When Time is Tight, What Do You Sacrifice?

A fire alarm recently interrupted a professional learning session I was facilitating and cost us nearly 45 minutes. As the clock ticked down, I felt the pressure every teacher knows well: I still had important ideas to cover.

So I did what many of us do when time gets tight. I started telling participants what I wanted them to know instead of giving them opportunities to figure it out for themselves.

Halfway through, I realized I was doing exactly what I had asked teachers not to do. Faced with less time, I had shifted from creating opportunities for learning to simply delivering information.

That experience reminded me how easy it is, even with the best intentions, to deprive learners of the very thing they need most.

As summer draws to a close and teachers return to their classrooms, I invite you to consider how you are making space for student sensemaking in your lessons. Whether you are using an off-the-shelf curriculum or one you've developed yourself, how are you giving students opportunities to grapple with scientific ideas instead of simply receiving them?

Sensemaking, in its simplest form, is figuring things out. When I first began wrestling with the implications of the Next Generation Science Standards, one of the most profound shifts I needed to make was moving from a classroom where students learned about science to one where they had to figure out the science.

At the time, I was doing what many teachers are trained to do. I was distilling important ideas, presenting them to students, and then asking them to repeat those ideas back to me. We completed labs and activities that reinforced the concepts, but in hindsight, I had taken on most of the cognitive work myself. I was carrying the intellectual load and then wondering why students struggled to develop deep understanding.

OpenSciEd's explicit use of sensemaking loops helped me recognize what was missing from my own instruction. Students begin with questions, gather evidence, develop explanations, and identify new questions. The cycle repeats until a scientific explanation for the anchoring phenomenon emerges.

I often think about this process as assembling a puzzle. Each lesson provides another piece that helps students make sense of a larger system or phenomenon. The picture becomes clearer over time as additional pieces are added.

But this raises an important question: What happens when puzzle pieces are missing? What happens when we shorten investigations, skip discussions, rush explanations, or remove opportunities for students to wrestle with ideas because time is running short?

Like many teachers, I know exactly why this happens.

Time.

The fire alarm during my professional learning session reminded me of that reality. Faced with less time than expected, I immediately felt the urge to accelerate learning by delivering conclusions rather than allowing participants to experience the learning process themselves.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I was teaching about the importance of sensemaking while actively removing it from the experience.

One of my favorite passages from Ambitious Science Teaching captures the consequence perfectly:

"When students are always told what the relationships are, they are 'borrowing' the sense that someone else had made, and consequently their learning is both fragile and temporary."

I suspect that time pressure is one of the primary reasons many of us unintentionally deprive students of meaningful sensemaking opportunities. After all, I can tell you something much faster than you can figure it out for yourself.

Yet teaching and learning are not the same process. Coverage is seductive because it creates the illusion of progress. Students can move through every lesson, every activity, and every standard. Yet movement is not the same as understanding.

While we worry about covering standards and pacing through units, we must also ask ourselves whether coverage sometimes comes at the expense of learning. Students may encounter every topic we planned, but if they never have opportunities to make sense of those ideas themselves, what are they truly taking away?

The good news is that students already bring tremendous assets into our classrooms. They arrive with curiosity, experiences, prior knowledge, cultural perspectives, and ideas about how the world works. Our challenge is not providing those assets. Our challenge is creating the space and time for students to leverage them in service of learning.

As you begin the school year, identify one place in an upcoming lesson where you are doing the thinking that students could be doing themselves.

Then give that thinking back.

The science will still be there. The standards will still be there. The difference is that students will leave with something more valuable than coverage.

They will leave with understanding.