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Without a doubt, teachers involved in restructuring need time to understand new concepts, learn new skills, and to develop new attitudes and tolerances. One person writing on the NEA School Renewal Network says it well:
If time is needed for adult learning, how do we find that time, and what might be the char acteristics of that time? Adult learning time in schools can be sliced two ways. It can be time that is allotted for the purpose of learning, say in the form of a workshop, an in-service, or even a course; or it can also be the time that it takes - weeks, months, years - for a person to experience and digest new ideas or ways of working.
In terms of time allotted for adult learning, Berliner's constructs for learning time (1990), offer one avenue for deepening our understanding. Usually some sort of time can be allotted in schools for teacher development, but it is unclear how individuals will actually use that time. For this reason it seems that of all the variables Berliner describes as part of learning time, the concepts of engaged time is particularly salient. Engaged time, the amount of time a participant actually attends to the learning presented, is one of the most difficult things to engender in teachers attending school-wide in-service or planning meetings. It seems very hard for teachers to focus on complex ideas when they get short bursts of released time from their regular work. For instance, some Seattle teachers in the NCEL sample talked at considerable length about how little attention they were able to give to restructuring meetings. Full-day and half-day sessions had been arranged once a month by the team of school leaders to focus on a variety of topics in small action groups. Teachers reported how they grouped with their friends and allies, and although they did some work, they mostly socialized. When learning time is allocated for teachers in the middle of their teaching time, it often used as respite from the routine of schools, not for learning.
How hard and for how long teachers are willing to persevere at the task of learning about restructuring is also an issue in learning time. Many participants find themselves quickly discouraged by how much attention to group process must be paid in order to generate long- lasting products (Cambone et al., 1992; Lieberman et al., 1991b; Muncey & McQuillan, 1992a; Weiss et al., 1992). It is hard work learning the skills of conflict resolution and consensus building. Not everyone is willing to commit to it. In one NCREST school, some members of the SDM team were highly task-oriented, and they rushed forward to implement changes without a full consensus with fellow members, and against the warnings of their facilitator. Eventually, the team came to a standstill, with the group divided equally on some important issues. To their credit, they realized that they had ignored good advice, and had made important errors in group process. They persevered by returning to the beginning of the decision-making process, and again moved forward (Lieberman et al., 1991b). But many teachers are not so willing to persevere at learning, and find the whole process to be thoroughly disheartening.
The pace of learning, how quickly new information is brought to teachers and how quickly they digest it, appears to play an important role in their learning. Learning time for teachers is a developmental process, as it probably is for us all. A phrase used in schools across the country is "buy-in," and it seems closely related to the developmental learning process for teachers. If this phrase is unpacked, we find that it refers to the process of first coming to understand the concepts presented in restructuring proposals, to next wondering how they differ from past "innovative" suggestions, to weighing them against one's own values and experiences as a teacher and a citizen, to waiting until some initial results are in, to testing some ideas for oneself, and then to giving one's support, however limited, to learning more and trying things out for oneself. What complicates this process most profoundly is that buying in to reform is not purely an intellectual process, but a social and emotional one, as well. I and my colleagues have argued elsewhere (Cambone et al., 1992) that teachers have long been socialized into thinking and responding in particularly timid ways; many teachers are unsure of how to use their strengths and abilities in the larger arena of school life. In the context of school reform, it will take teachers a long time to unlearn their wary attitudes toward traditional school authority, to develop a strong sense of professional identity, or to willingly take responsibility for school- wide decisions. Teachers, taken as a group, are a reticent lot, and many have good reason to be.
