useful ideas for trying to understand what it is that transpires when adults must learn new management, curriculum, or pedagogy concepts, can be found in the work of Carroll (1985) and Berliner (1987). Although their work has been largely concerned with predicting and controlling how children and youth learn in classrooms, the concepts of allocated time, engaged time, time-on-task, aptitude, perseverance, and pace are worth considering in terms of adults, nonetheless. Applied generally to such teacher learning activities as committee meetings, faculty meetings, in-service, and retreat, these ideas seem crucial for understanding how change can be affected in the cognitions, and hopefully the actions, of teachers.
Allocated time is the time scheduled for the learning activity, measured usually in minutes per day, or hours a week or year. Theoretically, this is time over which participants have the least control, created as it is through administrative means. Engaged time is the amount of time when a participant actually gives attention to whatever is being presented. Such attentiveness is differentiated from time-on-task, when a participant is engaged in a specific kind of task related directly to an outcome goal of learning. Berliner (1990) defines aptitude as the amount of time a person needs to learn under optimal conditions, where perseverance is the amount of time someone is willing to spend on the task. Pace is the amount of content covered in a given time period.
Later, when learning time for teachers involved in restructuring is elaborated, we will see that it is often most difficult to engage teachers in learning about restructuring. It takes considerable time for them to become receptive to ideas, to thrash out ideological differences among themselves, and to actually attend to the tasks at hand. Moreover, because the tasks of restructuring challenge the ways in which teachers have been taught to think (Weiss et al., 1992; Cambone et al., 1992), they are often challenged beyond their ability to persevere. The time it takes for teachers to learn the ropes of restructuring is substantially longer than many teachers, or administrators for that matter, are willing to give.
Curricular or Instructional time
The concept of curricular time is a difficult one to unpack, because it deals with the way time is allocated, by whom, and the way the time is used for instruction. This time is different than the time for learning teachers might need in restructuring efforts. Rather, this is the time they need to teach children.
Ben-Peretz (1990) writes of curricular time as a variation on Berliner's (1987) allocated time, but where such allocations are prescribed by curriculum developers or in some cases by school boards. In Ben-Peretz's formulation, curricular time is not planning time, per se, but the time a teacher has to teach what is assigned for that day. A curriculum guide may suggest that a particular topic be taught in a 45 minute period, for instance, with 15 minutes spent on a warmup activity, 20 minutes on presentation, 10 on review, etc. In some ways, curricular time is the quintessence of technical-rational time, where the conception of the curriculum is far removed from its execution (Apple, 1983). Curricular time that is planned a priori by the required use of basals, texts, and courses of study rankles many teachers. Frequent complaints can be heard regarding the inherent insensitivity to student learning and teacher intelligence that is built into such time.
While teachers may lament the loss of control they have over how much time they can spend on certain topics, it is also true that they demand their time to teach curriculum, regardless of who designed the curriculum originally. Teachers covet their curricular time, and many claim they simply close their classroom doors and teach what they think needs to be taught - be it a variation of the material required, or something else entirely. Regardless of the source of the curriculum, teachers want and need the time to do it. One reason teachers are reluctant to involve themselves in restructuring activities is that it removes them from teaching and limits their curricular time.
For those teachers who have the freedom to design their own curriculum, curricular time can be construed as the time it takes to conceive, research, and plan units or lessons. Teachers can design their own curricular time instead of having it crafted for them, but it comes with a cost in time that would usually be spent privately or doing other tasks. As we shall see later, this kind of curricular time is more often found outside of the teaching day or week. Teachers use Saturday mornings, weekends, and summers (Boles, 1990; Lieberman et al, 1991b; Muncey & McQuillan, 1991). Curriculum designed in this way is then piloted in instructional settings by teachers, and revised as data are returned on the effectiveness of instruction. Curricular time in this sense is planning, development, and instructional time combined.
Of course, even the teacher who is in full support of a particular program change will, in the course of her polychronic day, have her concentration drawn into myriad other problems and interactions. She will consider administrative timelines to be too aggressive, and Hargreaves claims that the teacher will work to slow things down so she can sort things through and integrate her classroom efforts. This can result in administrators becoming more impatient for implementation, and subsequent calls for acceleration of the change process. In turn, the teacher slows down even more, and the political battle is engaged (Hargreaves, 1990; p. 314).
This clash between administrators and teachers over how teacher time will be used, and how quickly it is used, highlights the role of power and politics in understanding time for teachers in school restructuring. Reformer or administrator notions of how teachers ought to be spending their time are often at sharp variance with how teachers prioritize and use their time. When reformers attempt to carve time out of the teaching day for restructuring meetings, they bump up against the curricular time of teachers. If only a little time is taken, there is hardly any resistance from teachers; but if the pressure for time away from teaching duties intensifies (Apple, 1982, 1983), reformers will meet with considerable resistance and a slowing of the reform process. Of course, the administrator can require that more time be used despite the resistance of teachers. Such is the prerogative of the powerful, monochronically-oriented administrator, and may be the nature of time as a political variable.
The way time is distributed among school personnel is another way in which time is a political variable in restructuring, and reflects power relations in schools. Hargreaves (1990) argues, and the data from restructuring studies bear out, that higher status academics, such as English and History, often get greater curricular time allowances, larger staffs, and conse quently more political clout. In one high school in the NCEL study, for instance, informants claimed that the English department had the largest share of curricular time, faculty, and most importantly, power in restructuring itself. This department revamped its curriculum offerings to be on a quarterly credit system instead of the district-wide semester system. They accomplished this with the blessing of the principal, who approved of this change mostly because it was finally an indication that some shared decision making had occurred. The loud protests of the guidance department did little good, even though the resulting transcript format and credit calculations were incongruous with the rest of the district. It was left to guidance counselors to transpose English department credit into the district format.
Political relations in schools are also apparent in the ways in which the vast majority of teacher time is scheduled for classroom work. Teachers have been traditionally tied to the classroom, which is considered the significant work of teachers (Hargreaves, 1990). When a teacher is called away from teaching in order to plan or consult, her status increases. But the status comes with a price, and time away from teaching responsibilities engenders conflicted feelings in teachers and administrators alike. Teacher's involved in restructuring often talk about their guilt over not using their time correctly when they are away from class for meetings, or when they must get a substitute.
There are other political prices to pay. In the Coalition of Essential Schools studies and some of the NCEL school cases, we can read of teachers engaged in high profile programs where they are given fewer students to teach, more time for planning, and fewer conventional school duties (Cambone et al., 1992; Muncey & McQuillan, 1991). The political fallout was significant when colleagues construed that their own time was not as valuable as the specially- treated teachers. How much time a teacher spends in classroom work is very significant to American teachers, tied as it is to issues of equal and fair treatment.
Thus, despite reform rhetoric to the contrary, it is still understood that teacher time is to be spent in direct contact with students, teaching in classrooms for most of the day. This is par ticularly true for elementary teachers, whose largely feminine teaching force spends almost all of its time with students. Much of the temporal infrastructure of schools has been built around this tradition of direct and sustained contact with students; and teacher understandings of their power, status, and efficacy are intimately linked to that infrastructure. When teachers are asked to devote time to activities that have not been part of that tradition, as they are in restructuring, it necessarily creates substantial disequilibrium (Cambone et al., 1992). In efforts at school restructuring, it appears to be paradoxical to ask teachers who have been thoroughly socialized into one type of political relationship to engage in new political affiliations - without changing the temporal infrastructure that supports the original power and status relationships.
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[The Multiple Meanings of Time for Teachers]