I haven’t got time

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I haven’t got time.

It’s a familiar refrain and I doubt there’s a teacher out there who hasn’t said or thought this. I know I have. The more I’ve really unpacked what effective teaching looks like, the more I’ve come to realise that to do it really properly takes more time than I have available. I’ve looked back at my planner from previous years (does anyone else keep theirs & do this?) and noticed that I’m later finishing certain topics and taking longer teaching others. I think I’m doing a better job of it, but I’m running out of time. As someone who spends a lot of time in other people’s lessons, giving feedback, and running CPD, it’s also something I hear a lot. It’s something we can’t get away from, but also something we often can’t do much about. How do we make the most of this precious resource?

Consider each of the following scenarios. Each one highlights a brief episode of teaching, along with some thoughts and questions from an instructional coach who is observing the lesson (please assume that the coach would also highlight and praise positive elements of the teaching – but this post is about helping teachers get better!):

Tim is teaching students a tricky new concept. He starts the lesson with a clear definition which he then unpacks, highlighting some of the key words and discussing their etymology. He gives a concrete example and then asks students to have a go at describing the concept for themselves with a new example, and then explain how it fits with some of the other concepts they’ve previously learned.

Tim’s coach wonders if students will struggle to understand the new concept because they don’t see how it fits with what they already know. Would they have benefited from some retrieval practice based around prior, prerequisite knowledge in order to ‘warm them up’ and make them more receptive to the new information?

Rachel is showing her students how to write a particular style of answer. She shows a couple of different examples and explains how each one does or doesn’t meet the success criteria, and then models a ‘perfect’ version for the, narrating her thinking out loud as she goes. Then she gives the students a set of practice questions to have a go at for themselves.

Rachel’s coach wonders whether the transition between modelling and independent practice was sufficient to allow students to fully grasp what they were aiming for. Would they have benefited from an additional example, completed with whole class questioning, to ensure everyone gets to think about what needs to go into this type of writing before doing it themselves?

Mark is giving back some end of unit assessments to his class. He shares some whole-class feedback to highlight common errors, then gives the class their paper along with the detailed feedback sheet which has mark scheme criteria broken down in student-friendly language. Students are tasked with analysing their paper, highlighting areas where they dropped marks, and then writing themselves a target for what they need to improve in the future.

Mark’s coach wonders if the students would benefit from doing something with their feedback rather than just noting what it is. Could they answer another, similar question that allows them to demonstrate they understand what the improvement looks like?

In each case, the coach’s feedback is based around a hypothesis (see more on this approach to observing lessons from Adam Boxer here); that whatever it is that the teacher *didn’t* do will potentially result in worse learning for the students. How might teachers respond to these suggestions?

“More retrieval practice at the start of lessons? I haven’t got time for that.”

“Longer handover during the ‘We’ phase of modelling? I haven’t got time for that.”

“Giving students practise to help them embed feedback? I haven’t got time for that.”

Now let’s consider what else our coaches might have noticed in each of these lessons:

• In Tim’s lesson, students are struggling to get to grips with the new idea. It doesn’t really make sense to them and when Tim asks them to explain it they can’t do much more than repeat back some of the words with lost expressions and helpless shrugs. Tim has to re-explain it several times and gets frustrated when they also seem to have forgotten the ‘basics’ he taught them in a lesson before.

• In Rachel’s lesson, students are struggling to write their own answers. Rachel spends a lot of time re-explaining what they’re aiming for, repeating the same thing to many individual students and finds that they are all making lots of the same mistakes around the room. Eventually she stops the class and gives them another example, working through it with them again, before letting them have another go on their own.

• In Mark’s lesson, while he circulates to deal with individual queries – particularly lots of “why did I only get 1 mark here?” questions – a lot of students are dutifully highlighting sections of their mark scheme and writing out their targets. Some of them finish this process quite quickly and are left twiddling their thumbs, politely waiting for Mark to be ready to move on with everyone – this takes a good 5-10 minutes. When the coach questions some of them, they are able to say what they need to do to improve, but can’t explain what that actually looks like.

I’m not naively idealistic enough to suggest that students should be learning at full throttle for every second of every lesson across a whole day. Moments of ‘down-time’ are a necessity and probably not too problematic if planned and handled with care. But there are also lots of occasions when the desire to push on at pace, to get through the lesson, comes at a cost. Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. Investing the time to get things right at the outset means smoother progress later on. 

• Activating relevant prior knowledge at the start of a lesson makes it quicker and easier for students to learn new information, even if it feels like it’s taking away valuable lesson time.
• Giving students more time co-constructing a model as a whole class might make it easier for them to do it themselves, and get through more independent examples quicker.
• Getting students to apply their feedback might mean they are less likely to just make the same mistakes in the future, reducing the likelihood of the teacher just giving the same feedback again.

We can’t create more time. It might be possible for school leaders to think creatively and flexibly about things like the curriculum, timetabling, staffing and come up with solutions that give us a little more. But these things don’t happen quickly or often. We can aim to be more efficient in our routines, as Jo Castelino explains here and this might give us more time to do the important things better. But this depends on classroom teachers making the best decisions about what those important things are. We do need more time. But we also need to invest the time we have better.