Classroom hours is one of the school’s most important  resources, and at a time when educational systems find themselves under pressure of budget cuts on the one hand and expectations to improve students’ achievements on the other, it is important to explore the factors involved in the effective usage of classroom time. Globally it has been found that longer hours per se do not bestow an advantage, since the amount of instruction hours in the OECD countries bears no obvious association with higher academic performance in international studies such as PISA, whereas teaching practices in regular school lessons were found to be associated with high performance (Education Today, 2013). How teachers effectively use classroom time and how school culture affects these practices, is the subject of the present study.

The rational idea that the more teaching time spent, the higher the achievements, received support from criticism of the educational system. Several studies in the USA, for example, found waste of lesson time and concluded that with the right teaching practices schools can increase teaching time (NCEE, 1983; Goodlad, 1984). It later became clear that not only teaching time counts, but learning time as well. Learning involves processes such as recalling, remembering, problem solving, and information processing, which all take time and create a gap between lesson time and productive time in which students learn (Walberg, 1988; Yair, 2000). In addition, other factors were found to affect learning time such as timing, when morning and afternoon lessons are less productive (Klein, 2004), teachers’ ability to handle discipline issues and address students’ diversity (Nomi & Allensworth, 2013), and external interruptions such as unscheduled visits (Leonard, 2008).

One of the main factors involved in creating the gap between teaching time and productive learning time is school culture. Based on Geertz (1973), school culture is defined as a pattern of meaning - values, beliefs, and traditions that have been molded over time and commonly held by school members. According to the ecosystem approach (Scott, 2005) that views organizational components as intertwined with reciprocal relations, a school culture that holds the core values of how teachers teach and how students learn is translated into the school’s activities and goals such as commitment to the mastering of core learning skills, monitoring of student progress, allocation of lesson time, and maximizing the time available for learning and preventing its erosion or ‘leakage’ (Tolley et al., 2008). But how do abstract patterns of meaning shape teaching practices in the class? And how do these patterns of meaning become shared by all teachers?

To answer these questions we employed the theory of organizational routines. Routines are defined as “repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors” (Feldman & Pentland, 2003:95). The performative aspect of the routine (who should do what, when, and what are the consequences) is the organizational manual that connects agent to system, and tell each teacher how to actualize school culture into everyday practices.

To better understand the relations between school culture, organizational routines, and teaching practices, we asked three research questions: What are the school culture and patterns of meaning concerning time usage in the classrooms? How do teachers actually use time in the classrooms? What are the organizational routines that connect the culture and the practices? 

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