A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

The Multiple Meanings of Time for Teachers

Multiple gears of time are turning for the teacher in an average day, in what appears to be a polychronic experience of time: A teacher meshes student time with teaching time, while somehow managing to find time for photocopying, calling a parent, and arranging a doctor's appointment for her daughter. The teacher is on the move, both physically and intellectually, shifting her attention from task to task, trying to give each the kind of time that it needs, in the amount that can be afforded. Many teachers have a highly developed capacity for meshing their different time requirements into a well-oiled routine.

Yet frequently, the teacher finds herself overloaded with demands for her time as the needs of students increase, the marking period ends, or the winter holidays approach. Sometimes she is so overloaded that she experiences "timelock" (Keyes, 1987), where the different gears of her living clock grind to a stop, her ability to attend to her tasks is diminished, and almost nothing gets done. It is always a challenge for teachers to keep the demands of their time in precise balance, living as they do in multiple and overlapping time constructs.

Into this already delicate balance, the time demands for restructuring schools have been added. Is the kind and amount of time needed for these activities compatible with time for teachers as it is presently constructed? Can a new sub-set of gears be added to teacher time without disrupting the entire mechanism? If so, how? And if not, what can be done?

Time for Students

Most teachers choose their careers in hopes of spending time with students. In fact, students are the people with whom teachers spend the balance of their time, and they are a prime source of teacher energy and despair. Each interaction between a student and teacher takes concentration and teachers use tremendous energy to sustain student time. In the teacher's polychronic day, many such interactions take place, often in tightly packed succession and most often during time originally set aside for teaching. The nature of student time appears to differ somewhat among elementary, middle school, and high school teachers. As children grow older, their teachers appear to expect that the time they spend will be less related to a student's social and emotional needs, and will tip more toward an intellectually-based relationship. In the NCEL interviews particularly, teachers mention how they are frustrated at having to deal with outside issues of students when they want most to be using their time for teaching.

For high school teachers, student-teacher time is enhanced or diminished by the daily or weekly schedule - the cyclical time of schools - which allows room for interaction outside of teaching time. Again, the NCEL study provides a good example. In a Maine school (grades 7 through 12), teachers have been assigned advisees that they retain through all 6 years at the school. Protected time is built into the schedule for teachers with their 12 advisees every day. Teachers consider this a nearly sacred part of the infrastructure of the school, a sociotemporal ritual that helps them maintain the shape of their work in classrooms, and throughout school life.

There are a number of examples of time for students in the studies. Similar student-teacher interactions are reinforced in most Essential Schools, where teams work to reduce the number of students they teach to no more than 80 so that more time can be spent with teachers and students working together. In one alternative school in the NCREST study, Delancey Street Preparatory, the SDM team helped the school rearrange the schedule so that two hours every Wednesday afternoon were set aside for students, with one hour for activities and one for mentoring.

However, as important as student time is to most teachers, it can be exhausting time. The more a teacher becomes involved with a student, the more thinking and planning goes into the relationship. Some Essential Schools teachers found that the workload increased tremendously as they switched their teaching to be more student-oriented. This affected their private time and their ability to manage their preparatory time, as well.

It is also true that as the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of students increase, it appears that the hats a teacher wears multiply too. One teacher in an NCEL school speaks for many teachers when she explains that she has become social worker, nurse, police, and parent for her students in addition to being their teacher. She has begun to bring those student problems home with her, and her student time has begun to corrode private time.

Each of these examples of student time interlocks with other kinds of time for teachers: The cyclical time of schools, its boundaries, structure, and rhythm, are changed when more student time is sought; the private time of teachers must be redesigned in some cases; the time that teachers have management control over, such as preparatory time, also changes. In the Maine school, student time was part of the original design of the school; but in the other examples, finding more student time required careful consideration of the other kinds of time that were impinged upon.

Time for Teaching

Teaching time is the actual doing of instruction, a different way of construing curricular time, discussed above. It is comprised of the hours teachers spend in their classrooms, labs, studios, and workshops trying to engage students in learning. This is a huge portion of teacher time, and is a matter of considerable debate regarding the ways it is constructed, how it should be used, and who has control over it.

Some view teaching time as a commodity that can be manipulated to increase student per formance. As I've already mentioned, in efforts to extend the school day or year, one of the issues that arises is how teachers can find more effective ways to stay on task so that more teaching happens in the time allotted to it. But educators cannot come to consensus on what constitutes the tasks of teaching. Some teachers would differ with those who consider teaching time to be the equivalent of instructional minutes. They say, for instance, that the time spent interacting with students about their social and emotional growth is as much a task of teaching as teaching math, science, or reading (Cambone, forthcoming). Such teaching time resists measurement in minutes, and is hard to structure instrumentally, even though it is shaped within the allotted time. It is time crafted from inside the experience of teaching and learning, and is created by the teacher in interaction with her students and the material under study (Cambone, 1990; Hawkins, 1974; Latus, 1988).

