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This review has been accessed  times since August 10, 1998
N. E. Adelman; Karen Panton Walking Eagle; Andy Hargreaves
(Editors). (1997). Racing with the clock: Making time for teaching and
learning in school reform. New York: Teachers College Press.
185pp.
$17.95 (Paper) 0-8077-3637-6
$40.00 (Cloth) 0-8077-3638-4
Reviewed by Miriam Ben-Peretz
University of Haifa
August 10, 1998
Schwab (1970) admonished us to study practice in order to improve education.
According to Schwab the practical, and not diverse, partial, and competing theories is the
appropriate language for curriculum.
Racing with the clock presents slices of practice in the context of a variety of
attempts of school reform. The book has many advantages. It focuses on one crucial and
essential parameter of education in general, and school reform, in particular, namely time.
Time in this book is treated not only as a necessary and often scarce resource, but as a
palpable entity experienced as almost threatening, an enemy to be overcome. In his
concluding chapter Hargreaves talks about teachers being "prisoners of time", or "time
bandits" who "can capture time and use it for their own purposes" (p. 81). All of us are
familiar with teachers who tend to talk about the lack of time as the barrier to better
teaching as one of the reasons for burn-out (Schonmann 1990). Administrators are
actually aware of this situation and tend to view it as unchangeable. There is no doubt in
my mind that both teachers and administrators will feel great empathy with the teachers
whose narratives are the basis of this book.
Is time the only culprit? The voices of teachers ring out loud and clear and demand
our attention, especially when they share their feelings and perceptions openly and
forcefully with the reader: "As the years passed I became more angry and resentful. How
could the state and our own district leave us without any support. Accustomed as I was to
being successful in the classroom, I felt betrayed and abandoned" (p.18).
The various narratives are powerful and dramatic and make us sense the acute and
concrete circumstances of teachers' life in the context of school reform.
The reader is bound to reach a sad conclusion: Change and improvement are hard
to sustain and tend to suffer from erosion and disenchantment. One of the editors
responding to the teacher narrative: teacher-as-juggler states: "There is a weariness to the
tone of this case that is dispiriting. Here is a very experienced teacher who chose to help
develop a potentially exciting experimental program, but the bloom is obviously off the
rose" (p.36). A middle school teacher analyzing the problems of implementing school
reform, such as cooperative curricular planning, comes to the following conclusion: "The
most innovative and empowering changes do not have lives of their own; these changes
must be reappropriated each year by teachers and administrators. The hard question is
"How?""(p.41).
Time, or rather the lack of it or the ways it is allocated, obviously play a major role
in the failure of sustaining school reform. But time is not the only player in this drama. A
high school teacher involved in a member of one of the Coalition of Essential Schools
describes the situation as follows: "Faculty members began asking each other what had
happened to our shared decision making regarding student discipline and the school
budget (a long-standing budget committee had disappeared). Only a few teachers
continued to participate actively in full faculty meetings. Several factors probably account
for the waning participation, including the large size of the faculty, lack of understanding
about shared decision making (some new teachers had come on board without proper
induction), and other interpersonal issues" (p.72).
One of the obstacles to school reform concerns the fact that that this is a high-risk
game. The cases presented in this book are very open about the difficulties the teachers
experienced: "The textbook was safe and secure. Developing my own curriculum and
materials was not" (p.54)..
As readers we are struck by the many dilemmas confronting the teachers in these
vignettes. One of these dilemmas stems from the fact that teachers involved in school
reform are apt to devote much time to activities away from their classrooms, such as
curriculum work or professional development. In the words of one of these teachers: "The
parents of students in my class were also concerned about the amount of time I was
spending away from my classroom. They complained to the principal, saying that my first
priority should be my students. My principal backed me and my work. She reminded the
parents that I was a better teacher because I was learning about teaching and spending my
time implementing new programs. Despite her support, I had my doubts. Perhaps I was
stretching myself in too many directions" (p.55).
The structure of the book. The stories of ten experienced teachers from a variety of
schools in seven states of the U.S.A. form the core of this book. Their first-person
accounts of time-related challenges that confront teachers in innovative schools are
viewed in the context of different stages of the reform process. The organization of the
cases into three groups: planning stage, implementation stage, and continuous
improvement stage, allows the reader a glimpse into the problems accompanying change
efforts on their way from initiation to survival.
The editors point out that the cases of mature reform illustrate "the fragility of the
change process, and its vulnerability to the passage of time as well as shortage of time"
(p.6). This is a crucial point, innovations seem to have their own life cycles, sometimes
long, sometimes short, and our knowledge of the circumstances and features determining
these cycles is much too scarce. Racing with the clock provides important insights into
these cycles.
Beyond the descriptive and reflective voice of the teachers sharing their cases, the
reader has the privilege of listening to other voices reflecting on these cases. These are the
voices of other teachers, administrators, or editors. Thus we are drawn into the
deliberations accompanying each case and become partners in a reflective discussion.
The book ends with suggestions of new ways to think about teachers and time.
Restructuring school time and teachers' time is not easy and raises questions about the
personal experience of time. This aspect of "racing with the clock" has not been treated in
depth in this book. The metric of time has so strongly formed our concepts about time
that it has become difficult to analyze and understand other frames and experiences of
time. Rawlence (1985) states: "Accurate clock time - the time by which we organize
ourselves - has become so indispensable to industrial society, which is founded on the
regular beat of its rhythm, that we've come to look on it as the time. The final pip of the
time signal, automatically monitored, seems to indicate the time of the universe
itself....Human realities, which we share with each other through art, love, co-operation
and just living together, suggest that there are many dimensions to time in the universe.
Yet the authority of clock time in our culture, underwritten by science, is so absolute that
the evidence of human experience is stigmated as too subjective" (page 5).
Zerubavel (1981) has studied the sociotemporal order of human environments. One
of his main points is that the experience of time is cyclic and not linear. Based on
Zerubavel's work Connelly and Clandinin (1990) have analyzed the cyclic temporal
structure of schooling. Their analysis is important for understanding the phenomena
accompanying school reform. Breaks from established cycles and rhythms become
significant because they change the sociotemporal order of participants' lives. This might
well be one of the difficulties teachers experience in the context of school change.
The cases in Racing with the Clock, as well as the added commentaries, could serve
as the basis for reflecting on issues of change and school reform for pre-and-in-service
teacher education programs. They provide a way for teachers to talk about their teaching
experience, and construct their personal practical knowledge.
References
Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (1990). The cyclic temporal structure of schooling. In
M. Ben-Peretz and R. Bromme (Eds.), The nature of time in schools: Theoretical
concepts, practitioner perceptions. (pp. 36-63). New York & London: Teachers College
Press.
Rawlence, C. (1985). Preface in: C. Rawlence (Ed.), About time. London: Third Eye
Production Ltd.
Schwab, J.J. (1970). The practical: A language for curriculum. Washington, D.C:
National Education Association, Center for the Study of Instruction
Schonmann, S. (1990). Israeli teachers' metaphors about time. In M. Ben-Peretz and R.
Bromme (Eds.), The nature of time in schools: Theoretical concepts, practitioner
perceptions. (pp. 81-101). New York & London: Teachers' College Press.
Zerubavel, E. (1981). Hidden rhythms: Schedules and calendars in social life.
Chicago &
London: University of Chicago Press.
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