Where the Day Goes: Rethinking Instructional Time

We're publishing two follow-ups to this episode: a time analysis tool your team can use to see where the day goes, and a post from Nell on the literacy practices that waste time and the ones worth the minutes. Subscribe to Lit Talk updates to get both as soon as they're out.

Students don't all get the same amount of school

Dr. Matthew Kraft traced his interest in time back to a meeting at a school about student absenteeism. Every few minutes, the intercom interrupted to call a student to the front office, and he started asking how often instruction gets interrupted and what it costs students.

He explained that time in school has two dimensions. The first is access: how long the school day and year are. The second is how much of that time becomes teaching and learning. Even the first question is hard to answer. State and school leaders often can't give basic facts about the length of their own school day and year, so his team gathered calendars district by district.

The typical student attends about 179 days a year for about 6.9 hours a day, roughly 1,230 hours of bell-to-bell time. The larger finding is the variation. Schools at the 10th percentile of total time offer about 200 fewer hours a year than schools at the 90th percentile, about five and a half weeks, which adds up to almost two years of instructional time across K–12.

“So we have this great and I think hidden inequity in access to time.”
Dr. Matthew Kraft

Where the minutes go, and what's in your control

Dr. Kraft walked through the many ways time is lost: days canceled for weather, teacher absences that substitutes can't fully replace, student absences, intercom announcements and knocks on the door, suspensions, early dismissals for athletics, and transitions that aren't as tight as they could be. In a case study of one district, absences, suspensions, tardies, and outside interruptions alone cost about 16% of potential learning time in elementary school and up to 25% in high school, before counting anything about how teachers manage their classrooms.

Some of that time is recoverable. Dr. Kraft estimated that cutting outside interruptions could win back 5–10% of it, and that tighter transitions and a coherent school policy on electronic devices could add another 5–10%, close to a day a week of potential instructional time.

For educators who don't set the calendar, he suggested two starting points. Teachers can keep a time diary for a week, recording each interruption, which makes for a stronger case than citing outside research. Anyone can compare their district's calendar with peer districts' and ask about the difference at a school board meeting.

“We don't need to fix everything all at once to make progress.”
Dr. Matthew Kraft

What gets squeezed when time runs short

In clips from conversations with instructional leaders, they described state mandates for literacy and math time that leave little room for science and social studies, and the pull toward covering standards quickly when there isn't time for depth.

Dr. Kraft said the research bears this out. When accountability systems test reading and math, schools respond, and history and science often get short shrift. Shortened periods also squeeze out whatever comes last in a lesson, such as student-to-student exploration and the exit ticket.

Nell connected this to literacy. The vocabulary, conceptual knowledge, and content knowledge students build in science and social studies are strong predictors of reading comprehension, yet those subjects are often cut in the name of improving literacy. She also described a recent SRI study that found the step most often dropped from phonics lessons was the chance for students to apply new patterns in actual reading. When a team knows it will run short of time, she said, it should decide deliberately what gets cut, so it isn't always the same crucial step.

Start here: analyze the time you already have

Nell shared a thought experiment from a chapter she wrote with Julia Lindsey and Crystal Wise for the Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy. They built a first grade day that included everything it's supposed to, at the length recommended for each part, from lunch and physical activity to social studies, science, literacy, and math. The day came up about two and a half hours short.

Any district or school can run the same exercise. Add up the time each curriculum calls for, add specials, lunch, and recess at recommended lengths, and compare the total with the day you have. When Nell has done this with districts, she often finds that it isn't possible to teach every curriculum for the time it calls for.

The next step is a time analysis, which shows where the time in your setting actually goes. All you need is an observer, a clock, and a notebook or laptop.

How to run a time analysis

1. Get clear on why. Go in with a continuous improvement mindset. The goal is to find opportunities to use time better, and the analysis works best when everyone knows it isn't an evaluation.
2. Decide who will observe and when. Pick one block to start.
3. Pick your approach. Follow the whole class, or follow one or a few focal children, such as a student who is pulled often for tier two or tier three intervention, or a multilingual learner.
4. Timestamp everything to the minute. Small stretches of time add up across days and years.
5. Keep your notes low inference. Write what happened, such as "teacher calls students to the rug," and save judgments like "the transition dragged" for later.

