How does one overcome the challenges to finding time for meaningful professional learning? The authors asked seven experts in the field, and these practitioners offer powerful strategies for making better use of educator time. An example from Illinois centers student data in school systems as an essential component of a school's overall commitment…

Efforts to improve education outcomes often involve lengthening the school day or the school year in hopes that spending more time in school will boost student learning. Yet, as Frederick Hess explains, U.S. students spend as much or more total time in school as their peers in other industrialized nations. What matters more than the amount of time…

COVID-19 is laying bare two realities in education. Over the past several decades, is has been warned that schools are not making the most of the time they have with students. Despite those warnings, little has changed. Additionally, the school calendar is not friendly to working families. As the education community plans for the upcoming school…

In this essay I concentrate on a distinct aspect of teaching courses online postpandemic: concrete steps both to ease workload burden and to increase student learning efficacy. There are ten lessons that can facilitate moving instruction online: 1. Organize the Course in Weekly Modules; 2. Communicate on a Regular Schedule; 3. Post Key Lectures;…

Teachers are dedicated, wise, and thoughtful change agents who need more time to identify problems they see in their schools or classrooms and work individually and collectively on solutions. They need both more time for individual planning and time to collaborate with colleagues who teach the same grades or the same subjects. A productive day of…

Childrens' learning has been massively disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing the need for more opportunities for differentiated, high-quality learning, stronger relationships with the adults in their school, and streamlined access to social-emotional support -- especially for the country's lowest-income students, Black and Latinx students,…

Careers in the 21st century are changing, but traditional education methods are not preparing students for these new jobs and demands. In this thought-provoking book, esteemed educator A.J. Juliani describes how we need to modify our classrooms to instill in students the drive for inquiry and innovation that they will need to succeed beyond school…

The major challenge with time is finding it. Current school-day schedules and school-year calendars are leaner than ever because of budget reductions. States and districts have implemented furlough days to balance lean-and-mean budgets that show no sign of improving. Few are willing to take the leap toward reducing instructional time to improve…

One has heard it before: time is money, especially when it comes to adding time for instruction to the school day. When budgets are tight and relief is nowhere in sight, how can schools afford to implement a reform as costly as adding instructional time? It's a daunting task, yet current federal educational priorities tied to federal funding…

The senior year of high school has long been considered a lost year, a time when many students have earned most of their high school credits and have been accepted into college. With few requirements and little pressure, students often slack off in a common affliction known as "senioritis." The year of slacking off, however, may have…

Instructional design models have been criticized for being too inflexible and taking too long to follow to be useful in today's fast-paced environment. As a result, some have rejected instructional design. This article offers an alternative view of instructional design as flexible and able to be accomplished in much shorter time periods than…

The paper explores important issues in today's education, not by analyses and statistics, but by projecting readers into the future and then asking them to look back on today's schools and to act like archaeologists--to surmise from all sorts of things they can observe, what was really important to us, what we really valued, how we treated kids,…

A high-performing school is described as one where student achievement is high and student and teacher absenteeism is low. Student behavior is such that teachers seldom have to control them or tell them what to do. This results in greater time on task, higher teacher morale, low teacher absenteeism, and improved parental support. One other…

Presidential commissions, parents, academics, and employers have proposed the same solutions, again and again, for fixing the time students spend in school: (1) Add more days to the annual school calendar; (2) Change to year-round schools; (3) Add instructional time to the daily schedule; and (4) Extend the school day. Three reasons--cost,…

The academic credit hour, developed over 100 years ago, does not accommodate online and other instructional innovations. The academic credit hour is an Industrial Age metric based on seat-time, or contact time that faculty and students spend together in a classroom. Online education does not require that students and faculty be in the same place…