Education's Four Letter Word

The winter break provides educators an opportunity to unplug from their roles within the school, to recharge the batteries, deepen their relationships with family and friends, and to steal a few moments of quiet reflection.  In one of those quiet reflective moments, I found myself thinking about my first 6 months as building principal.  And while these months can be simply summarized as a game of survival, I realized that I have recently been able to think towards the future.  As I think about the future for our school, our district and the field of education as a whole, I see one thing as a certainty; change is the new norm.  Gone are the days when we could look at our field as predictable.  School choice, technology, education research, state/federal programs and mandates, public accountability, grant funding, a sluggish economy, 24 hour news networks and a plethora of other factors have placed an enormous amount of pressure on our field to evolve. This should not come as a surprise.  If we think of any other major institution/industry (automotive, airlines, higher education, entertainment, medical, telecommunication, etc.) and consider what that institution/industry looked like 10 years ago, we would be hard pressed to recognize the similarities to today's iteration.  Do we feel that education is immune to such evolutionary forces?  Should our students expect any less?

If we are willing to accept change as the new norm then we must next come to the realization that we may never feel settled again.  We are likely to spend the rest of our professional careers in a state of flux, and the expectation will be that we are willing and ready to learn more, that our students will perform better, and that our profession will progress at a rate equal to that of the world around us.  Now anyone that has been in education for more than ten minutes knows that after reading the above two sentences nearly every educator (be it teacher, principal, superintendent) will immediately ask, "When are we supposed to have the time to do this?"  And there we have it, the four letter word of education: TIME.  Let's talk a little bit about this elephant....

Ground Rules

Before engaging in a conversation on time, I need to establish some assumptions.  These are the assumptions that I operate under.  I welcome challenge on these assumptions, but they are foundation assumptions that help to shape the conversation to follow.  

1. Time is fixed - My rudimentary understanding of astronomy helps me feel confident that they day is not likely to extend beyond 24 hours any time soon.  Also, while some charter and magnet schools are experimenting with longer school days/years, we are not likely to see that type of a change in a widespread fashion in the next 5 years.
2. Accountability - Taxpayers have supported increased education funding for years (per pupil) and there is a very real pressure to ensure this financial support is producing results.
3. We are professionals - Educators operate in jobs that require certification, an advanced degree and license renewal.  This is no different than a lawyer, doctor or CPA.  No one would expect their lawyer, doctor or accountant to operate solely on the knowledge they gained in school.  We expect these professionals to stay current in their field, adapt their practice to match current thinking, and incorporate technologies that make them more efficient and effective.  As professionals, educators should be held to the same standard.
4. The school day is short - A typical student day consists of six and a half hours.  If you remove 20 minutes for lunch, 20 minutes for recess (elementary), 10 minutes for homeroom, at least six transitions of five minutes each for lunch, recess, specials, class/subject changes, and dismissal you are left with only about 5 hours for instruction.  

Each Day is Precious

What happens in the classroom each and every day is the responsibility of the classroom teacher.  As a building principal, I have a responsibility to be in classrooms and I am responsible for constructing a schedule that meets the academic needs of our students; however, it is the classroom teacher that determines how that time is utilized each and every day.  We get such limited time with our students.  There are only 180 days in a school year.  The average teacher misses between 5 and 7 days of school, reducing the 180 to 173.  Add assemblies, field trips, half days, and the first/last day of school and teachers are lucky to get 160 quality days for instruction.  These are precious days and as a teacher, you must consider how to best spend these days.  

We must be willing to ask ourselves hard questions if we are going to move our profession forward.  For example, it is "conventional wisdom" in elementary schools that the day(s) leading up to a vacation are for parties, fun activities, craft projects and performances.  In my experience this practice stems from a belief that attendance before the vacation will be poor, therefore as a teacher I shouldn't waste my time with important content.  The problem is that attendance records do not support this belief.  Students come to school on these days because their parents are already scrambling to work out child care for the school vacation and are not going to add to this burden unnecessarily.  So we need to ask ourselves, if students are going to get 10 days off from school for a vacation, do they need "pre-vacation" during the preceding days? 

Another example involves reading instruction.  Our reading curriculum centers around regular guided reading practice with a trained professional.  Students need regular practice with reading in order to become better readers, and directed instruction from a teacher in small reading groups around specific skills is the best way to guarantee student success.  If a teacher decides to take one day a week off from guided reading (it is almost always a Friday) so that students can "catch up" on center work or other projects left from the week, there are approximately 30 days of reading instruction lost over the course of the year.  The question we have to ask ourselves is, "How many of our struggling readers can afford to miss 30 days of reading instruction?"

Are we willing to reclaim this time?  These are the tough decisions that professionals have to make.  If we are going to out this four letter word, we must be willing to take a hard look at how we use each of our days.

Look For Efficiency

Each of us does things in our professional life because we have always done them that way.  However, many things in our lives we could do more efficiently.  For example, do you hand out papers to your students?  If so, how do you do it?  Do you walk around the room and hand one out to each child?  If you do, it probably takes about 3 minutes each time you do that.  Let's say you do it 5 times a day.  That is 15 minutes each day, 75 minutes each week and 2,700 minutes each year that you are not teaching.  If you changed this practice to shave 1/2 that time, you would gain 1,350 minutes of instruction back.  

How about attendance?  Is there a system that you could set up in your room that would put more of the onus on the students and free you up to meet with students.  This can be done in any grade.  I saw a kindergarten teacher that created a question of the day for her students to do when they first arrived.  The question always had two choices and students had to move a magnet that had their name on it under one of the answers.  The teacher trained the students in this procedure early in the year.  Students completed this activity after entering the room each morning.  The teacher could quickly see if all the students were present by examining the question board.  While students were completing this task and other morning work, she was able to conference with students individually.  

Technology has brought efficiency to every other profession in America, it should be doing the same for ours.  Do not fear technology.  Look for ways to embrace it and allow it to make some of your more mundane tasks easier.  Do you take a lot of time averaging student grades at the end of the year?  There's an app for that.  Want an easy way to keep current on education topics?  There is an app for that.  Want to be able to access your documents, pictures, videos, etc. from any Internet enabled device?  There are several apps for that.  Technology is not just a tool to support student learning, it is also a tool to support us in our professional lives.  Be sure you are leveraging it to your advantage.  

Eat Your Frog

There is a motivational book by Brian Tracy entitled Eat That Frog.  In the book he provides ways to accomplish your goals and one piece of advice he offers is around the idea of eating your frog.  The frog represents the one task that you have to get done that is likely to be the hardest and least desirable task of the day.  To "Eat Your Frog" is to take on that task first thing.  It is essentially the opposite of procrastinating.  We all know that there are things we need to get done and things we would like to get done.  Eating your frog in part means that you are prioritizing the demands placed on you (because time is fixed) and you are taking on your toughest challenges first.  This approach frees your mind of the burden of your "Frog" and allows you to move through your other tasks more efficiently.    

Whether or not you are a believer in the frog metaphor, being a professional requires us to make difficult decisions.  We are required to prioritize our own time, because there is not enough time to do everything. However, not everything needs to be done.  Some tasks can be reassigned to other people.  Some tasks can be done more efficiently.  Some tasks can be stopped all together.  There are places in all of our lives where we can grab more time, but it will not happen without an examination of our current practice and it has to come from within.  We can not use time as an excuse if we are not willing to examine the ways we are using the time we are provided.  Teachers must understand that they are empowered to make these decisions on their own.  They can look for ways to better utilize time and will never run astray as long as they make decisions based on the best interest of their students.