‘There’s just no way’: Time poverty as an obstacle to pedagogical change

A lack of time prevents teachers from adopting instructional practices they know are likely to be effective. Where can leaders reduce demands to increase effectiveness?

At a Glance

Giving students time for activities that encouraged more thinking required Michigan teachers to rush through or cut out other elements of the curriculum.
When adopting new programs, leaders need to consider how to reduce demands in other areas, especially planning, curriculum, and fidelity.
Providing support for planning and preparing materials can enable teachers to implement more engaging activities.
New programs could create opportunities to reduce or eliminate aspects of existing curriculums.
Allowing teachers to use their judgment about adapting the curriculum to their students could enable them to make the best use of their time.

Over the last year, the state of Michigan engaged in a $25-million initiative to support early learning in mathematics through the introduction of new instructional materials, local coaches, and statewide professional development. Teachers interviewed about the initiative consistently reported feeling grateful for the resources and professional learning and excited about shifts in their math teaching. However, every single teacher also mentioned the same obstacle to changing their practice — lack of time.

Michigan’s efforts to improve elementary mathematics teaching have centered on the Math Essentials (www.gomaisa.org/math-essentials), a set of eight research-based instructional practices including developing children’s positive math identities, ensuring equitable participation, and implementing daily number sense routines.

To understand how the initiative is unfolding, our research team conducted 35 interviews with teachers, early math specialists (EMS), and administrators. We also attended professional learning sessions; sat in on learning labs where teachers planned and reflected on practice; shadowed EMSs as they coached, modeled, and problem solved in real time; and observed math teaching and learning in elementary classrooms.

The good news is that we saw teachers ask questions that prompted children’s critical and creative thinking, handle “wrong” answers in ways that sparked further learning, and encourage children to listen to each other’s mathematical thinking. We saw young children use manipulatives to make sense of math, collaborate with classmates to solve complex problems, and express joy in doing math. According to one EMS, this shift was her greatest celebration:

Kids are excited about math. They are seeing themselves as mathematicians . . . That excitement around math is something that we haven’t seen in a long time, and so you have to take that as a win, right!?

The majority of educators we interviewed had similar wins to share.

Teachers and the trouble with time

Despite these wins, all educators said the pressures of time challenged their abilities to teach math in more meaningful and research-aligned ways. One fifth-grade teacher added up the time that would be required to teach all lessons in all their mandated curriculums with fidelity. They found that they would need at least two more hours each day to teach the lessons the way they were intended.

When the minutes demanded by mandated curricula exceed the amount of time in a school day, teaching with fidelity becomes impossible. Instead, teachers are left in a state of “time poverty” (Thompson & Cook, 2017, p. 26), lacking enough time in the day to accomplish what is expected. A 20-year veteran kindergarten teacher who was new to her math curriculum and the Math Essentials told us, “I’m still trying to figure out how to manage the time . . . I’ve got to be more like, ‘OK, what are we going to cut?’”

Given that all the teachers reported struggles with time poverty, we wondered what they were cutting from their lessons. So we looked how they implemented Number Corner (www.mathlearningcenter.org/curriculum/number-corner) — a daily 15-20-minute routine in which students engage in a short exercise designed to extend and reinforce important math skills and concepts. Teachers received Number Corner materials as part of the Math Essentials project.

What’s lost for the sake of the schedule

When we analyzed video recordings of Number Corner lessons, we found that some teachers rushed through the routine to fit it into the scheduled time block. This often required them to cut out instructional moves highlighted in the Math Essentials. For example, they asked fewer open-ended questions and invited participation from fewer children. In addition, they did not give as much (or any) time for children to talk to each other about math, articulate their reasoning, or connect to the thinking of others. They did not provide manipulatives because they feared that managing children’s “appropriate” use of these tools would be too messy and take too long.

On the other hand, some teachers resisted the time crunch and protected space for sense-making, reasoning, collaboration, and exploration either by taking more time to do Number Corner or by choosing not to do all the elements recommended in the curriculum guide.

One of the most powerful lessons we observed — one filled with student talk, collaborative problem solving, movement, and high-level reasoning about fractions — lasted nearly an hour. While the third-grade teacher was thrilled by her students’ energy, she was also visibly stressed by how long the lesson took and concerned about the consequences for her schedule. At one point, she suggested that the class come back to the math game later. Multiple children begged to continue. She laughed and said, “This is the problem sometimes when math is fun.” While she saw this hour as worthwhile, she still felt constant pressure to monitor time.

Other teachers noted that their children felt stress as a result of their efforts to stick to schedules. One fifth-grade teacher said:

I feel like I have to really stick to a very rigorous schedule. Even though the kids definitely don’t want anything to do with that schedule, we have to stick with it. And sometimes it’s a battle to get them to go from one subject to another.

During classroom visits, we observed children reacting negatively when lessons were rushed. This isn’t surprising, when shortening lessons means cutting out opportunities for discussion, social interaction, movement, and play.

Strategies for taking back time

Many administrators — often overworked themselves — recognize that teachers and children feel stressed by the current instructional climate. Working against the culture of time poverty might be one way to mitigate this stress. We suggest that leaders consider reducing demands on teachers in three areas: planning, curriculum requirements, and teaching with fidelity.

