Your teacher has been talking for the last 10 minutes and is just about to get to the most important part of the lesson when suddenly everything takes a pause. An announcement is being made over the intercom.
For many this year, announcements have felt excessive and thus disruptive. Besides announcements, other interruptions to class time like End of Course (EOC) testing and the preparation needed for EOC testing also seemed very different this year.
When an announcement first happens, it does not appear to have much of an effect. For some, it is simply just a pause in teaching, but for others it causes a significant change in the course of the lesson.
“[Interruptions] definitely break the flow of teaching,” Geometry teacher Karl Kreitlein said. “Especially if they’re some time either close to the beginning or in the middle of the class period, it completely breaks the flow and I just feel like I have to stop and wait.”
For other teachers, it goes beyond this break in flow and slight change in course plan; it becomes frustrating, leaving teachers feeling overwhelmed. English classes usually face the most disruption because things like device issues, test platform testing and diagnostic tests are done in English classes as all students are required to take an English class all four years of high school.
“I am one who can monitor and adjust on the spot so I’m okay … but I know … from co-workers it’s very frustrating because you’re trying to do the best you can and then you feel like when you get thrown two and three other things to do on top of [the usual workload], it’s hard … you’re not doing the best you can and you feel like … ‘My students don’t get me at my best,’” Tracy Duckworth, English and mythology teacher said.
An issue many teachers can agree on is that many of the announcements do not seem directly relevant to the majority of people in the school and may not need to be done over the announcements, but rather in an email. There are conflicting ideas on whether the video announcements help or hurt this issue and thus whether they should be stopped, continued or changed. Some believe advisory can be utilized instead to reduce these announcements and ensure students are getting the information they need.
“I think if advisory was homeroom, there would be an easier way to track accountability to the teachers,” Duckworth said.
But many may wonder what changes lead to such an increase in interruptions and whether the interruptions have significantly increased. Principal Carrye Holland attributes the change in interruptions to changes in the testing schedule and device issues.
“Testing was four days last year and six days this year, so it’s a little bit longer, but I don’t feel like it’s that much different,” Holland said. “The devices have gotten older and older … so we had to do more loaner devices this year, which caused a lot of additional work for the staff. We had to call students down, assign laptops to them, all the things. So that is one of the things that expanded testing a little bit.”
But device issues affected interruptions in many ways. For one, as mentioned before, a lot more work had to be done to assign loaner devices, like calling students down, which was often done over the announcements. However, the EOC testing schedule itself was lengthened because there were not enough devices to do tests simultaneously. This longer testing schedule meant more time spent in homeroom and not in class, another class interruption.
“Because we didn’t have enough devices to do a lot of tests at once we had to split the tests,” Holland said. “In the past, … we did more tests simultaneously. We just don’t have the devices for that this year.”
As for the announcements themselves, the office staff and Holland try to be very intentional with them not interrupting class.
“I’m very clear with the office staff that I don’t want random announcements made. It’s not just, ‘Oh, I just decided to make an announcement,’” Holland said. “This is information that really needs to get out so I feel like as a school we are cognizant of interruptions.”
Despite these difficulties and the frustration associated with interruptions, it’s important to realize that everyone can cooperate to find a solution and that there is always room for improvement as long as there is understanding.
“I can acknowledge we can do better,” Holland said. “But I think we all have to see each other’s perspective. I think it’s important for us to be in the shoes of the classroom teachers who are in the middle of a lesson and they get interrupted, but also classroom teachers to understand that if we are making announcements, it’s something pretty important in that moment.”
