Time. We are all prisoners of it. That fact is especially evident in the classroom. We try to make more of it (think Saturday school, extended day, homework). The fact is, the way we look at time and how we use it is a major factor in determining student success.
Up until now, everything I knew about time, I learned from watching “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” so I was eager to find out about a new way of looking at time from D.C. Berliner's work, Simple Views of Effective Teaching and a Simple Theory of Classroom Instruction.. Time is, of course, a limited resource, and it is often looked at metaphorically as something ‘that runs out’. Time can be looked on in other ways as well, something we can affect.
Berliner tells us that time at school can be divided into 4 different categories: Allocated, instructional, engaged, and academic learning time.
The largest category of time, making up 100%, is allocated time. Allocated time is the amount of time set aside by the legislature. It’s our 180 days from
The next category of time is called instructional time. Research shows that instructional time represents about 90% of allocated time. Instructional time is the time that a teacher can be observed teaching. It can be whole group, small group, or individual instruction. Instructional time can be increased by good classroom management and the minimization of outside distractions.
Engaged time, which represents about 75% of allocated time, is the time that students spend actually engaged in a task. The concept of engaged time does NOT take student success into account. Therefore, while engaged, students may be bored, or they may be struggling or frustrated. Motivating students, scaffolding instruction, and tapping into prior knowledge all serve to increase engaged time.
The final type of time, and the most valuable, is referred to by researchers as academic learning time. It is the time the learner is engaged in appropriate activities that are closely related to improved academic performance. Unfortunately, academic learning time only makes up about 35% of allocated time. Educators can seek to increase this precious type of time by giving effective feedback, helping students recognize success, attributing success to effort, and creating self-directed learners.
It is true that we can’t make more time, and even without supporting research, it seems fairly obvious that the more time we spend on a task, the more we learn. Research has verified that this relationship exists for academic activities. But simply assigning more study time to a topic will not automatically increase the student's learning. There are strategies to reallocate, or reshape the kinds of time that we are using during the day. Research shows a positive relationship between the amount of academic learning time and student achievement so the idea here is to increase the desirable academic learning time to the maximum amount possible. This, while at the same time decreasing unproductive portions of the other, less desirable types of time.
Berliner's research has shown that successful teachers who maximize academic learning time spend a great deal of time actively instructing their students through interactive lessons that feature teacher-student discourse and relatively little time working without guidance. They stimulate their students to react to the curriculum in a thoughtful and successful manner. For the most successful teachers, instruction occurs during interactive discourse with students rather than during extended lectures, presentations, or demonstrations. It is this combination of quantity and quality that defines effective academic learning time.
