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Introduction
There is an old joke:
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow
Interrupting c-
MOOO!
Everyone understands what an interruption is—it is something that gets us off track. Teachers know this all too well. Interruptions distract students and sometimes can even knock the teacher off course. A loud noise outside of the classroom, a surreptitious cell phone ringing, a student cracking a joke, these things can interrupt the flow of a classroom lesson.
Sometimes, the worst offenders are educational professionals. When I taught high school in Alabama, our administration abused the school’s intercom system. Five, ten, even fifteen times a day, they would break into our lessons, interrupting whatever was going on with needless and inane information. It enraged me. After a few months, I was reduced to stage-shouting responses at the box on the wall, much to my students’ delight.
A colleague, a first-year teacher no less, had a better strategy. One day, he asked me to observe his classroom and give him any feedback I could. Even a few moments’ observation showed little need for my help as he operated a smooth-running classroom where his students were engaged.
How he handled that blasted intercom, however, was a work of genius.
As I sat in the back of his room observing, a blaring interruption was broadcast through the intercom. The teacher, unlike me, did not miss a beat. He just kept going as if nothing had happened. Just then, one of his students sitting a few seats back silently walked up to the front of the room and added a tally mark to a set I had not noticed on the right side of the whiteboard. He then sat back down and resumed his work.
At first, I was unsure what was going on, but whenever there was an interruption from the intercom, up got the student, who marked the tally and sat back down. When I realized it was a form of silent protest from this young teacher, I thought it was the funniest thing I’d seen in a classroom. Good jokes are subtle and catch you off guard, and that is what happened.
My colleague, even in his first year, knew that maximizing classroom time is important. Students only spend around 6 hours a day in school for around 180 days per year. Teachers have a lot of ground to cover. If they are being interrupted, it prevents them from doing what they need to do.
In this paper, we examine survey results about teacher time use. While interruptions are a part of the equation, many other issues take teachers’ time away from educating students. Teachers are asked to do many things outside the classroom, such as meetings, professional development, delivering and analyzing assessments, and supervising everything from the lunchroom to the hallway to the carpool line. They also have to plan lessons and grade student work. While some of that work might be necessary, some of it might be better done by other staff, or not done. This paper does not aim to judge professional development or comment on how much time teachers should spend planning. It is designed to be descriptive, helping us understand how teachers spend their time.
To get a better idea of what teachers are up to, we partnered with Hanover Research to poll a representative sample of American teachers and ask them about their days. We wanted to know two things: how much time teachers spend on various activities throughout their day and how much of teachers’ time is consumed by non-teaching activities and unproductive interruptions.
Previous Research
This is not the first paper to look into classroom time-use practices. The problem of classroom interruptions is not new. Take this description of a morning in an elementary school classroom Glen C. Eye, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin, observed:
9:05: Notice to inform pupils regarding fire drill
regulations such as line of traffic, conduct, exits, etc.
9:05 – 9:20: Speech teacher talks over speech problems
in room.
9:05, 9:25, 9:40: Notices from office
10:05: Milk boys inquire as to whether there are straws.
10:25-10:35: Notice from office requesting the number of library books in room library
10:40: Teacher inquires as to what should be done with books in activity room.
11:00: Notice to hand in two daily programs
11:20: Notice of fire drill
11:25: Notice from office (repeat of what had been sent earlier)
While they might sound familiar to teachers today
(well, except for the reference to “milk boys,” whatever those are), these observations were made during a morning in September of 1953.
After witnessing the near-constant interruption, Eye concluded, exasperated, “It is difficult for one to believe that there could be such a record of interruptions — unless it were planned by someone who wanted to wreck the school program.” 1
Eye’s paper on classroom interruptions was resurrected in the epigraph of perhaps the most complete study of classroom interruptions, Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum’s 2021 paper, “The Big Problem with Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning.” 2 In that paper, the authors used both a school climate survey and direct classroom observations in the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island to estimate the number of times classes were interrupted. They found, “On average, teachers and students estimate that they experience 11.9 and 16.3 total interruptions per day in a typical PPSD school, respectively.” These interruptions varied from students arriving late to class (38% of interruptions), visits from other teachers or staff (17%), intercom announcements (14%), and calls to the classroom phone (12%), to others, like student bathroom visits and visits from students from other classes or noise in the hallway outside the classroom.