One morning, minute by minute

Nell shared notes from a time analysis of one primary classroom. The doors opened at 8:50, and by 8:54 most children were doing worksheets. A breakfast group came in at 8:59. The teacher called the class to the rug at 9:17, most children were on the rug by 9:20, and the read-aloud began at 9:30, forty minutes after the doors opened.

The notes were factual, and they still revealed a lot.

• Children who qualified for free breakfast were getting about nine minutes less classroom time every day, a structural issue worth addressing.
• It took three minutes for even most of the class to reach the rug, and a discipline issue cost another three minutes.
• Several activities, including most of the worksheet completion and dressing a teddy bear for the weather, aren't supported by research.

Looking at the full analysis, Nell said, almost the whole 40 minutes was not a research-aligned use of time.

Sort it against the research

To turn notes into decisions, look at each use of time and place it in one of three columns.

• Research supports this. Protect it. For example, read-aloud, which research strongly supports in the primary grades.
• Research is neutral, or we're not sure. Talk it through as a team. For example, daily oral language.
• Research does not support this. This is where you'll find time. For example, most worksheet completion, dressing the teddy bear for the weather, and uninterrupted sustained silent reading (USSR) or DEAR time, which have more effective alternatives.

Name the kind of change

Once you see where time can be recovered, ask what it would take. Nell described three kinds of change:

• Structural changes are systems-level issues, such as whether arrival and breakfast could happen differently. These often mean a conversation with school or district leadership.
• Management changes involve transitions and behavior, such as how long it takes to move a class to the rug. They may call for new routines or a new way of storing materials.
• Content changes concern what gets taught and how, such as whether calendar time is teaching what students need most, or what to prioritize within a curriculum.

A time analysis tool to walk your team through this process is coming in the next few weeks. Sign up for the Lit Talk newsletter to get it.

What this means for practice

Dr. Kraft's research gives district and state leaders hard questions about how much time students can access. For school leaders and teachers, the most immediate opportunity is the time already on the schedule, and a time analysis is a practical first step toward using it well. There are many points of entry into the time conversation, Nell reminded the audience, and each role has its own ways to make a difference.

Once a time analysis shows where your minutes go, the next question is which practices are worth them. Nell's upcoming post walks through common literacy time wasters and what to do instead. In the next few weeks, look for our follow up blog: Where the Day Goes: Making the Most of Literacy Time. Sign up for our newsletter to get direct access to more Lit Talk resources and tools.

Resources from the episode

• Kraft and Novicoff, “Time in School,” American Educational Research Journal (2024), on how much time students have in school and how it varies (on Sagepub; direct link)
• Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum, “The Big Problem With Little Interruptions to Classroom Learning,” AERA Open (2021) (on Sagepub; direct link)
• Kraft, Blazar, and Hogan, “The Effect of Teacher Coaching on Instruction and Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence,” Review of Educational Research (2018) (on Sagepub; direct link)
• Duke, Lindsey, and Wise, “Feeding Two Birds With One Hand: Instructional Simultaneity in Early Literacy Education,” in Handbook on the Science of Early Literacy (Guilford, 2023)
• Jennerjohn, Rutherford-Quach, Cassidy, Woodworth, Dec, and Reynolds, “Bridging the Divide: Connecting Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in Early Literacy,” SRI learning brief (2026), the study Nell described on what gets left out of phonics lessons (direct link)

Closing reflection

Dr. Kraft's research points to a hidden inequity in how much time students get, and it also shows how much of what happens to that time is within reach. A district can compare its calendar with its neighbors', a school can cut down on interruptions during the day, and a teacher can start with one morning of timestamps. None of these steps requires fixing everything at once.

Next episode

Lit Talk returns Wednesday, December 2, at 3:45 p.m. CT, with an episode on reading comprehension and guest Dr. Gina Cervetti, whose work includes the integration of literacy and science and research on text sets. Register for the next Lit Talk episode.