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Teachers encounter time poverty as a barrier to implementing child-centered math instruction, suggesting implications for educational leadership.
As part of a statewide initiative to shift elementary mathematics teaching in Michigan toward more child-centered instruction, teachers overwhelmingly reported that a major obstacle to improving their practice was time. Through interviews and videos of teaching, Kaellen Williams, Mallory Mattimore-Malan, and Amy Noelle Parks analyzed how teachers’ concerns about time shaped their experiences implementing pedagogies designed to center children’s thinking in mathematics. They found that teachers felt pressured to curtail children’s thinking and mathematical exploration to meet time demands, sacrificing responsiveness to children and impeding instructional change. They suggest strategies for educational leaders to alleviate the pressures of time for teachers and their children.
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Williams et al. (2026) studied this question.
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