Classroom interruptions impose serious costs. According to the authors:
“About 15% of all classroom interruptions led to disruptions that continued to visibly interfere with instruction and students’ focus for the remainder of the class period. These lasting consequences included students remaining disengaged from the lesson (50% of all instances with a prolonged disruption), students continuously distracting each other (25%), the teacher altering or not being able to finish a lesson (14%), and students being forced to leave the class (11%).”3
Providence students lost 54.5 instructional hours to disruptions. This equates to nearly 10 days of interruptions that are, according to the authors,
“largely under the direct control of schools.”
Tying it all together, they write:
“We estimate that, over the course of an academic year, PPSD high school students experience more than 2,000 instances of external interruptions. Both survey and observational data suggest that these interruptions and the subsequent disruptions they cause result in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time over the course of the academic year—enough time to consider all PPSD students truant or even chronically absent.” 4
This study will build on previous work and tweak it in two important ways. First, rather than looking into a single school or district, our sample of teachers is national. Second, we also sampled private and charter school teachers, allowing for between-sector comparisons.
The Survey
We administered the survey in partnership with Hanover Research. Hanover contracted with a panel provider (a public opinion research company that recruits samples of Americans) and administered the survey via the Qualtrics platform in February of 2022. To be included in the survey, respondents had to indicate they were classroom teachers in the United States. In total, 686 teachers responded. Table 1 offers descriptive statistics on survey respondents.
Our sample varies slightly from national averages. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, in 2017-18 (the most recent year of data available), public school teachers in America were, on average, 79.3% White, 9.3% Hispanic, 6.7% Black, 2.1% Asian, and 0.5% Native American.5 White and Black teachers are slightly overrepresented in our sample, and Hispanic and Asian teachers are slightly underrepresented compared to those numbers. Our sample is also somewhat more male than the general teacher population, as public school teachers in America are 76.5% female and 23.5% male. In all, our sample is quite close to the general teacher population.
Results
To start, we asked questions about what teachers do within the classroom each day. We offered a breadth of possible answers, from “providing direct, whole-class instruction” and “facilitating group work” to “addressing student discipline issues.” Then, teachers could select whether they engaged in those activities in the previous week. For all the activities identified, we then asked how much time they devoted to each. Figure 1 shows their answers.
The most popular use of classroom time was direct, whole-class instruction. Eighty-one percent of surveyed teachers said they provided it during their most recent school week. Of those teachers, 44 percent spent more than 5 hours per week engaged in whole class instruction, and fewer than one in ten spent less than one hour. The next most popular was working with students individually, with 78 percent of teachers saying they engaged in it in the previous week. Of those teachers, 18 percent said they spent more than 5 hours per week engaged in it. Leading small group instruction, addressing student disciplinary issues, and facilitating group work rounded out the list. While facilitating group work was the least popular response, 61 percent of teachers surveyed said they utilized it, and those that did reported spending a sizeable amount of classroom time on it, with 22 percent reporting they spent more than 5 hours per week on it.
The next question asked teachers how they spend their time on non-teaching duties. Now, it is always fraught trying to delineate between “teaching” and “non-teaching” duties. For this question, we identified activities like supervising students, attending committee or staff meetings, and participating in professional development as non-teaching duties. Survey responses are summarized in Figure 2.
The most common response was addressing student disciplinary issues, with 59 percent of teachers identifying they had to deal with such issues. Committee and staff meetings were the next most popular, with 54 percent of teachers saying they participated in a required meeting in the previous week. Of those teachers, 62 percent said it took up more than one hour of their time. Things like preparation for federal, state, and local assessments, supervisory duties, and professional development were less popular as results, but they represented a lot of time for those who did identify participating in these activities in the previous week. For example, of the 36 percent of teachers who said they prepared for federal, state, and local assessments, 35 percent said they spent more than 5 hours per week doing so.
In a variation on the question asked in Figure 2, we also wanted to know the range of tasks teachers are frequently asked to complete. Therefore, in this question, we asked teachers to reflect on their most recent day, instead of their typical week. We asked them to report how much time they spent planning for their classes, completing administrative tasks, communicating with parents, and more. Results are shown in Figure 3.