Of course, merely allowing time and experience to unfold does not bring about specific learning outcomes for teachers, nor anyone for that matter. There must be significant invest ment in adult learning as a goal, like at the Green Valley Essential School described in the SEP studies. Over a ten year period, the principal and staff have reorganized the school schedule, instituted an advisor-advisee program, lowered the dropout rate, and changed the school discipline policy. Investigators point to the principal's enthusiasm and vision, but also his investment in teacher learning time. This is reflected in his commitment to professional development activities for teachers, including the use of the summer to plan the upcoming school year, but also in such activities as encouraging teachers to keep journals. He collects these journals each week and reads them twice - once for understanding and once to respond (Muncey and McQuillan, 1992a). Allotting and managing time to conduct these activities must be a difficult task for teachers and principal, alike. But these examples highlight both the process time and the pace of learning that can stretch over months and even years.
Finally, learning time for teachers cannot be separated from the content that they are encouraged to learn. This content, as the teacher in the quote that led this section states, is complex in the extreme, and spans a wide group of interrelated topics. The structure and governance of schools, teaching and learning innovations, educational technology, and philosophy of education, not to mention adult behavior, are each fields of study in themselves to which people dedicate their entire thinking lives. It is small wonder that teachers need quality time in copious quantities to encounter different ideas, test them, reflect upon them, and experiment with them in their practice.
Bird and Little argue that "considerably more time for these activities [of learning] should be made in the normal school day, either by addition or by the elimination of activities that are less important" (Bird & Little, 1986; p. 504) However, it appears in the studies reviewed here, that allocating time for teacher learning is not as effective when it is integrated with teaching time, student time, and the standard cycle of schools. Brief forays on Tuesday afternoon into topics of school governance or curriculum reform just do not do the trick. Adult learning time appears to need more breathing space that can't be found in the brisk tempo of the regular school day or week. It requires room for reflection, experimentation, and deep discussion. Some schools appear to have begun to acknowledge these facts. One NEA school, for instance, has been thinking about making a commitment to provide its teachers with 50% of their time as non-instructional time by the end of the decade (Watts & Castle, 1992). Ostensibly, some of this time will be put aside for professional learning.
Learning time seems to mesh with innovation time, discussed next, and some schools in the studies have begun to see the double benefits. Often a big leap in understanding and skill improvement comes when a team of teachers gets away to focus on restructuring as a topic all by itself, unimpeded by the time constraints of the work day. While many of these times encroach on teacher's private time, happening as they do during weekends or summers, most teachers report that it is time well spent. Subsequent work is done more easily.
Time for Innovation
There appears to be a pattern of behavior among teachers suggesting that in order to be innovative, creative, free to try new ideas, they must be away from the time and place of schools. Prolonged release time, retreat time, and summer work time are all venues that schools in the various studies have used with success. Discussing this phenomena in the schools they studied, the NCREST investigators write, "In all cases, team members reported how important the retreats were to their work. As one said, 'It is a time when we can actually work through major problems and have enough time to do it'" (Lieberman et al., 1991a; p. 14). Evidence from Essential Schools also shows that teachers benefitted from symposia, conferences, retreats, and prolonged workshops.
This need for special, uninterrupted time to innovate is not surprising in light of the phenomenology of teacher time. While working every day in a polychronic time frame, teachers are focussed on the interactions among students, and between themselves and students. Part of a teacher's mind is engaged in the curriculum and teaching she is doing; part is wrapped up in managing her administrative, planning, and duty tasks. For many teachers, part of their thinking is concentrated on how they can keep control and safety in their classrooms. Of course, for some teachers, as the pressure of the day mounts, the adrenaline that courses through their bodies pushes them to heights of creativity in their pedagogy. But many teachers cannot find the creative space in their packed days to think big thoughts, toss around creative plans, or do the detailed work that will change their school's governance, curriculum, or schedules. Most teachers, on most days, are fully engaged in implementing, not innovating.
As with learning time, innovation time for teachers is usually sandwiched in between all of their other tasks. The correspondence among teachers in the School Renewal Network provides a good example of the dilemmas this creates for teachers. There are a number of descriptions of how they have squeezed an hour or so out of their weeks for innovation. There are elaborate plans where teacher aides carry out prepackaged art and exercise programs so that teachers can be released to plan; substitute time is used to free up teachers in groups; teachers bank their time by teaching longer days, 4 times a week. On the fifth day, they spend their time in collaboration (School Renewal Network, 1992). But Watts and Castle claim that such efforts are tinkering with, and not necessarily transforming of, schools. They write that these efforts are like "building an airplane while we're in the air" (Watts & Castle, 1992; p. 7).
