Dr. Jack Conklin
Some teachers are just better at their craft than others, in this series of essays I will attempt to identify the characteristics, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of those teachers. I will use research on what works, personal experience (having observed over 1000 teacher lessons) and established understandings in this series of articles. Because I have done so, I believe that all teachers can change their behaviors or attitudes in ways that will help them become better and better at their craft. That is both the purpose and goal of these essays.
If you know me, or have seen me present to a group of teachers you will know that I believe strongly in the concept known as time-on-task. Best teachers always keep the time-on-task principle in their mind as they teach.
Simply put, time-on-task means that the more time you spend doing something the more you will know about it or be able to do it. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers articulates that great golfers, violinists, sports heroes, computer scientists, chess players and others have spent a great deal more time doing what they are successful at doing than others have. Just think of Tiger Woods; he had spent more time playing golf by the time he was a teen than most people will spend in their lifetime. When he was developing his theory of relativity, Einstein said that he thought about Physics “all the time.” Every day, even while commuting to work, Einstein would conduct what he called “thought experiments” about the speed of light. He once said that there were thousands of people who were smarter than he was but the difference was that he worked at it eighteen hours a day. Focusing on and paying extra attention to a specific task or thought changes the structure of the brain and makes the thinker more competent.
Recent research on the how the physical brain works and develops clearly shows us that the architecture of the brain is actually changed by repeated exposure to a thought or a task. By repeatedly spending time on a new concept the brain builds more dendrites, axons and connections as it learns new things. The most recent research informs us that we can actually create new neurons! Therefore, spending more time on-task will build the physical brain. Sadly, however, these new connections will fade without repeated exposure. The only way to get repeated exposure is to spend even more time-on-task with the new learning. Practice doesn’t make perfect… practice makes permanent.
(As an aside- Marion Diamond, the famous brain researcher, was given a piece of Einstein’s brain to examine and discovered that, in spite of the fact that he had about the same number of neurons, axons and dendrites as a typical person, he was different from the rest of us in one very important way. Einstein had more myelin sheathing on his nerves and axons than is typically found. Myelin [Wikipedia has a very nice picture of myelin at its site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ ]. Myelin surrounds nerves and axons, helps to keep them in place and is built up by repeated use of the nerve or axon. With strong myelin our dendrites stay in the same place and our synapses have a greater chance of firing off in the right place and at the right time. Myelin gets soft when we get drunk and explains why we slur our words or why we have difficulty walking a straight line. Myelin loss is also the culprit in the devastating disease of MS. We need myelin to keep our neurons communicating most effectively. Without myelin a nerve may fire off a message but may miss its intended target. We can’t seem to remember as the memory trace has faded. Einstein built up his myelin by repeatedly thinking about the same things again and again thus changing the actual architecture of his brain. Increasing your learners’ time-on-task builds myelin, changes the structure of their brains and strengthens learning, recall and ultimately problem solving ability.) This ultimately makes it possible for your learners to create more insights and have additional learning experiences.
So what else do we know about time-on-task and how do we incorporate its principles as teachers? Interestingly, it doesn’t take a lot to have a big impact on learning…but what time-on-task needs is to be regular and consistent. In the typical 180 day school year one minute of time lost every day represents three hours of learning lost (1 minute a day times 180 days equal 180 minutes or three hours) and you can learn a lot in three hours. This is why good teachers start and end their classes on time and keep their charges on task throughout a lesson. (Why do you think there is such a big emphasis on having teachers conduct “do-now” activities? The “do-now” is simply a strategy to focus the teacher and the learner on starting class on time and with a high value learning event.) If a teacher regularly chit-chats (after a class starts) with the teacher across the hall just ten minutes a day there is a loss of thirty hours of learning for the year! The typical college course only meets for 37½ hours a semester! Other less effective teachers when they finish a lesson before the end of the class period might say to the learners “talk quietly among yourselves until the bell” or let them line up at the door instead of teaching to the end of the period. If this is a consistent event they lose tremendous amounts of learning. Even 5 minutes wasted each day turns into 15 hours of lost teaching time over the year. In a research study, The Prisoners of Time, it was discovered that in the most ineffective schools over half of the teaching day is wasted!
Now the research on time-on-task looks at several types of time that take place in a learning environment. Two of these include allocated time (the time that teaching/learning is supposed to be taking place, i.e. 50 minutes of math a day) and engaged time (the time the learner is actually involved in the work at hand). The amount of engaged time predicts successful learning as the research clearly states that learners who are engaged for the longest time learn the most. Therefore the world’s best teachers focus on engaged time and they design activities that make sure that their students are actively involved in their learning.
The reason that allocated time is not predictive of student learning is because teachers can “fudge” the amount of time they teach. For example an elementary teacher who does not like teaching math but loves teaching reading will spend classroom time allocated to math actually teaching reading. The time a learner is engaged cannot be manipulated.
By the way, Piaget helped us to understand that all new learning is built upon old learning through the dual processes he called accommodation and assimilation. In assimilation new learning is easily fitted into existing cognitive structures; this happens when we see an Airedale for the first time and we recognize it to be a dog. Without the original cognitive structure of the “dog” this would not be possible. To reiterate, without the existing concept of “dog” the learner could not have learned about Airedales. The process of accommodation happens when we must make modifications to existing cognitive structures. I like to use the concept of “ball” to illustrate this cognitive task. If we see an American football for the first time it doesn’t neatly fit into our understanding of the concept “ball” as a circular/ round object because the football is almond shaped with pointed ends. To make sense of a football as a “ball” we need to adjust our concept to include its unique shape in our original definition. With both of these examples we needed the original concept to learn the new one and Piaget tells us that all learning is built on the backs of older cognitive structures. In order to connect with their own prior cognitive structures our learners must be engaged in the learning activity for the new learning to occur and this is why they need appropriate amounts of time-on-task. (By the way every time you help them to construct a new learning you are creating a future plethora of even newer concepts and skills. And the beat goes on.)
Virtually everything that a teacher does can impact a learner’s time-on-task or engaged time. Planning, focusing on the objective of a lesson good management techniques all impact the time a learner will be on task and properly engaged. By focusing on keeping learners engaged and on task is one of the many secrets of the world’s best teachers.
This is one of the simplest “skills” of the best teachers and you can increase your ability by focusing on where the time wasters are in your classroom. Teaching in block-schedules and elementary classrooms, transitions can be a killer. The best strategy is to explicitly teach for effective transitions. Fourth graders love to have the “Olympic Trials of Transitions.” Teach the skills, have speed trials and enlist them in developing transitioning skills. Even high school students need to be “taught” transitions and the importance of effectively managing their own time. Every kid wants to be a good learner but many have lost the motivation because of many failures. Work on their desire to be better…but that is the focus of our next Secrets of the World’s Best Teachers.
© Jack Conklin, Ph.D., October 9, 2009, #1