Not Enough Time!!
My entire career as an educator I have heard colleagues utter these words. Sometimes it’s said like Frank the Tank in Old School:
But most often it’s discussed in reference to the quantity of material that a teacher has to cover in the allotted time given in the schedule. Most recently the discussion we’ve been having is around language arts. The argument is that Language Arts isn’t really one subject but five, (reading, writing, spelling, grammar, presentation skills) and that each of those subjects needs to be taught each and every day. Now I understand that every teacher feels his/her subject area is the most important and needs to be taught every day. Coming from an elementary school background our first charge is to build foundational level of understanding in reading, writing, and math. But secondarily to that we have a responsibility to illuminate all facets of the world to our students from the animals and plants to the cultures people have created.
For us, the issue has bubbled up with our upper elementary grades where our students can read and write and are now reading and writing to learn. Another contributing factor in our particular building is that our curriculum is taught by subject area specialists rather than one homeroom teacher. Therefore, teachers have less flexibility within their own schedule to borrow from math time for science time for example. We’ve discussed and gone down the road to trying a few solutions.
1. Block schedule: A block schedule by itself may not create more time but may indirectly because of less time lost in transitions. Rather than meeting with each class daily for a short period of time (40-60 min), students would meet for 2 hours at a time a few times a cycle.
Advantages: Students have longer chunks of time to work and can get more deeply invested in the material.
Can be adapted to adjust for snow days and PD days so students don’t disproportionately miss the same classes.
Challenges: Students don’t have the frequency of meeting and may not get the repetitions that they need in certain subjects like Math.
It would be harder for parents and community members to engage with the schedule and for students to learn.
2. Interdisciplinary Units of Study: Another approach we have discussed is creating more interdisciplinary units.
Advantages: With good planning this approach reduces redundancies in the curriculum and allows teaching time to be more efficient.
Can allow for deeper understandings for students as they see the connections from one subject area to another.
Allow teachers not to feel isolated an on an island to cover curriculum but rather working towards a common goal as a team.
Challenges: Requires teachers to have common planning time to stay up to date on the coverage of material in each classroom.
Requires students to be able to apply their subject area standards to the planning to make sure that the topic is deep and meaningful in all areas.
Requires skilled teachers to be able to weave skills like spelling and grammar into a unit based on a science overarching question.
Can be more difficult to achieve when working from a prescribed curriculum.
3. Taking time away from other subjects
Advantages: It would allow more time for Language Arts or Math
Challenges: It would probably just push the problem off on someone else
4. Reducing expectations
Advantages: Only so many things can be taught in a day, priorities have to be made for which skills and content areas are the most important.
Challenges: This may vary from teacher to teacher.
I’m sure that our school is not the only one to wrestle with this issue, what have you tried? How does your school deal with this? Please share your suggestions, comments or questions below.