Report

Teachers’ Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading

Published
By Jon Snyder Soung Bae

Compelling evidence shows that teachers are the most significant in-school factor affecting student learning, and teachers’ effects on student learning are cumulative and long-lasting. If teachers are indeed what matter most, then how their time is organized during the school day should offer an opportunity to improve the quality of instruction and realize positive benefits for students. Yet research has rarely focused on how school conditions influence teachers’ use of time. At least in the United States, the use of teachers’ time in schools is an unexamined “regularity”—rarely questioned or changed.

This cross-case analysis is part of a more extensive study of four public schools across the United States that organized teachers’ time and work in innovative ways. The report unpacks the organizational structures and conditions that support how schools organize teachers’ time and prioritize and bolster teacher collaboration, ongoing professional learning and development, and enriched opportunities for student learning.

The analysis focuses on the following schools:

Specifically, the project evaluates:

  • the schools’ reorganization of teachers’ and students’ time within the school day;
  • teachers’ and students’ activities within the reorganized time;
  • the interaction between reorganized teacher and student time; and
  • enabling conditions for using the reorganized time well.

Researchers found that the collaborative practices in place at these schools engaged educators with different areas of expertise to share decisions and responsibilities in pursuit of a commonly held vision or desired outcome. As teachers learned with and from each other through collaborative relationships, they strengthened their sense of collective responsibility for student learning.

In the schools studied, collaboration provided educators with multiple opportunities to exercise leadership as they worked together towards a shared vision while bringing different expertise to the practice. It was not always, and still is not, easy for these schools. Strategically managing partnerships, maintaining permission to be different, avoiding meeting creep, sustaining the school’s learning culture through the inevitable personnel churn, and responding to the need to continually change the schedule as the strengths, interests, and needs of the students change all require ongoing work. These schools would say, however, that the outcomes for the students and their families are worth the effort.

 

Posted with permission, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

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