KIds spend 60 per cent of their time waiting

The next time a kid looks like they're falling asleep, bored or not quite paying enough attention to the PowerPoint with which you have driven on and on (well, you did spend four hours preparing it last night, didn't you?) don't forget: it's not you, it's just that the kids are fed up waiting for something to happen.

From Donald Clark's blog (in July) comes this Times Ed story:

American anthropologist Philip Jackson, showed that children in school spent 50% of their time waiting. When Roland Meighan took a stopwatch into a primary school to conduct the same research with his students, he found they spent as much as 60% of their time waiting for something to happen.

When I was starting out teaching I thought it was normal to start with at least 10 minutes of explanation or introduction to a new thing. Often, though, it would end up as 15 minutes. I have observed other teachers where, in a fifty minute lesson, they have droned on for a massive 40 minutes before giving all the kids something to do.

But it got me thinking about the classrooms where 1:1 computing or interactive whiteboards appear. The latter gets a bee in my bonnet, because it actively encourages, in the wrong hands, only two or three students to work at once (or, worse still, just one person: the teacher).

So, here's a challenge: keep a log this week of how much time all the kids in your classroom are actively working (not listening, or waiting for something to happen, but searching for information, working at making something of the information, producing something). Are the results surprising?

Comments

[Robert Jones]

I agree that sitting listening to a teacher droning on is not a Good Thing. But waiting is not always necessarily a bad thing. "Grokking in fullness waiting is" after all (wilfully obscure I know).

I also agree about the potential misuse of whiteboards. That's why I'm such a fan of the electronic voting systems. Maximum class activity.

It may be difficult for me to perform your experiment - I could assume that every pupil is actively doing something during individual problem solving but I think this would be rather naively optimistic! I'll give it a go anyway for one lesson and take it from there.

Bit puzzled by this. Are you/they suggesting listening is a wasted useless activity?

[Gordon McKinlay]

Waiting is a very important activity as long as that waiting is for something. Just think of those times you have sat in a presentation waiting for the presenter to get PowerPoint going! Do you ever want to jump up and down and do it for them. I end up having to sit on my hands and biting my tongue on these occassions.

[Chris]

I think you're dead right! The biggest crime in teaching is to be a bore - and I became more and more aware of that with every passing year. I have a horrid feeling that PP presentations could become the new worksheets - of which I have always had a particular horror.
Idea: every time you face a class, imagine you're at a social gathering with friends. Apply the same criteria of interaction and being fascinating - and always, always let everyone else have their turn!
And that's why I retired at 60 - because, with the best will in the world, it's really hard to keep it up. Being boring is *much* less tiring......

[Ewan McIntosh]

I don't like it when people leave anonymous comments - if you have an opinion then speak up! But I am suggesting that, sometimes, teachers speak too much and that, yes, kids could be doing something more worthwhile than listening.

Why?

Repetition of something they have already captured.
Having to listen to simplified explanations for a few slower students when they themselves want to get going (and could explain things better than the teacher perhaps).
Children have different styles of learning which appeal. Listening caters for one of these, so it should only take up a relatively small proportion of the time spent in class.
There are many ways to peel an onion. If a teacher is explaining something, then there is probably a means for the student to find out the same information themselves, if the teacher showed them how.

Are those enough reasons to keep you going, Anonymous?

[John]

Hi Ewan,
This reminds me of the presentation I sat through, the main point of which was that children had a 5 (or 3 or something) minute attention span, adults 7, for listening to a speaker. The speaker spoke for an hour, unfortunately my attention span ran out and I can't recall any of his other points;-)
But I have sat for an hour inthralled by a good presentation, not often but occasionally. Or I've sat bored for most of the time and got one or two gems that were worth the wait, this is probably more like a classroom.
I know what you mean about whiteboards, but 2 or 3 working the board can lead to a lot of input from the terraces. I quite often do class blogging with a projector, and it is amazing how quickly the children pick up typos and my spelling mistakes. They also are keen to improve suggested texts by their peers (this seems especially true for primary 4-5) I'd say as long as you don't do it everyday you can involve most of the class in that way.
Chris, I am not sure your are right about being boring, when I am boring I end the day exhausted (most of the time), when I am on the ball I am usually pretty good at the end of the day. May be a taoist principal at work. Mind you you need to have time to prepare etc to be on the ball so I don't claim to do that too often.

[Andrew Pass]

Ewan, When I was a newteacher a more veteran colleagues told me that the students of great teachers leave exhausted at the end of the day, because they've been working all day, and great teachers leave bored, because they've been watching their students work all day. There is a kernel of truth in this statements. Students of the best teachers don't wait too much. However, certainly the best teachers are constantly thinking and working with individual/groups of students to push them to ever higher achievements and insights.

Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html

[Ewan McIntosh]

I think what you've just said, Andrew, hits the nail on the head. It's the middle ground that I believe is the 'right' picture for a classroom. Thanks for making it clearer.

[Chris]

Let's not lose sight of the fact that the actual day consists of, say, 6 different classes of 27 pupils, many coming in mixed-ability groups including SEN pupils. I still maintain that keeping the motivation and enthusiasm going throughout that kind of day is ...draining? Especially after 35 years. Maybe it's just my age showing!

[Craig]

The other cardinal sin for a language teaching is talking too much. I remember reading somewhere that the average EFL teacher talks for about 50 to 70% of the lesson. How anyone is expected to learn to speak under such circumstances is beyond me.