How can/should teachers allocate their time?

Sometimes in a group project you want to go around to everyone but you have limited time and how can you give full attention to each student as you meet them without getting distracted or missing anyone? From this inquiry I wanted to look at it from two different perspectives:

• Logistical: how can we support teachers in practical ways so they have enough time and energy to give to students?
• Teacher Practice: how can teachers become better teachers and effectively allocate their time to students?

In Charles M. Achilles’s “Students achieve more in smaller classes” it argues that there’s a strong correlation that younger students do get more out of small class sizes because they get a lot of attention and time with the teacher. As the students get older this correlation diminishes.

An interesting information that Achilles points out is that while small classes benefits all students in the classroom, the ones that most benefited from the small class size were minority students.

However, the article was quite short and does not specify a lot of measurements that they have used to see the difference between bigger classrooms and smaller classrooms. I find it quite unreliable or at least something that I can completely base my inquiry and build up on it. It is definitely something to appreciate but I don’t think this satisfies the question of whether it is really good to reduce the size of the classroom.

Another article about the side effects of reducing class sizes by Thomson and Cunningham talks about the problem that arises from classroom reduction.

• Money becomes a problem: you need more teachers, bigger schools etc. Many schools will struggle with this.
• Article was based in California
• Teacher quality becomes a problem- you need more teachers, and if you don’t have a good pool… It becomes a challenge to make sure you have enough quality teachers to fulfil demand. David says teachers might actually improve with smaller class sizes. Chris says that people might be enticed to become teachers because they think sizes are smaller and the job might be easy therefore they might not be the best teachers.

So there are complication that follows because of reducing the size of class. But they both argue that smaller classrooms have benefits in students, but up until certain ages.

From the discussion with my inquiry group, there were many suggestions and ideas for me to look for in my further inquiry.

One of the suggestions was to look into different organizational strategies to find a way for teachers to  make other processes more efficient so that they have more time for students.

But also, I could look into mini-conferences with students to ensure they are getting equal one on one attention (once a week? Once a day? Twice a week? Not sure of the regularity, but something that can be structured into my practice)

Next inquiry might be on the teacher pedagogy and actual teacher practices in the classroom.