Never enough hours in the class day

Perhaps the most fundamental and finite resource schools have is time.

As pressure builds to increase student achievement, talk across the country often turns to lengthening the school day or school year — both expensive options.

But a critical question is:

What are schools doing to make the best use of the time they have now?

In my economics class I teach that time is the ultimate scarcity, no matter how rich, how smart, how poor, there are only 24 hours in every day. It is a great equalizer, some use it efficiently, other waste it recklessly, many fall somewhere in between.

This article does not provide any answers, it just tells what a few of the Pittsburgh area districts are doing with time. The point is that the article should make educators question, “How to I utilize time in my classroom and how can I improve time management?”

As more technology is rolled out in schools, an endeavor which is necessary considering technology exists outside of the classroom in the “real world”, we need to adjust class time or how students are assigned technology in classrooms. We need to extend time for students to get set up each period with technology, assign them a device to go 1 to 1 where there is little or no set up time, or allow them to bring there own technology into schools.

Once we take this step, we can then begin looking at instructional time spent on actual learning and how effective the lessons actually are.