Reducing planning demands

Many teachers reported that the amount of time they spent planning and preparing was a major roadblock to adopting daily number sense routines. The mathematical games and problems for Number Corner required significant instructional planning each day. It also required teachers to create new anchor charts, place new calendar markers into pocket charts, and organize many handouts and manipulatives each month. Several teachers said they dread the beginning of each month because they will need to stay late to prepare Number Corner materials. Two teachers mentioned bringing in their mothers after hours to help.

One support from EMSs that teachers most appreciated was their effort to lighten this planning load. Many EMSs prepared and laminated charts to track student thinking, organized materials, and set up calendars each month. One EMS supported a particularly overwhelmed grade-level team by scheduling 30 minutes to teach in each of their classrooms each week so the teachers could plan their Number Corner instruction.

In schools without EMSs, it might be possible to find other ways to reduce the planning burden. For example, family volunteers, older children, or support staff might prepare materials for teachers. Planning time could be protected from other meetings, and instructional leaders could preview units and provide summaries of games or other complicated activities to help teachers quickly make sense of curriculums.

Reducing curricular demands

Educators do not have the bandwidth to do more. On one district survey about teachers’ experiences with Number Corner, two of 16 respondents said they had “no celebrations.” Both of these teachers mentioned time in their responses, with one writing that “each year, more is added to our plate, and nothing is taken off.” Every new initiative that asked this teacher to squeeze a new activity into the day increased her sense of time poverty. Leaders need to take these expressions of overwhelm and resentment seriously when considering new initiatives.

When evaluating new programs, leaders might consider whether a new curricular addition will help teachers save time in another part of the day. For example, two teachers in our study said that Number Corner’s engaging, spiraling instruction built such a solid foundation in students that they could move more quickly through lessons in their primary math curriculum. One told us that “this year, we’re going to cover everything for the first time.”

Similarly, leaders may choose not to take on a new program but instead explore ways that an existing curriculum or routine could serve multiple needs. One third-grade teacher in our study found that the conversations during Number Corner could also help meet social and emotional learning (SEL) goals. For example, during the lesson we observed, the teacher invited children to “talk to your buddy” 14 times. Children asked their peers questions, gave each other high fives, encouraged each other, and listened patiently to each other’s reasoning.

At one point, as the children worked through a particularly tricky story problem, a boy pulled his hood up and hung his head in frustration. A nearby classmate noticed, put his hand on his shoulder, and delivered an encouraging message with a smile. Seeing this, the teacher knelt down, and said:

I see you shutting down because you’re feeling frustrated…It’s OK to feel frustrated, bud. It’s OK. Usually math is so [snaps] automatic. This is good for our brains. Just take some breaths. You can kind of check out if you need to. We’re all here for you.

Teaching in a way that creates space for relationships, communication, emotions, and caring makes a stand-alone SEL curriculum redundant. Careful analysis may reveal similar opportunities for instructional routines to meet learning goals across disciplines.

Reducing fidelity demands

“Fidelity of implementation” has been a frequent refrain in efforts to improve instruction (Ball & Cohen, 1996). Drivers of such reform argue that curricular guides and lesson plans are “research-based . . . best practices” (Erickson, 2014, p. 4) that have been proven to work and, thus, will work everywhere “if teachers and building principals will only do what they are told to do” (p. 4).

Many teachers we interviewed perceived fidelity to curriculum as an expectation at their schools — albeit an impossible one. Echoing the teacher who realized they would need two extra hours each day to teach with fidelity, a fifth-grade teacher we interviewed put it succinctly: “There’s just no way.”

Beyond the question of whether fidelity is possible or not, leaders must also reckon with the question of whether fidelity is truly desirable. A better approach might be to celebrate “low fidelity” implementations (Erickson, 2014, p. 4), which occur when teachers adapt practices to their own contexts. EMSs in our study expressed gratitude for the flexibility of the Math Essentials program and the autonomy they had to take the plans from the state-level and adapt them to fit their own local schools.

Teachers also benefited from the freedom to adapt lessons. The children in the classroom where the Number Corner lesson took more than an hour enjoyed the mathematics activities more and engaged in more conceptual thinking than children in classrooms where the lesson was cut short to make time for all parts of the written curriculum. Of course, teachers may need support in deciding what to cut from curriculums, but these conversations create more learning opportunities for teachers than offering up curriculums where decisions have already been made.

Our big take away: Value slow, responsive instruction

Time poverty works against teachers’ efforts to prioritize the needs of the children in front of them. Squelching conversations to keep to a 20-minute limit, calling on only one child to share their thinking, or rushing through a math game so all parts of the lesson can be completed limits children’s access to meaningful mathematics. If educational leaders want teachers to engage in dialogue with children; assess their understanding; take stock of their energy; and make in-the-moment, responsive decisions, they must find ways to reduce time pressure.

Teachers need the wiggle room to pause, assess what is happening, consider the possibilities, and respond. Leaders can encourage this practice of slowing down. Instead of reinforcing constraints of time through talk of fidelity, tight schedules, and the threat of accountability, leaders can work to relieve some of the pressure by prioritizing the people instead of the clock.