Increasing Effective Learning Time

One of the privileges that I have as Superintendent of the School District of Beloit is to visit the schools and classrooms.  I visit to watch the wonder of student learning and especially like seeing the moments when 'the light turns on'.  It is what attracted me to education in the first place. It still holds fascination for me.  I have seen a variety of classes and classrooms and have watched different instructional styles.  Though there isn't one style or technique that proves to be radically more effective than another, there is one thing that I have noticed.  I would like to focus this blog on that matter.
When you walk into some classrooms you notice that there is student focus and student engagement with very little time off task.  In some classrooms that I have visited I watch the effortless transitions from one activity to another.  I have watched teachers who expect that all students are ready to participate in discussions and they do not just call on the bright student repeatedly.  They pull students names out of a jar or some other procedure that insures that everyone has to be at the ready. They have created the culture and expectation within their rooms in which all students have to be engaged and ready.  These same teachers have processes and procedures that eliminate long transitions from one thing to another.  In the past in my job as a principal and then as a supervisor of schools I would sit in classrooms in which very little engaged learning time occurred.  The teacher would speak to the students trying to get them to settle down so that he could start the lesson.  If this took 3 minutes the teacher would wait until they were quiet.  They had no procedure to make this happen quickly and so the class dragged on and learning was held hostage.  What made it even more painful is that I have only worked in high need, high poverty districts.  Most of the students in those classroooms were students of color and of poverty.  These students entered Kindergarten with a limited vocabulary and little academic knowledge on which to build.  In the big scheme of things they were like a runner who was a mile behind in a five mile race.  At the start of the race they were already far behind their more advantaged peers.  They needed to catch up!  I watched classrooms where it took forever to get kids to focus.  Handing out papers took forever.  If students needed to sharpen a pencil learning halted for that student.  Students got up and down like a jack-in-a-box. I would watch teachers that taught, even if no one was attending or paying attention.  Students were in their desks,  looking down and exhibiting that they were not tied into what the teacher was doing.  I am glad that there were no sharp objects close to me or I would have put myself out of my misery!  It was very painful and hard for me not to intervene.
During those past experiences I also noticed that in the some classrooms no enrichment happened.  If a teacher was teaching a particular work of literature or science lesson they never mentioned enriching facts or vocabulary.  I suspected that they were so tired of trying to corral everyone's focus that they taught to the least common denominator. They were internally frustrated because they knew that there had to be a better way.  As a supervisor I must tell you that it was not a shock when I examined the data on student achievement in those classrooms.  Students did poorly on state tests.  The reason was not hard to figure out.  In a low performing classroom for every 60 minutes of Allocated Learning Time about 60% it was wasted. Students were engaged about 40% of the time(24 minutes)! Think about that in terms of a students first four years of school.  That would mean that a student in a classroom where students are engaged 80% of the allocated learning time get twice the education of these students in low engagement classrooms. It also means that in four years of seat time less than two years of real education happened. Would there be any wonder on why these students are a year or two behind!  As I said that was my experience in my last job.  I must confess that I am concerned that this is a phenomenom that occurs in too many classrooms throughout the state and country.
I once had a teacher that had the problem of low Engagement Time.  Watching her start and stop a lesson because of disruption was like watching the old steam locomotive get started.  She would slowly chug ahead and then stop and then chug forward again. I couldn't take it any more. I knew that she was potentially a really great teacher.  I finally intervened and told her that I wanted her to use data to determine how much learning time was being wasted in her classroom.  I told her that I wanted her to take baseline data first.  Each time that she had to stop teaching for any reason I wanted her to take a marble and put it in a large jar.  I wanted her to do this in front of the students for one week but not to give them any explanation.  I wanted her to write down the number of marbles each day,  record it and graph it.  The next week I wanted her to start the class by explaining what the marbles in the jar were about.  I wanted her to show the students a chart of the last week and the number of marbles she dropped in the jar and how many times she stopped their learning.  More importantly I wanted her to explain the consequences of wasting learning time in terms of whether or not they would get to go to college, have interesting jobs, drive nice cars or live in nice homes.  I wanted her to make them understand that their lives were being diminished by the constant waste of Engaged Learning Time.  She worked with the students and set a goal for the number of interuptions.  They tried it the next day and there were a few less marbles, but it was not significant.  She then added a reward component, if they reached the weekly goal.  She didn't shoot for the moon with her initial goals.  If there were 30 marbles as the baseline the goal was 22 marbles.  If they reached 22 she set the goal at 17, and so on.  I cannot tell you how excited she was a few weeks later when she came into my office with a few of her students and they proclaimed that they only had 3 marbles in the jar!  I was excited as well.  I was excited that the amount of time that those students were learning and engaged was increasing.  I was excited that they had increased their chances of succeeding and their future opportunities were expanding proportionately.
I leave you with this thought and challenge> Since we cannot increase the amount of Allocated Learning Time, let's see what we can do to increase the amount of Engaged Learning Time in each of our classrooms across this wonderful district.  Milt Thompson, Superintendent of Schools