Individual planning time, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the most popular result, with the most time reportedly devoted to it, with 73 percent of teachers saying they engaged in it in the previous day and 63 percent of those teachers indicating they spent at least 30 minutes planning individually during the previous day. Tasks like administrative duties and collaborative planning time were less popular, but of those teachers who engaged in them, large percentages identified that these tasks took a lot of time. Fifty-five percent of teachers reported spending at least 30 minutes on administrative duties and 59 percent of responding teachers reported that they spent at least 30 minutes in collaborative planning time.
To look at the question differently, we asked teachers to group some of their non-teaching activities into two categories: pre-instruction and post-instruction. Pre-instruction activities include things like lesson planning, and post-instruction includes things like grading. Figure 4 displays the results.
All 686 teachers in the sample answered this question, and we saw a close to even breakdown between the amount of time spent on pre-instruction and post-instruction activities. While 6 percent of teachers said they spent less than 15 minutes on pre-instruction, 7 percent said so of post-instruction. While 21 percent of teachers said they spent between 15 and 30 minutes on pre-instruction, 19 percent said so about post-instruction. The same percentage of teachers, 32 percent, said they spent between 30 minutes and one hour on pre- and post-instruction; also, there was only a one percentage point difference for those spending between 1 and 3 hours and more than 3 hours, both favoring pre-instruction.
Building on Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum’s work, we also wanted to know about classroom interruptions. We first offered a list of potential interruptions and asked teachers to reflect on their most recent day in school and answer if any had experienced them. Figure 5 displays the results.
More than half the teachers reported they had their class interrupted by a student discipline issue. Almost half said student questions or concerns outside of class had interrupted their class. While less prominent, more than one third of teachers said an intercom announcement had interrupted their class, and more than a quarter said the same for administrators.
Were there repeat offenders? That is, were teachers interrupted by these incidents more than once? We asked a follow-up question to identify how many times these various interruptions occurred the previous day. Figure 6 shows these results by stacking the percentages in a bar chart.
If we look at an area like student discipline issues, where 58 percent of teachers said they had experienced at least one that interrupted their class, we see a pretty even spread of frequency. Fourteen percent of teachers said they had only one incident during the previous day, 30 percent said they had two, 27 percent said they had three, 11 percent said they had four, and 19 percent
said they had five more or more. For almost all interruptions, two incidents was the modal response.
Up to this point, all our questions dealt with incidents inside school. We wanted to know how much time teachers were spending on school-related activities outside the regular workday for our final question. Figure 7 displays those results.
When thinking about their average work week, one in ten teachers reported spending less than one hour working on school-related activities outside of school. Three in ten said they spent one to three hours working outside of their school work day, and another three in ten said they spent three to five hours outside their work day. Just under two in ten said they spent five to ten hours, and just over one in twenty said they spent more than ten hours.
Between Sector Differences
The previous analyses group all 686 teachers in our sample together. But as Table 1 demonstrated, we had teachers representing multiple educational sectors in our sample. This section will break down some key results by sector to locate any differences in answers among teachers from traditional public, public charter, and private schools.
As before, we’ll start in the classroom. Accordingly, Figure 8 breaks down classroom tasks by sector and finds few differences. Using a standard z-test to determine if the differences are statistically significant, we find some. For instance, the percentage of teachers in charter schools saying they provided direct, whole-class instruction is statistically significantly less than those in private schools, as is the percentage of charter teachers saying they dealt with student discipline
issues. But there are no clear, sustaining patterns
among sectors.
This pattern, or apparent lack thereof, continued when delving into the time spent on various classroom tasks. For example, Figure 9 shows the differences between sectors in the time spent addressing student disciplinary issues. Here, there are some interesting outliers. Charter school teachers, for example, were more likely to report spending more than 10 hours per week on disciplinary issues, but that was the only statistically significant difference among sectors. The same pattern carried through for all other classroom tasks identified in Figure 8.