As I mentioned at the top of this discussion on innovation time, some schools actually land for awhile and do the redesign work on the ground. The schools studied by NCREST, and the Essential Schools that were able to survive, share the planful use of retreats and time away from school to think and work. The Maine school in the NCEL study carried out a yearly outdoor challenge week for its entire teaching and non-teaching staff just before the school year began. Teachers found this invaluable for building teamwork skills, trust, and confidence in each other.
In most schools though, innovation time must double up with planning time. However, day- to-day planning is a substantively different endeavor from innovation, much like building the plane while aloft. If teachers are to do the important work of school redesign, they need the research and development time to do it. Constructing that kind of time, and adding it to the current mix of time constraints, is indeed a daunting task.
Managed time
Managed time is what we usually think time is when we think of time at all. Everyone par ticipates in some form of managed time - either as the manager or the managed - throughout most of the workday. We cannot adequately discuss how teachers find time for restructuring without first asking how they manage the time for work they already do. Before any tasks of restructuring are added, teachers already must manage paltry amounts of time to do preparation, grading, faculty meetings, hall duty, study hall, parent conferences or calls, extra help after school, for sorting and filing student work, talking to the speech and language specialist about Maria's bilateral lisp, attending IEP meetings, getting the AV equipment ordered, and tracking down, photocopying, or making dittos of materials - all above and beyond their teaching time, and all in the context of a school schedule that is managed by someone else. It is not surprising that a teacher's ability to manage time is so important to the work of teaching, that states require student teachers be evaluated on whether the are competent at managing their time before allowing them to be certified.
Of course, teachers only manage their time to an extent, given the school schedule. As one NEA teacher said and many teachers would agree, "The schedule is GOD. You can do any innovation you want in your classroom as long as you don't mess with the schedule" (Watts and Castle, 1992; p.4). The daily, weekly, semester, and yearly cycles of school time are decided by others, and not managed by teachers. It almost goes without saying, that the way time is scheduled in schools is intended to meet administrative and institutional needs but not necessarily the teaching and learning needs. This is not surprising, nor is it illogical. The time that teachers can manage for themselves is completely constrained by the boundaries of the schedule, which in turn is constrained by the sociotemporal cycles of schools. A teacher simply cannot decide that 7:30 until 10:45 are his most productive teaching hours, and 11 to 11:45 is the best time for grading papers. Too many overlapping schedules -student's, specialist's, classroom teacher's schedules - must be coordinated if there is any hope for order and purpose in the school.
Individual teachers are constrained by the larger school schedule, but even when teachers try to organize into clusters and to manage their time collectively, they often run up against time constraints imposed by the larger school culture. Particularly at the high school level where students might want to take second language courses and other electives, cluster programs founder as they try to accommodate student scheduling needs. The constraints aren't always derived from the lack of available hours. For instance, Essential Schools have adopted the philosophy that "less is more" partially in response to the ways that having too many choices dilutes student learning in any one discipline. The less is more philosophy helps with scheduling students in alternative schools, where the four core subjects (mathematics, English, science, and history) are the predominant offering. However, while scheduling issues are diminished, the political implications of dividing time between so few subject areas constrains how far teachers can go in managing the scheduled time (see Political Time, below).
