How to Protect the Teaching Moments

There are two main ways, as administrators and teachers, we can protect the teaching moments and improve the use of time-on-task in every classroom. We do so by limiting interruptions in the schedule and by guiding teachers to limit interruptions they can control,

in their classrooms.

As an administrator, it is very tempting to provide a multitude of fun and valuable assemblies, fund-raisers, and contests to insert into the normal week and excite our students about coming to school each day. However, when your admin team have no time to do their normal tasks each week due preparations of the next whole-school event and middle school teachers are asking for more teaching time to get through the curriculum, this signals there may be too many extra happenings.

For the Whole School

At one point, at our school, the administrative team sat down and looked at the school calendar with new eyes. We lumped our special events into three categories:

1)    Have to do

2)   Adjust the time/dates (meaning shorter or combine) and be able to do

3)   Put on the back burner, for this year, anyway. 

We made every attempt to limit the number of extra events per month, to something we could live with. Granted, during certain months around the holidays, this is really difficult but we did make changes. It’s important for all involved that whatever events are left in the schedule, they include a balance of what fits the mission of the school. In other words, make sure what is left is not all fund raisers or counseling programs or athletics.

In the Classroom

Next, we went to the teachers and spent a lot of time observing the mechanics of a classroom.  I now strongly endorse the idea of protecting the teaching moments. Sometimes this comes naturally to a teacher and other times valuable minutes are lost, unintentionally. At any rate, students and teachers need to respect the teaching time. Here are a few helpful hints to keep the teaching moments safe.

• Make it clear to students what is considered the teaching or teacher time.  This would be when you are presenting the material to the class, even if through a video clip.

• During the teaching time there should be no moving around the room, not even for a tissue, sharpening pencils, throwing something away and certainly not working with a partner. Bathroom break should have its own time. Anything that may keep a student from hearing what the teacher has to say or distracting others from hearing, cannot be allowed.

• All these other things can happen when students are working individually or in small groups. Pull outs for special help or testing needs to be scheduled during application or work time.  That being said, a teacher needs to keep the teaching time to 5 – 15 minutes at a time, depending on the age of the student and the subject.

• Projects with presentations – I admit I have a pet peeve about these.  Although group and individual projects can be great for applying knowledge to a productive outcome, be very careful with these. When every student in the class presents their project to the whole class, it means there is little to no real teaching done for a few weeks of class time.  It can be said that each student is teaching the whole class what they researched, however, this is weak and not generally good use of the time. Pick out a few of the best projects and have them presented to the class, if interesting or valuable to the goals of the unit. Also, remember unless you are teaching speech or oral presentation, that should not be a large portion of the grade or time spent.  

For more tips on protecting the teaching time in a Do’s and Don’ts checklist, follow this link, Go Forth and Lead Teaching Resources | Teachers Pay Teachers.