Teaching time is a distinctly personal investment for teachers and they tend to covet it. For this reason, we often see struggles among teachers and reformers over teaching time: some want to extend it; some want time away from it for other professional activities; some will not involve themselves in restructuring activities expressly because those activities require time away from their core activity. Teaching time has always been what has defined the American teacher, for good or for bad. Teachers are caught in the paradox of being isolated from others by their time teaching, while seeing their strongest results with students borne of intensive teaching time.

In a discussion on the NEA network about one district's plan to increase teacher's non-teaching time to 50 percent, one correspondent alludes to this paradox for teachers. Some teachers in his district, elementary more than secondary he says, are

...in a panic over this one....teachers [were] very concerned about spending any more time than they do already away from their kids. A high school administrator then said [to them] that they really have to learn to let go a little, for their own good. It is important to take care of themselves. Staying isolated in a classroom is not the most healthy thing to do, either personally or professionally (School Renewal Network, 3/10/92).

Part of the concern of elementary teachers over being away from their students may be found in the amount of overlap they experience between teaching time and student time. The developmentally-oriented elementary school is qualitatively and quantitatively different in the amount of time that is spent on the fundamental socialization of children. Thus, teaching time for the elementary teacher, and increasingly for the middle school teacher, is constructed to allow time for this phenomenon. This time is different than it is for a high school teacher, who likely spends more of his teaching time transmitting information. But, it is not just socialization that is at issue for elementary teaching time; often the whole teaching enterprise is different, and time is constructed accordingly. One teacher on the School Renewal Network recalled that her fondest memory of teaching was in a multi-age classroom where she had the same children for three years. Referring to herself as much as the children, she wrote

I found it amazing how much we were able to slow down and relax -to think and to dream. I read aloud, we drew pictures and listened to music, we sat in the grass and wrote poems on the first lovely day of spring, we hunted for frogs in the brook for hours, and one day I remember sitting silently under a hedgerow for an hour watching ants milk aphids with the kids - and we did all the content stuff we had to do, too....I think I taught at least four years worth of curriculum in three years - and I believe it was the atmosphere of unanxious expectation that great things would come in their own time...(School Renewal Network, 6/09/92).

Each teacher has had some moment like this, and it is intoxicating. The moments differ for teachers in mood or substance, depending on what they teach and at what level. But teachers work tremendously hard for those kinds of moments, and so teaching time becomes almost a sacred thing. It is also idiosyncratic to the individual teacher. After all, teaching is a craft, and the time that they make and use is part of that craft. Seasoned teachers, particularly, can be somewhat pugnacious when they are exhorted to use their teaching time differently than they have in the past, especially if the suggestion feels like a university-initiated recipe for time usage. The so-called effective teaching variables (Brophy & Good, 1986; Rosenshine, 1979), however useful in their pure form for helping to shape teaching time, will invariably be adjusted by the veteran teacher to meet her requirements for time.

Perhaps these idiosyncrasies about their time explains why some teachers resist the changes in teaching period length suggested by many school reformers. In the NCEL interviews, a number of teachers discussed how reformers at their schools attempted to modify the day to create longer class periods. They met with considerable resistance from their colleagues. One teacher finally confessed that he and his colleagues were actually frightened by the idea of double periods. They had no idea how they would actually use the time; after so many years of crafting their teaching time to fit 50 minutes, they could not conceive of how to craft it to 100 minutes. Teachers in Essential Schools experience similar challenges when they attempt to extend periods to do more project-oriented work. Changing the amount of teaching time implies a change in their pedagogy, which in turn, requires a reordering of notions of curricular time. One teacher balked at the idea of having students do more project and library work. She realized that she didn't have the time to generate the new curriculum and teaching plans that would facilitate such learning, and such an effort was going to take more time (Muncey & McQuillan, 1992b).

As with each construct we will discuss, teaching time meshes with other portions of time for teachers. In the present instance, we can see that teaching time is constructed differently by different teachers, even when they have the same amount of minutes to use. How teachers craft time is a matter of personality, preference, and cognitive style; in other words, a teacher's use of teaching time mirrors to an extent how he thinks. Of course, one can argue that the effective teacher ought to be in the service of teaching students to think; this would require that the teacher adapt his or her teaching time, and hence his or her thinking, to what students need to do their best work. But to change teaching time implies that teachers will need more learning time; changes in thinking don't come easily to anyone.

Further, we can see that elementary teachers will necessarily differ from high school teachers in the way they construct teaching time because their time is used for substantially different purposes. The nature of the work is different, and the cycles of time differ in elementary school. The boundaries between first period Earth Science and fourth period British Literature, clear and strong in most high schools, are more easily blurred in the elementary room as a read-aloud experience with The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle, 1989) is woven together with a hands-on experience with metamorphosis, and the making of 25 construction paper butterflies for a class mobile.

The careful reformer will not mistake teaching time as the same for all teachers. Nor will they mistake teaching time as a single variable that has scant relationship to other aspects of teacher time. At the very least, teaching time is linked to the time teachers spend with students, the cycles of time in schools, a teacher's subjective experience of time, and the time they manage as they do their work.

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[Some Useful Theories about Time]

[The Multiple Meanings of Time for Teachers (part 2)]