I suspect that if you polled teachers and asked what resource they would like to have more of, most would answer time. I agree that you would be hard pressed to dispute that there is never enough time to do all the things that we would like to do in the course of a day (or week, month, year!). However, a lot of the time I think we say that we don’t have enough time, we are creating an artificial barrier or a knee-jerk reaction rather than a well-thought out response. It is rarely that we do not have enough time, it's that we don’t have unlimited amounts of time and so we are unwilling to trade the time from one activity for another (kind of like how I say I don’t have time to get in shape but I always seem to have a lot of time to watch my favorite tv show or movie). Alternatively there are times when we don't actually want to do something so we claim we don’t have time to do it (which perfectly describes a bunch of the unfinished home projects I have).

As an examination of some places where we spend time in the classroom, when students are working on assigned tasks, what are you doing? Are you sitting on your desk disengaged from what they’re doing and catching up on correcting or planning the next lesson? Are you walking around the room trying to help students and providing answers? Are you going around the room constantly assessing and taking notes of students learning progress? This is not a judgment on either of these actions, different days you may be doing different things, but, for the purposes of this thought experiment, let’s explore these three examples. 

If you take the time to correct or lesson plan you may find yourself spending more time trying to re-engage students and manage the class. It is possible that you will get caught up on what you were trying to do. With regards to the students though, the best case scenario they complete the task that you gave them and now have another big pile of assessment to correct which perpetuates the cycle. Worst case scenario, it was a task that just occupied them while you prepped and no one really got any learning out of it (but you still have the stack to correct and are still locked in the cycle). 

If you are moving around the room working with students individually then you are taking a big step in the right direction to maximize student learning time. You may also find it more efficient to station yourself in the room and work with small groups rather than one-on-one since it cuts down on transition time between students and allows you to spend more time focused on students. Coupling this with some flipped activities (eg, students who can work on things at their own place, instructional videos, etc) and you can create a learning environment that maximizes in class time for learning. 

If you are moving around assessing student learning while helping then you are really maximizing your time and gain a wealth of data about current student understanding. You can tweak and adjust lesson plans to fill the gaps avoiding the need for lengthy re-teaching and intervention plans since you can catch the gaps and intervene early.This also has the added benefit of giving you a pretty good idea of where students are without requiring an extensive summative assessment. This understanding reduces, if not eliminates, the need for a large summative assessment meaning that you can reclaim planning time by offering short summative tasks that are easier to create and correct. 

So while this is a much better use of in class time, what about out-of-class time? When we find ourselves in spaces with our colleagues, how do we spend the time together? Whether these are official PLCs, Staff/Grade/Department meetings or even just at lunch or in the hall.

In our staff meetings I make a commitment to staff that anything that can be a memo will be a memo. If I don’t need engagement from staff then it will not appear as an item for discussion. Instead it is listed in a section called ‘Memo Items’ on the bottom of the agenda. I give time to ask questions about it if needed, but otherwise our staff meetings are geared towards interaction and collaboration. 

Similarly I try to avoid spending valuable time complaining about things that we cannot change. If you spent a half an hour commiserating with a colleague about things you can’t change that have no influence over and that was a half an hour of time that you could have been doing something else that was more productive. I get the need to vent sometimes, but I also think that it can be taken to extremes where it becomes the norm, creating a toxic work space. 

A trap we can easily fall into is the all-or-nothing mindset when it comes to time. For example, we don’t make positive phone calls home because we don’t have time to do it for everyone. Or we don’t want to implement Inquiry Learning, or Universal Design for Learning, etc because we don’t feel we can do that for every class every day. But, breaking this down you don’t have to have time to do them all. Start with a call here and a call there, it only takes a few minutes out of the day. Do some more a different day. Similarly, you probably can’t create a new and robust lesson every class of every day each week. But, you can do one or two classes like that each week and something beats nothing. Saying that we don’t have time to do it all is correct, but we absolutely have time to do some of it.

So, when we say we don’t have time, we absolutely do. We need to put that in context though. We don’t have time to do what exactly? Time to do all of it? Then do some of it. While time is a very real barrier, it is sometimes easily overcome by re-framing the scope of it. If you need time, create an action plan of what you are trying to accomplish and what reasonable amount of time is needed. Take a look at your practices and see if some low-impact ones can be de-implemented and then stop doing those. Saying that ‘time’ is a reason not to do something as a self-explanatory answer is sometimes simply an artificial barrier and we have enough real barriers in education without creating false ones.