The bell rings and our time starts. For fifty minutes we construct a place of learning. We are the calm, the enthusiasm, the patience that students experience in what can be a full and fast-paced day. The hustle and rush of getting to lockers, arriving to class, keeping a binder or folder organized, and yes, having a pencil that is usable—all of that is expected in the typical school day. All the while, the clock ticks toward snack, lunch, a hurried recess and dismissal. This is the reality for most public school teachers.
Ask any one of us what the challenges are to our success in the profession. We will tell you that time is our greatest enemy. Time weighs heavily as the relentless measure on teachers. And it is the ability to forget about the loss of minutes—minutes that can quickly add up—that allows for us to do our best work. When we lose those minutes is when we create the kinds of moments that are the living, beating heart of education.
It’s possible to account for the smallest increment of a class period. We can spend 5 minutes on the introduction, 10 more on a model, 25 on independent practice and the final 10 on a report out. That framework is fine. It’s usable, along with tens of other iterations teachers know. Instead, what I’d like to challenge you with is to think about how we can find time within the rigidity of the day to transcend the fifty minutes of obligation.
Teaching is a vocation and not an obligation. As Parker Palmer once wrote, a vocation is a calling that gives one’s life meaning through voice. Let your life speak, Palmer famously advised.
When we let our lives speak, we freeze time. We create a classroom where we momentarily are lost in play, in discovery, in inspiration, and in debate. These are moments of creation, moments of calling the true self into being. This was what the Greeks meant in their classical definition of education, that the inner self could make its way past layers of protection, past the artificial demands of the day to simply be, to exist, to be known and to be honored.
As teachers, we must revel in the moments when time is paused. The feeling that class time is expanding because it’s so much fun to be lost in imaginative play–where kids can be kids. There, in those frozen minutes, my classroom goes from plain old desk-and-chair combo seats and a white board leaning over a floor made of scuffed up tiles—to being an ancient tomb of an Egyptian king—that’s when we have defeated time, at least momentarily. Or maybe it should all be chalked up to the sarcophagus that lays in state in the front of the room, challenging us all to resist time.
Giving Time & Space for Dialogue
Predictability can be a saver of time and also an expedient of student creativity. Once students know the basic structure of an activity they can play within the expected established boundaries. In our first Mock trial, I modeled for the students the general format of the trial while donning my black college graduation gown. The prosecutors would present their argument, then I would ask if the jury had any questions, the prosecutor would respond, and then move on to their next argument. Once the prosecutor had a chance to present three arguments and receive questions from the jury, the defense would go through the same format. Finally, the jury stepped out into the hallway to deliberate. The turn taking exercise of the trial format extends itself to practicing other kinds of dialogue too. Though, middle school students enjoy the back and forth of court, as well as my YouTube soundtrack from “The People’s Court”.
Scaffolds or prompts for exploring dialogue can be a helpful tool in adding structure. An example is brainstorming a list of characters affected by a problem, then having students respond to the prompt:
I’m thinking about ____ from the point of view of ____(person or character name), one thing that I’ve seen with this issue is…one thing that I have felt is…something that I would like to ask to ____(other character) is_____? These kinds of stems can help reluctant speakers to kick start a conversation. They can also help to sort out misconceptions, which can be addressed in the safety of the class.
Creating dialogue in the classroom can be approached from the perspective of “drill”. This approach asks students to do the same kind of dialogue moves again and again with the goal of building good habits. Adding this kind of predictability to the classroom is a form of structure and routine. As such, we need to recognize that using routine for establishing or building dialogue in the classroom can be effective. Routine creates a shortcut that overcomes the limitation of time. The predictability of routine guides our students toward independent learning with an invisible structure of common expectation. The question is what is the cost? The cost of this is a loss of the novelty or freshness of dialogue. Even if the topic changes, when we use the same format too often the dialogue feels stale. For that reason, we have to be ready to move to different formats and to use varied protocols or games. All along the way, we keep in mind the kind of classroom culture that we are trying to evoke—and how students are responding to our overtures to be independent thinkers.
Authentic dialogue in the classroom means overcoming limitations, including the imposition of time constraints. Use of scaffolds can help to point us in the right direction, but they are simply a tool. Sentence starters and word stems or turn taking routines help students give time back to teachers and students by creating a sense of familiarity with the way we talk with one another. Instead of searching for the perfect words, sentence starters give our students a first step toward participating. Instead of seconds guiding another student's time to speak, a formatted structure gives students a sense of predictability. For me, these tools must be judged in the light of how it has helped us to advance in our ability to hear each other and to truly respond to one another. When we learn to listen and to respond, we are creating new shared understandings, both of the content and of one another. This is the kind of teaching that we can aspire to practice: helping students to see one another more fully in a world that is still unfolding.
