It's About Time: Organizing Schools for Teacher Collaboration and Learning

“We wanted to take a look at schools that paid attention to time and understood that if teachers had time to learn with and from each other, it would benefit their children and it would benefit themselves as teachers.”
– Jon Snyder, Ed.D., Executive Director, Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education

In the United States, the use of teacher time in schools is an unexamined “regularity”–rarely questioned or changed. However, compelling evidence shows that teachers are the most significant in-school factor affecting student learning and that the effects they have on student learning are cumulative and long lasting. If, indeed, teachers are what matter most, then how their time is organized within the school day should offer considerable potential to improve the quality of instruction and realize positive benefits for students.

Jon Snyder, Executive Director for SCOPE, and Dion Burns, Senior Researcher at Learning Policy Institute, will discuss the findings of the study Teachers’ Time: Collaborating for Learning, Teaching, and Leading, which was designed to help both practitioners and policymakers understand the teaching and learning implications of structuring time differently in schools. The study illustrates how these uses of time relate to a range of educational outcomes, from building more successful curriculum to supporting teacher learning and development to facilitating deeper, more meaningful learning opportunities for students. In addition, the talk will address the school characteristics and relevant themes that emerged across all four school sites during the course of the study.

For those of you who cannot join us in person, click here to watch remotely.