The grand schedule of schools is remarkably resistant to change, and so in order to get their work done, teachers exert considerable control over time in class, between their classes, at preparatory and lunch periods, and before and after school. High school teachers have quite a lot of control over the way in which a class period will unfold, for instance; elementary teachers can control the flow of their entire day - up to a point. Teachers control whether they use a preparatory period for preparing, meeting with another teacher, or arranging for their car to be serviced. Teaching time, student time, and other managed time all must coexist, and somewhere in the day everything they are required to do to keep life running smoothly must be done. For the conscientious teacher, this means using up some private time to finish work. In Among Schoolchildren (1989), Tracy Kidder describes Chris Zajac sitting after dinner at least a few nights a week grading her student papers because in her busy day, there simply was not enough time to do all the work. This image is familiar to all teachers. In my own experience, my first principal and mentor taught me that my weekend ended and my job really began on Sunday evening at 5 when, like it or not, my thoughts would turn to planning and preparing for the next morning.
Administrative time
Into this already packed worklife, teachers have added the tasks of restructuring. The two new tasks that seem to surface most often throughout the literature are management meetings for activities such as strategic planning, decision-making teams, and site-based management groups - and co-planning periods for teachers to collaborate on teaching plans. Administrative time is relatively new to teachers and finding it is particularly difficult. Teachers and administrators have tried to buy, borrow, and even steal time for the administrative work they want to do. But little real progress has been made at satisfactory solutions, for each new arrangement of time bumps up against another need teachers have for time. Mostly, administrative time is being shoe-horned into the existing ecology of teacher time, and it has upset the entire system.
It is, however, exciting and even exhilarating work for many teachers. For instance, at the Stephen Day School in the NCREST study, a group of reluctant teachers became excited about SDM as a result of a week-long student counseling and orientation program they had successfully planned and implemented. The team and staff felt they had finally taken some control of their destiny. But it was not without cost, "We're dying now because there's just no time to handle all our regular duties and responsibilities as well as these new ones - but we're dying with smiles on our faces" (Lieberman et al., 1991b; p. 6).
Teachers have mixed feelings about their struggle to find administrative time. It affects their teaching time, as well as their student time. One teacher wrote about the guilt she feels leaving her class to do her administrative work.
In a school described in an NCEL study, a collaborative team of elementary grade teachers met periodically on Saturday mornings in order to avoid being out of their classes too often. The team was made up of three general teachers and one special education teacher. They collaborated around almost every aspect of their teaching, including such things as their literature curriculum, instructional groupings, or behavioral and learning problems of individual students. The Saturday morning meetings were crucial, even though during the week they had bought collaboration time with grant money that brought specialists into their classrooms to teach (Boles, 1990).
There is clearly no way that teachers can successfully do all they are asked to do, and all they want to do, in the current schedules of schools. To have more administration time, they must - at least - reinvent the school schedule and their current means for time management. Teachers are experimenting with a variety of methods. After examining the correspondence from the School Renewal Network, Watts and Castle (1992) listed some of the strategies that teachers have employed to resolve these dilemmas. Some faculties have freed up more time from the constraints on the school day through early release, team teaching, administrators teaching on occasion, and the use of parents. Some schools have actually altered the school calendar or day to accommodate new blocks of time. In other schools, new time has been purchased using grant money, substitute funds, or staff development monies. For the most part, teachers have only succeeded in juggling time within the confines of the existing school cycles. As long as the tasks they must accomplish as teachers remain the same, and the schedule constraints remain the same, teachers will not be able to change their managed time. Without a change in their current managed time, they will never find adequate administrative time. Even at one of the most successful SDM schools in the NCREST study, a key finding was that "those interviewed pointed out that the combined responsibilities of creating new programs while teaching the old ones were draining, perhaps to the point that they could not both be managed well" (Lieberman et al., 1991a; p. 28).
There may be some promise for finding administrative time for teachers by extending the school year or day. This will happen only if policymakers, parents, and other stakeholders in schools are willing to redistribute teaching time in order to make more room for administrative time for teachers. Until recently, the Federal government advocacy for increasing instructional time for students had been quite strong, and will take precedence over time for teachers. Without a change in that emphasis, it seems unlikely that the extended year will provide the needed time for teachers. Whatever the case, a change in the length of the school year implies a change in the more than just the cycle of schools, but in the entire community.
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[The Multiple Meanings of Time for Teachers (part 3)]