Krstovic's Thoughts on Education

Last week I analyzed my weekly lesson plans from the Grade 9 Applied Science and week by week I added up the amount of time that I spent on each major category of action.

The major categories of action in my Grade 9 Applied Science consisted of the following:

• Community circle/Think-Pair-Share
• Place mats and Graffiti
• Paired-Learning Investigations
• Reflection Journaling
• Demo/Didactic Lessons
• Individual Student Work Time

As part of the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program (TLLP) project I had to further analyze my data. To aid my analysis I developed “Time Use Graphs” showing the amount of time that students were engaged with each major category of action.

This was a great exercise that offered a lot of insight into what I actually did with these students over the course of 17 weeks.  In order for teachers to do this exercise correctly it is absolutely necessary that teachers keep an accurate yet brief record of what they did each day in their classes along with an estimated amount of time that students spent on various actions.

Here are some interesting results from my SNC1PO class:

• students spent 54% of the time with various “intelligent” instructional tactics and strategies (community circle/TPS, place-mats/graffiti and paired-learning investigations)

• Only 13% of the time was spent in direct instruction/demo lessons, which suggests that my teaching was more student-centred than teacher-centred.

• About 26% of the time students worked with a partner on various inquiry bases activities

• About 15 – 20 % of the allocated course time was lost due to the school schedule, announcements, interruptions, student lates, snow days and buy-out-events.

Please feel free to comment on this exercise. The next step in the analysis is to look at what changes occurred in students’ performance in priority achievement targets and to compare that to the actual time that students spent with various “intelligent” instructional tactics and strategies.