Do variations emerge when looking at non-teaching activities? Figure 10 shows some interesting variations among teachers from different sectors. Using the same z-test as above, we see significant differences among sectors. Traditional public school teachers were more likely to report dealing with disciplinary issues than charter school teachers, less likely to report attending committee or staff meetings than charter school teachers, more likely to report delivering assessments than private school teachers, and more likely to engage in professional development than private school teachers.
Finally, we look at classroom interruptions. Figure 11 shows that, again, there are a few statistically significant differences. Traditional public school teachers, for example, were more likely to say their class was interrupted by intercom announcements than private school teachers, and charter school teachers were more likely to say their class was interrupted by administrators than traditional public school teachers. But again, there were no consistent and recognizable patterns among sectors.
One strange trend does emerge in the data presented in figures 8, 9, and 10. In figures 8 and 10, charter school teachers were least likely of the three sectors to identify they had to address student discipline issues inside or outside the classroom. But, in figure 9, charter school teachers were most likely to report spending over 5 hours on student discipline issues. It is tough to parse this data without more survey work, but it is possible that, while charter teachers deal with fewer discipline issues, the ones they deal with are quite serious and consume more time. But that is simply speculation. It is also true that there were only 37 charter teachers in our sample.
Discussion
So, what can we make of these data? It is worth highlighting three topics the teachers who responded to this survey helped us better understand. The first is student discipline and its impact on how teachers use their time. The second is the amount of time teachers are working outside their typical school day. The third is how to think about differences among schooling sectors concerning how teachers spend their time.
With this in mind, the best approach would be to take each in turn.
Student Discipline
Student discipline has been a topic of discussion since before the pandemic. But the coronavirus, lockdowns, and disruptions to school routines appear to have affected student behavior. (Take this headline from the education outlet, The Hechinger Report, “How the pandemic has altered school discipline — perhaps forever.” 6) As any teacher will note, managing
a classroom is fundamental to learning, and disruptions and discipline issues can waste the best-planned lesson.
Teachers gave us several interesting data points related to student discipline. First, 58% claimed they had a class interrupted by student discipline issues in the previous day. By a substantial margin, this was the most common form of classroom interruption that teachers reported. Of those 58% of teachers, 86.5% reported they had experienced more than one student discipline issue, and 18.5% said they had experienced more than five. When it comes to the time cost of these, between 51% and 53% of teachers reported (we asked the question two ways) devoting at least one hour per week to dealing with student discipline issues, and between 23% and 25% of teachers reported devoting more than three hours per week to it.
Assuming a 180-day school year, with 36 weeks of instruction, one hour per week is 36 hours of work or 6 full 6-hour school days. Three hours per week is 18 full school days. For the 3 percent of teachers spending more than 10 hours per week, this is a minimum of 360 hours or 60 full school days is lost.
There were some minimal between-sector differences in how teachers report responding to discipline issues. Overall, student discipline issues were the most popular choice for classroom interruptions, with 59% of traditional public, 49% of charter, and 57% of private school teachers saying they had experienced one in the previous day. When it comes to the overall impact of student discipline and how much time teachers devoted to dealing with it, for most cases, the time use looks similar across sectors. The only significant finding is that charter school teachers stood out, with 11% reporting they spent more than 10 hours per week addressing student discipline issues, compared to only three percent of traditional public and one percent of private school teachers.
Now, there is a minority of teachers burning the midnight oil. Nine percent of teachers said they spent more than three hours during the previous day on pre-instruction activities, and 8% said they spent more than three hours during the previous day on post-instruction activities. Looking at the average week, 7% of teachers said they were spending more than 10 hours per week working outside the school day.
There were no discernable differences among sectors. Roughly the same percentages of private, charter, and traditional public school teachers reported out of school time use in the various time bands provided.
Perhaps more interestingly, there were no differences among teachers of varying experience. When we compared teachers who had been teaching for less than three years, teachers who had been teaching from four to six years, and teachers who had been teaching for more than six years, there were no significant differences in the percentages of teachers falling into each time band.
Out of Class Workload
How much teachers do outside the classroom is a hotly debated topic. Most debates shed more heat than light, so we simply asked teachers how much time they spent on pre-instruction, like planning, and post-instruction, like grading. We asked teachers to think back to their most recent school day to answer that question. We also asked them to look from a weekly perspective and tell us the average amount of time they spend working outside school hours.
