N. E. Adelman; Karen Panton Walking Eagle; Andy Hargreaves (Editors). (1997). Racing with the clock: Making time for teaching and learning in school reform. Reviewed by Miriam Ben-Peretz

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.