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On any given day, middle school students begin gathering their books and lining up at the door waiting for the hell to ring five to ten minutes before class is officially over. In other classrooms, students finish their assigned work and chat among themselves, sit at their desks doing nothing, or. in the worst-case scenario, get out of their seats and begin to disrupt class. And in many classrooms, several minutes are squandered each time learning activities are changed. Even in the most benign of the above examples, quality instructional time is being lost al a number of points during teachers' lessons. Some educators might say that it is only a few minutes here and there, but even live minutes a day adds up to a significant loss of instructional time each semester. Revisiting the relationship between lost minutes of instruction and the quality of teaching may be warranted. Current state and national educational expectations, with their emphasis on results on high-stakes tests, serve as incentives for each teacher to plan every lesson carefully and to use classroom time as effectively and efficiently as possible. In other words, we should be paying more attention to both aspects of the time on task equation: purposeful use of time and quality instruction.
Following my own years as a teacher and as an assistant principal and principal for more than 25 years, nearly half in middle level schools and now as a teacher educator for more than 10 years. I have observed many classroom teachers in a variety of urban and suburban school districts. While I have seen firsthand innumerable lessons of impeccable quality, I have also seen more than a few poorly conceived lessons and wasted classroom time that involved both beginning and veteran teachers. Lack of attention to time on task is not the only reason for less-than-adequate student achievement. However, it is a factor teachers directly control.
The purposes of this article are to highlight several aspects of using time effectively through a series of vignettes, to apply the current research on time on task, and to offer to middle school educators a variety of ways to help remedy lost time on task.
Time on task
One of the main themes of the Effective...