‘Time on task’ refers to the time people spend engaged in activity designed to bring about learning. It suggests focus, and thinking, and some effort.
In schools, it’s a good bet that success in increasing students’ time on task is likely to enable them to learn more, over time – that may sound so obvious that it doesn’t deserve to be said, but it’s a truth that is easy to neglect in the hubbub of the daily routines of school life. Learning time is precious; it’s good to remind ourselves about the need to maximise it, and to think about how we might do that.
Some key things that are apt to erode learning time in classrooms
- Students chatting: this is, by far, the biggest time-eater in lessons. Let’s remember: doing work is hard, making an effort is, well, effortful, and we are biologically hardwired to conserve energy in case we have to flee imminent danger – say, a leopard leaping in through the classroom window. Learning new things IS hard, too – or it should be; as I often say to students in assemblies, ‘If you are finding the work easy a lot of the time, you’re probably doing the wrong work’. Chatting is far easier and it’s probably more fun a lot of the time – we humans are hugely social creatures and what on earth did we think was going to happen if we put up to 30 young people together in a very small space and ask them to sit for quite a long time at a stretch (established in Victorian times to educate the masses, this remains our State model of schooling)? Chatting is a popular classroom activity that eats away at those precious minutes of learning time, lesson after lesson, day after day.
- Time-wasting: students taking a long time to settle at the start of the lesson; being distracted a lot – looking around at other students and out of the window, searching for a pen, and then a pencil, and then a pencil-sharpener and so on; asking to go to the toilet at some point during every lesson (without a good reason); stopping work at the first sign of a difficulty to wait for the teacher to come and help… most of this activity will not be wilfully done to avoid working – although that can definitely happen, too – but all of these things reduce precious learning time.
- Lesson planning and/or delivery issues: pace issues, such as allowing 25 minutes for an activity when 15 minutes would be plenty; ‘winging it’ a lot; not being sufficiently clear on exactly what it is intended that the students will learn from the activities they are doing in the lesson (or series of lessons); too much teacher talk (teacher talk is essential; it’s about getting the balance right)
No doubt there are many other things that will use up learning time but what makes all of them so important is the multiplier factor: add up, over a school year, say, the amount of time lost to learning by a group of chatty students in class x and you get a scary amount of time wasted over that school year. Let’s add it up now: say a chatty student has three 60-minute lessons of Macrame a week and on average they spend about a third of their lesson time chatting; over a school year, this means they will have wasted 2,340 minutes, or 39 hours, in chit-chat – you could probably learn a lot of extra Macrame in those 39 hours.
How to get more learning time
- We have to minimise classroom chit-chat – I am absolutely NOT talking here about classroom discussion, productive talk is hugely beneficial to learning – by seeing it for the huge time-waster that it is, insisting on students spending their precious classroom time productively, and tackling chit-chat when it happens. I realise this is easier to say than do when, for example, otherwise very well-behaved students are ‘chatting while working’. Chatting while working means, in reality, less time working because we can’t both chat and work at the same time – unless the work is literally mindless and requiring no thought, what we are doing is rapidly switching between chatting and working and that is bound to have a detrimental effect on the learning.
- We can also minimise time-wasting activity through well-established sensible routines in the classroom that make the expectations clear. When the systems are good (e.g. we hand out books like this, if I don’t have a pen when I arrive at the classroom I do this…) and the expectations for behaviour are high, less time is wasted – back to the multiplier effect.
- Tight lesson planning helps get the pace right, and helps reduce wasted learning time. Time spent planning great lessons is, by and large, a far better use of teacher time than time spent marking piles of students’ books. Time can also sometimes be lost through students doing less effective work, but that’s a question about pedagogy that deserves its own topic.
Squeezing some extra learning time out of lessons requires some thought and discipline, but it is surely well worth it.
Mark Patterson
Principal
Hinchingbrooke School
Brampton Road
Huntingdon
Cambs PE29 3BN
Tel: 01480 375675
