Exciting Classrooms by Thoms Frank;

Author:Thoms, Frank;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Incorporated

Chapter 12

Stop the Interruptions

It has to do with power. Every time anyone shamelessly interrupted my class, the message was clear: “My time is more valuable than yours. Whatever you’re doing cannot possibly be as vital as whatever I’m doing.”

Why do teachers have to struggle to find uninterrupted time? What in the school psyche allows office personnel—principals, guidance, and secretaries—to interrupt over the public address system (PA)? What allows janitors during classes to operate floor-cleaning machines in the hallways or lawn mowers outside windows? People claim that teachers are an essential piece in a child’s education, yet such actions in schools undermine their efforts.

Coleen Armstrong is right. Whatever she is doing in her classroom is not as valuable as what others do. It is a power struggle.1 But an unnecessary power struggle, an unjustified power struggle. Successful businesses put customers first, so schools should put teachers and students first. When the principal interrupts over the PA, the lesson disappears! Depending on the length of the announcement and its content, returning to the lesson—if possible—can take several minutes. “Will the following students please come to the office?” has an even more emotional impact.

Patti Grenier, former superintendent of schools in Barnstable, Massachusetts, and now a consultant at Teachers21, shared at a workshop that an average of seven minutes are lost with each PA announcement. Think about that. If five interruptions occur during the day, thirty-five minutes of teaching is lost. For a week, that means three hours! For thirty-six weeks, forty-eight hours!

Armstrong’s insight is the-emperor-is-not-wearing-any-clothes expose’ of this travesty. In dire contrast, in Japan, the classroom is considered sacred. Learning takes priority. No interruptions are tolerated.2 In contrast, in American schools, where interruptions are the order of the day, Japanese visitors flinch when the PA (Big Brother?) issues a command—or when teachers barge in on one another.

This last comment deserves scrutiny. If you are a teacher, how often do you drop in on other teachers in the middle of the period to borrow something or simply to say hello? How often do you interrupt your own students during a lesson instead of letting them have extended time? Have you thought about suggesting to your colleagues to consider the impact of the traditional assembly-line schedule of forty-to-forty-five–minute periods? How might you make it a point to advocate for more uninterrupted learning time?

Lorraine Hong offers a different perspective from Armstrong, one that is more subtle and perhaps more insidious.3 Hong describes how increasing intrusions caused her to lose her passion for teaching. In her school as part of an hour-long writing period, the principal told her and her fifth-grade colleagues to include ten minutes of keyboarding. While her principal considered this a simple request, by the time the computers were set up and students settled, the lesson took fifteen to twenty minutes to implement.

Later, a new math curriculum was put in place that required teaching sixty minutes per day. Hong found it impossible to schedule it on Mondays and Fridays, because students were required to leave for “gifted” programs and for special-education pullouts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.