The numbers given for the most recent day align with the numbers given for an average week. For the most recent day, 62% of teachers said they spent less than one hour on pre-instruction activities, and 64% of teachers said they spent less than one hour on post-instruction activities. When asked about the typical week, 71% of teachers said they spent less than 5 hours working outside their school day.
Within Sectors and Among Sectors
Longtime Brookings Institution education policy researcher Tom Loveless frequently chided those making between-state comparisons of student achievement. Politicians, journalists, and pundits love to rank states by student achievement and show how states that do what they like do better than states that don’t do what they like. Loveless helpfully reminded them that the variation in student performance within states is much larger than the variation in student performance between states, often by a factor of four or five. As he wrote a decade ago, “Anyone who follows NAEP scores knows that the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi is quite large. What is often overlooked is that every state has a mini-Massachusetts and Mississippi contrast within its own borders.” 7
The between-sector comparison of teachers’ responses to our survey reminds us of Loveless’ wisdom. Based on what teachers told us, it appears that there is more variation within sectors in how teachers spend their time than among them. For example, Table 2 displays the results of the question asking teachers how much time they spend working outside of the classroom each week.
There are some differences. For example, the 18% of private school teachers that report spending less than one hour per week is statistically significantly more than the percentages of traditional public and public charter teachers, and the 21% of private school teachers reporting spending 3 to 5 hours is statistically
significantly less than traditional public or public charter. But other than those two sets of numbers, there are no significant differences among the sectors.
But within sectors, substantial differences appear. Within public schools, we see eight percent of teachers reporting less than one hour per week working outside the school day and seven percent saying they are spending more than ten. The bell-like curve peaks around 3-5 hours of work outside of school, but the tails of the curve are still fat enough to include a lot of teachers. That means, within the same district or even the same school, teachers can spend vastly different amounts of time working outside the school day. This pattern is repeated in the other sectors as well.
Conclusion
As Glen Eye understood back in the 1950s, time in schools in important. Teachers have a limited amount of time with students, and maximizing the amount of that time devoted to the actual task of teaching is important. That means minimizing distractions and freeing teachers from extraneous and unnecessary work.
The teachers in our sample identified several areas for improvement. For a majority of teachers, student discipline issues cause classroom interruptions. For a substantial minority of teachers, student discipline issues suck up enormous amounts of time that should be spent preparing lessons, delivering them, and then grading.
That said, it might come as a surprise to see how many teachers state they don’t do much work outside the typical school day. The overworked teacher, buried under grading and furiously Googling to find activities for their class, is a common trope on television and social media but is not the majority experience of teachers. Most teachers seem to have a relatively manageable workload outside the school day.
We are so grateful to the teachers who took their time to answer our survey. Hopefully, the results can be used to think about how schools operate and how schools can best use the limited time they have with students.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank James Shuls and Joan Walden for feedback on early drafts of this paper and for the suggestions his colleagues John Kristof, Marty Lueken, and Manasa Swaminathan made when they read it. He would like to thank the team at Hanover Research for helping design and administer the survey instrument and analyze the results. He would also like to thank mrproofreading (Fiverr’s top rated copy editor!) for copy edits as well as his colleagues Michael Davey and Jacob Vinson for their graphic design and layout of the report. All errors are his own.
Notes
- Eye, Glenn. (1955, June). The importance of decreasing classroom interruptions. American School Board Journal, pp. 35–36
- Kraft, Matthew and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum (2021) “The Big Problem With Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning.” AERA Open Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1–17 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584211028856
- Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum, pg. 10
- Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum, pg. 2
- National Center for Education Statistics (2020) Digest of Education Statistics: 2020. Washington DC: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/2020menu_tables.asp
- Preston, Caroline and Sarah Butrymowicz (2021) “How the pandemic has altered school discipline- perhaps forever.” The Hechinger Report, February 20, available at: https://hechingerreport.org/how-the-pandemic-has-altered-school-discipline-perhaps-forever/
- Loveless, Tom (2012). The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education. Washington DC: The Brookings Institution. Page 4. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/0216_brown_education_loveless.pdf