Since the time I sat at the keyboard to begin writing this piece, my phone buzzed with an incoming text message followed by a different buzzing pattern for three e-mails. My wife yelled from the downstairs bedroom where she is spring cleaning our closet, and our cat jumped on the desk to lay behind the fan port of my ThinkPad. In order of priority, I stopped tapping keys to assure that favorite old sweaters made the “keep” pile in the closet, glanced at the three messages, and rubbed the cat’s chin. It often is hard to keep my mind on my morning’s commitment to write. Life can be disturbing. And, these disturbances to my focus do not include the decisions I have been making on the content, organization, and the voice of my writing. Staying mind-on the work at hand is difficult. And, significant to the amount of mind-on time I have given to my writing, I have been reading notes and data from two monitors attached to my computer to formulate the content of my writing. Mind-on has been the amount of time in which I have been fully engaged in conceptualizing, writing, and making immediate and needed corrections. As focused as I try to be, mind-on time has been only about twelve of the past thirty minutes.
Why am I concerned with mind-on time? As a retired public school educator, my time is my time, except for the time my wife and grandchildren require. Correction. Most of my time is my time. As a retired educator still engaged in the field, I am concerned with the proliferation of media, print, e-, and broadcast, that blares the failures of our schools to educate children. A 2013 Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa study says that only “17% of Americans agree that that US high school graduates are ready for the world of work, and 29% agree that they are ready for college.”
The same Gallup poll asked “What do you think are the biggest problems that public schools in your community must deal with?” Responses ran the gamut of problems that schools have faced for several decades
- Lack of financial support (35%)
- Lack of discipline (8%
- Overcrowded schools (7%)
- Lack of parental support (5%)
- Testing and regulations (4%)
- Difficulty in getting good teachers (3%)
- Drug use (3%)
http://products.gallup.com/168380/state-education-report-main-page.aspx
While it may be true that each of these organizational and environmental problems affects the teaching and learning environment, none of these are as directly related to the execution of teaching and learning as mind-on time.
As a superintendent, several secondary teachers constantly reminded me of the incessant school disturbances to teaching and learning time. “My students and I have not had the benefit of five contiguous days of teaching and learning this school year. We seldom have an entire class period without some form of school disturbance.” They went on to correctly tick off the fingers of both hands with the number of disturbances that were part of our “normal” school life.
- Four or five PA announcements calling children to the school office or telling of changed basketball practice schedules every class period.
- Twenty-one special days and observations required by our state’s DPI/state statutes.
- Nineteen days of testing – state testing, school testing, pre- and post-testing, interventional assessments, college admissions testing, special education assessments.
- Seven all-school assemblies and eight class meetings.
- Nine fire drills, two tornado drills, a variety of disaster drills with practices of each drill so that everyone knows what to do during the drill.
- Professional development meetings held eighty miles from school that not only require a full day for the meeting and transportation to the meeting but hours of preparation for a substitute teacher and hours of re-teaching during the days after the meeting.
- Snow days. He smiled and didn’t necessarily hold cancellation of school on days when more than a foot of new snow clogged the local roads.
There were right, of course. How could we expect teachers to conduct quality instruction and children to commit to quality learning when their school leadership incessantly disturbs any sense of mind-on time? I observed classes to see how these disturbances really affected teachers and children. PA announcements are just a pain for everybody. A loud voice coming through the classroom speaker interrupts talking and listening, invades student reading and writing time, and almost always causes everyone to stop doing what they were doing. Interestingly, fewer than 15% of the students on our school ever heard their name voiced over the PA. Yet, how principals, counselors, and attendance offices connect with scores if not hundreds of children every day?
There are ways. These are strategies that mind-on schools can use to diminish school-caused disturbances to mind on teaching and learning.
- Use technology to make your announcements. Post them through the school Internet and wifi systems. Children and teachers will read posted announcements and messages on their personal or school computes or check them on their personal devices. Regardless of school rules, kids checks their phones several times during the hours of a school day for messages. Message these announcements.
- Pre-publish a “Disturbance Plan” so that everyone knows the schedule of testing dates, drills, and meetings. If my teacher colleagues disliked class time disturbances, they really disliked not knowing in advance when the usual types of disturbances could have been “planned around” so that teaching and learning could be chunked for optimal mind-on time.
- Hold required drills at the usual transition times of the school day, such as leading into a passing period or going to lunch time, or just prior to school dismissal. It is impossible to predict when an emergency will arise, but posting drill procedures in all school rooms so that “what to do” is well known and means that you only need to drill safe and orderly procedures.
- Hold student meetings during lunch and right after school. Kids will eat and listen if the substance of the meeting is worth their interest. Adults do this all the time, especially with the content of the meeting is informational and not interactive. And, publishing a schedule of days when after school bus transportation will be delayed twenty minutes creates a correct sense of school priority. It would be so affirming to announce to parents and day care providers, “we will delay dismissing the buses for twenty minutes so that we assure teachers and children have uninterrupted time to complete their class assignments.”
- Connect teachers as often as possible to webcasted professional development or bring the training to the school. Webcasts that allow for replay have additional value. More importantly, the message that undisturbed teaching and learning time is a school priority is essential for parents, community, professional developers as well as teachers to hear. Also, spending some extra funds to reduce teacher travel time and keep teachers with their students even for an additional hour on a professional development day reverberates with all teachers.
- Flip the presentation of supplemental educational information so that teachers and children can read, listen or watch the information on their time. Prepare information about those special observance days as videos or PowerPoints that can be read after school or in the evening. Everyone knows what “token” time is when an hour or more is carved out of the school days for compliance with a state mandate. “Token” time is resented and is not mind-on, so don’t waste the time; flip it out of the teaching and learning day.
As I scratch my cat’s chin once again, it dawns on me that I have had more than an hour of undisturbed writing time. As mind-on opportunities are important for a blogging writer, mind-on time is essential for a child reading and committing essential information to short-term memory or trying to construct a compelling argument in writing, or doing a science lab, or a teacher explaining what Robert Frost meant when he said that “writing poetry without rhyme and meter would be like playing tennis without a net.” Undisturbed mind-on time is essential for reading and listening, writing and speaking, doing hands-on art, music and technical work, and just thinking. We owe teachers and learning children as much mind-on time as we can give them.