Time is a central theme in policymakers’ and educators’ work on curriculum and teaching.  It permeates all aspects of policymaking and decision-making from how much time should be allocated for the teaching of school subjects to time for professional learning in education systems.  With respect to primary school science, research consistently points to a shortage of teaching time that in turn contribute to inequities in children’s opportunities to learn globally so they can understand the natural world and pursue STEM careers (NASEM, 2022, Tate, 2001).  Conceptions of time within the literature on leading improvement in primary school science, however, are undertheorized. Recognizing the importance of time in efforts to improve the quality of elementary science education, we theorize time for primary school science to create a conceptual framework to inform empirical, development, and practical work.  In this theory building paper, I examine educational leaders’ (at system and school levels) sense-making about time as they engage in efforts to lead improvement in the teaching of primary school science. 

To frame our work theoretically, we bring two literatures - sense-making in educational systems and the sociology of time - into conversation with each other.   Educational leaders and teachers ongoing sensemaking is central to the implementation of curricular reforms (Coburn, 2001; Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002). Whereas interpretation assumes an object to be understood (e.g., policy text), a sensemaking perspective takes a broader approach by attending to what individuals notice in their environments and how they frame, interpret, and respond to those cues (Weick, 1995; Weick et al., 2005). Sense-making is triggered by situations where system actors encounter change, ambiguity, uncertainty, surprise, or discrepancy arising from changes in their environment and from interruptions to their ongoing work practice (Weber & Glynn, 2006; Weick et al., 2005).  Sociologists of time identify several different conceptions of time including— 1) time as objective, 2) time as political, and 3) organizational time (Gokmenoglu, 2022; Poole, 2004; Zerubavel, 2020). Time as objective refers to how time is sometimes conceived as being a finite commodity.  We often talk, for example, of not having enough time, or of saving or wasting time.  Time as political refers to its “political” and value-laden nature drawing attention to how time is tied to power dynamics in society and education systems (Gokmenoglu, 2022; Zerubavel, 2020).  Organizational time refers to how “people and organizations orient themselves to common externally defined time scales such as calendars, but also experience critical and significant events that interact with the objective temporal scale” (Poole, 2004, p. 22).

Motivated and framed by these two literatures my research questions are: How does time figure in education leaders’ efforts to lead improvement in primary school science education?  How do educational leaders, at both the system and school levels, make sense of time as they make decisions about leading improvement in primary school science?

I draw on two different data sources to develop my argument in this paper. First, I draw on my work over the past four years advising the Irish Ministry of Education on the development and implementation of a new primary school curriculum (Walsh, 2023). This work involved extensive engagement with educators at the national, regional, and school levels through seminars, workshops, conversations, and documents over an extend period. It also involved in participation in formal events related to the new primary school curriculum. Second, I draw on data from a mixed methods multi-year study of 13 education systems’ efforts (e.g., urban, suburban, rural school districts and charter school networks) across the United States to reform elementary (primary) school science in response to new national standards for teaching science. Using a qualitative comparative case study design (Yin, 2014), we conducted 116, 60-minute, virtual, semi-structured interviews, with 101 leaders, including science coordinators, ELA/math and Title coordinators, data managers, and superintendents in 13 school districts. We used snowball sampling to select education systems by asking science education experts to recommend contacts, who in turn nominated candidate education systems that were doing system building work in elementary science. Though our focus was on leaders’ instructional decision-making about elementary science, interviewing leaders beyond those with exclusive responsibility for science, was necessary to understand the leadership work. The interview protocol was designed for eliciting leader’s practices in reforming primary school science. We asked questions on (1) their roles, responsibilities, and background; (2) state, district, and community context; (3) current priorities and visions for elementary science instruction; (4) infrastructure in place supporting elementary science instruction; (5) plans for continuing elementary science reform; and (6) challenges they were experiencing in this work. We began data analysis by coding the interviews deductively into broad analytic categories in our framework, as well as references to challenges and dilemmas system leaders were facing in system building work for primary school science. Then working inductively as a team, we coded the references within the challenges and dilemmas code to identify key themes and dilemmas across different systems (Saldaña, 2021). Finally, we wrote analytic memos about each education system (Charmaz, 2014). For the purpose of this paper, we examined similarities and differences in themes with respect to time and leading improvement in elementary school science that emerged from the two lines of work as well as the cases within the empirical study.

While still preliminary, we describe several emerging findings from our ongoing analysis. First, finite notions about time dominate in educational leaders’ sense-making about leading improvement in primary school science with considerable attention being devoted to ‘finding time’, ‘making time”, ‘sharing time’, and ’flexing time’ These finite perceptions of time cut across levels (e.g., system, school, grade, and classroom) and, from educational leaders’ perspective, feature as one of the most prominent challenges in leading improvement in primary school science. Second, other conceptions of time, especially political and organizational, emerge from closer analysis of educational leaders’ sense-making in ways that often went unnoticed by leaders and contributing to the complexity of the challenges that these leaders grappled with in leading improvement in primary school science. Examining how different notions of time interacted contributed to more complex diagnostic framings of the challenges of time in leading improvement in primary school science. Third, and related, our account shows that understanding the time challenges involved in leading improvement in elementary science education at any one level (e.g., school level, school, system) can only be fully appreciated by careful attention to other levels simultaneously and to the broader institutional environment. The institutional environments that form around particular school subjects, for example, differ overtime contributing to some subjects being ‘more valued’ than others. Hence, a leadership challenge that is understood chiefly in terms of time as finite at one level (e.g., the school level) can only be fully understood when considered from other levels (e.g., system level) where time as political and organizational come into play. In conclusion, we sketch a practical conceptual framework for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars to use in their work related to time for teaching and learning in education systems.

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