In an excellent post awhile back, Larry Cuban summarized research related to how many decisions a teacher has to make each day:
*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.
*Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.
Now, a new study (thanks to Dan Willingham for the tip) has identified the number of research-based options we have to choose from when we make these decisions:
There’s certainly no reason why someone with just a few weeks training shouldn’t be able to handle teaching a class, wouldn’t you say?
Thank you for all that you do as a teacher. I retired from K-12 and now help prepare aspiring school administrators. I focus on teacher decision making as the foundation for protecting teacher rights–the right to manage a classroom, the right to due process, etc. Your page has helped me organize an upcoming editorial.