John Walkup

Our company released the Community Edition of its Sapphire classroom observation software for free download a few months ago. Since then, administrators have been downloading the software and using it in their classrooms.  I want to take this time to explain why the feedback provided by Sapphire can enhance data-driven decision making and drive professional development to improve the amount of academic engagement time (often mistakenly confused with time on task) available to students.

We used state-of-art tools like Java FX to create Sapphire, which has granted the software considerable functionality. I want to focus this entry on the timeline feature, which uses real-time charting to map the time usage of classroom sessions.

Suppose a principal steps in and observes a classroom for 50 minutes.  Using Sapphire, she obtains the following timeline.  (In my experience, this timeline describes a typical classroom; I have certainly observed far worse.)

The timeline suggests to her considerable areas for recovering lost instructional time between the bells.

1. The first three minutes devoted to transition is too long and completely wasted because the assessment appearing between 3-18 minutes could have begun at the 1 minute mark (or even earlier) while the teacher took roll.

2. Partial student engagement from 12-18 minutes (and especially between 15-18 min) indicates many students finished early. Can the teacher shorten the next quiz? Possibly.  Can she assign academic work to students who finish early? Probably. Do her students need to spend 16 minutes on a quiz? Maybe, but if this is a common occurrence she would likely review her teacher’s checking-for-understanding techniques.

3. The teaching of new content (a good thing) was interrupted by the PA system (a school-centered disruption) at the 24-minute mark. Never minding the disruption factor (which can irritate teachers and distract students for the remainder of the class session), students lost three minutes of instruction. She questions why the school is interrupting instruction during the middle of a classroom session, and if all three minutes consisted of truly important information.

4. The transition to review activities at the 36 minute mark took three minutes, which is probably too long. She might ask the entire teaching staff to discuss means of shortening transitions. Do the staff have a consistent method for transitions? Can they reduce this time to (say) one minute?

5. The review session featured one-fifth of the students disengaged throughout the last ten minutes of the observation. This points to a classroom management/engagement issue.  Did the teacher realize that one-fifth of the class was disengaged?

The attentive engagement index is 0.82, indicating that students, no matter how intent they were on learning, could not have been engaged more than 82% of the observation session.  The non-attentive engagement index, 0.49, indicates that even the most disengaged students were engaged at least 49% of the time — a small consolation given that this is less than half of the observation session.  The true engagement index for this session is therefore a range between 49% and 82%, depending on the motivation of the student. Note the engagement index for the typical student, 66%.  We’ll come back to this value later.

After considerable discussion and a bit of professional development in questioning strategies (which The Standards Company LLC can provide), the principal steps back into the classroom and observes the following:

Notice the differences:

1. The school secretarial staff now interrupt the class near the beginning of class, not during the middle.  And they have trimmed their announcement to only include vital information. (They have decided to refrain from calling out of the names of birthdays, which was a habit in the past.)  During the announcement, the teacher took roll and handed out the quiz.

2. The teacher examined the Sapphire timeline and decided that trimming the quiz by three problems would not seriously detract from its purpose but would save three minutes. (Students who finished early completed word searches to keep them busy while the rest finished.  This does not count as academic engagement, but at least it keeps them from tearing into each other. Perhaps the teacher can improve even more by having them review grade-appropriate vocabulary words. )

3. The teacher proceeds with the same lesson as before (but without the school-centered interruption).  However, the transition to the subsequent review session is shorter.  After undergoing professional development in student questioning and classroom management, the teacher maintains more engagement during the review session.

4. Because of the saved time, the teacher has roughly ten minutes near the end of the session to teach new vocabulary words.

So what did the students gain?  The attentive students are now engaged 91% of the time, an increase of 9% (about 7 minutes).  The big gains were made in the non-attentive group, an increase from 49% to 86%.  Wow!   And since this group comprises many of the students that lie on the fringe of proficiency on state tests, the gains in achievement scores can be enormous.

What about the engagement index for the typical group?  This is a weighted average that takes into account the portion of the students that are engaged at any one time.   This value is now 89%, an improvement of 23% over the previous session.  In a sense, this teacher has improved his or her classroom time usage by 23% with a little professional development and changes in classroom management. (The secretarial staff helped too; classroom time usage is a schoolwide problem needing cooperation from every staff member.)

The teacher can improve the results even more. The principal thinks this teacher can trim another lost minute from the transition at the beginning of the classroom session and eliminate the transition at the end entirely.  And the time lost t partial engagment during the last portion of the quiz can be eliminated by providing students with true academic activities instead of word searches.

So what can we expect schools to achieve when improving classroom time usage? I am not sure what values the three engagement indices would exhibit if studied on a wide scale. I do know that schools, over a period of a full week, can achieve an attentive engagement index of 95%, for I have witnessed it personally.  But it takes a concerted effort on everyone’s part. (Professional learning communities, anyone?)

So how much does it cost to fix problems with classroom time usage?  You be the judge, but I think most of the readers will see that the cures are relatively cheap, with most being free.  But to raise academic engagement time at a school, the staff has to first know where the problems exist. Sapphire is the most powerful tool available for achieving this end and monitoring improvements.

You can download Sapphire for free from our official web site, http://www.standardsco.com.