Giving Every Student the Equivalent of a Time Turner

Giving Every Student the Equivalent of a Time Turner

In The Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the Harry Potter series, Hermione Granger manages to attend extra classes with the help of a Time Turner. The Time Turner allows her to go back in time so that she can, in effect, take two classes at once. To use the parlance of renowned education Robert Marzano and others, it gave her “more time on task.” Of course, Hermione was “quite the brightest witch of her age” and so learned an even more prodigious amount with extra class time.

Many educators would like to figure out how to put more hours in the day – both for teachers and students. But, of course, the time-space continuum is what it is, using a Time Turner isn’t an option. Sometimes, schools look at extending the school day, or the school year, and that seems to have helped in some situations, but perhaps we need to take a step back and look at the time-on-task equation in a slightly different way.

Here is the equation. If Johnny needs an hour to learn to a particular concept, or a series of steps to solve a problem, or set of vocabulary words, then 30 minutes of instruction and study time will leave Johnny short of mastery. The problem for many teachers is that they are pressed to simply “cover” the material. If “covering” a topic takes 30 minutes, that’s just the way it is. The question then becomes whether there is a way to help students learn more material in less time.

I can think of two, and neither of them is a Time Turner. Both ways of helping students learn more material in less time can be effective for those that are the “brightest of their age” and those that are not.

The first is to teach more effectively. It may be that students will “get” whatever it is more quickly if the material is presented in a more effective way. Teachers who understand how learning happens in the brain can often get more and better learning to happen for their students in less time.

The other is to improve the efficiency of learning by building a student’s learning capacity. What if Johnny could grasp that concept in less time, or manipulate the steps of a story problem more effectively? What if he could sustain his attention better so that he is actually attending to the instruction rather than needing it to be repeated multiple times? What if he could take notes while listening to the teacher? What if he could monitor his own pacing and progress to finish his work?

Many teachers assume that they are stuck with their students’ learning capacity, leaving them to choose between just “covering” the material or taking more time to teach. That assumption no longer holds. Dramatic improvements in students’ capacity to learn are possible in a very short period of time. In 12 weeks of using BrainWare SAFARI, for example, students have improved their cognitive skills by an average of 4 years, according to peer-reviewed published research.

So, if we can help students learn more in less time, how much time will we spend helping them get to that point? Is it worth the investment of time?

Let’s do the math again. The time spent using BrainWare SAFARI is typically 30 to 50 hours over those 12 weeks – usually no more than 30 hours.

If we assume that a typical school year involves 1,000 hours of instruction, 30 hours of cognitive skill development is a one-time investment of 3 percent of instructional time in that particular school year. If one considers that the improvement could be amortized over three years of elementary school (since 3^rd grade is a common year in which to incorporate BrainWare SAFARI in the curriculum), the investment of time diminishes to about one percent of instructional time. If learning capacity, then, is only one percent more efficient, it would be an even trade, but learning capacity is likely to be much more efficient than that because learning is not linear and learning one thing better provides the groundwork for learning everything that comes afterward more efficiently. It also doesn’t account for the cumulative effects of students who go on to middle school and high school with the capacity and preparation to succeed at those levels.

Maybe, Time Turners aren’t an option, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enable our students to learn more than they currently do.