 The organizing of time and space in a school has to take place within the context of educational policy. The challenge, however, is always the timetable. Before a teacher comes face to face with her learners, she usually has to face the timetable. The timetable is the framework within which she has to develop a systematic practice. Teachers may prefer to have longer periods or to have fewer periods at the end of the day. Getting the grade 8 after a PT lesson might also be a problem. And who wants a lively grade 6 class for the last period on Friday? But, like or not, a teacher has to follow the timetable that she has allocated. When you work out how much contact time a teacher has with a class during a year, it is surprisingly little. In South Africa, there are supposed to be 38 weeks of school in a year. That translates into 190 teaching days. About 20 of these days are used up with exams and tests. Another 5 days go to public holidays. 10 days often go to administrative tasks at the beginning and the end of the year. School events and visits use up another 5 days. Teacher absences may account for a further 5 to 10 days. This means that 50 days are lost, leaving only 140 teaching days. Various calculations can be made about how much effective teaching and learning time there is in each lesson. So according to my notional time, I have 2 and a half hours with each class per week. That's 5 half hour periods. You can't do much with half an hour. Especially if they come late. And you still get interruptions that waste time. And you need 5 minutes at the end of the lesson to tidy up and put the children to pack away. If these teachers are correct, then a 30 minute lesson may be reduced to only 15 minutes of effective teaching. So teacher and learners have 15 minutes to make learning happen. That works out to be about 75 minutes a week. In a year, a teacher will have about 35 hours effective contact time with each class. That's why every minute needs to count. It's frightening when you think about it that you only really have about 15 minutes of good teaching time with our classes today. You have to get the most of your 15 minutes teaching fame. So what teaching and learning strategies do you use to get most out of your contact time? Well, I think it's important to keep the class busy from the minute that they walk in. Either with a task written on the board, or a pre-planned activity, or a worksheet that's been made beforehand. Yes, but it's important to write in a lesson. If you keep changing your lessons, then the children don't get bored. What I do is I set different learning activities for different learners. I have few bright spots in my grade 4 class. So what I do is I set an extension work for those bright children so that they don't distract the others. And that gives me time to help the others. Don't they get bored with all the extra work? No, they love it. They even compete to see who's done more extra work. Well, that must keep you busy. It does, but it's worth it for the peace. These teachers have their own strategies for making more time. By reducing the teacher's centeredness of their lessons, they have more time available to attend to individuals. So here we are in a fairly ordinary classroom on a fairly ordinary day. But is this the case? Today, this teacher has decided it's time for a change. He wants to alter the learning space. Here goes. Now for the finishing touches. So what's changed? Look closely. How could these changes affect the way the children learn? What else could SIPA do to change this learning environment? He's got an idea for a role-play. Now this means rearranging the desks. Then learners have to form two groups, the trackers and the chiefs. Part of the classroom becomes a stage, a platform for the role-players to act out their roles. This seems to be appreciated by the rest of the class. By moving desks in a class, the way the learners interact with each other and with the teacher can be completely changed. This class is very nice and it looks good. And the posters, they teach us about many things. In this class I have learned more and in other classes my mind cannot function very well. These pictures mean a lot to me and to other students. They make you feel like you're in a school and you become interested more and more in education. Very bright, nice light and I wish the other class could be like this. Patrice explains how he manages space in his classroom. It's important to be able to get the learners and give them help when they need it. So you can attend to their problems immediately without wasting any time. And that's why the groups are more accessible as compared to roles. You also find in terms of having groups, it's much easier to go around and check on what individual learners are doing. And the classroom is more accessible, there's more space in the classroom when you're having groups. You find that in a group, learners are able to help each other, they're able to learn certain social skills like listening to each other, working together, cooperating together and listening to each other's point of view. As an educator, you can take your desk and put it at the back of the class and that also changes the power arrangement in the classroom. And you can also get to see things which learners are doing which you might not have been able to see if a desk was in front of the classroom. At this school, the teachers are based in one classroom and the learners move from class to class. This enables the teacher to have more control of the learning space in the classroom. I normally change the layout of my desk very often depending on the kind of lesson that I'm presenting to the learners. For instance, I use the horseshoe shape, we use it when we normally do discussions, when the learners have to do role-playing or when they're having group discussions, group discussions as a whole class. And this enriches the learning experience of the learners and the ones that are doing the role-playing further in the stage and the whole class is watching them. It's very interactive, the learners are able to interact with each other all the time. This teacher is using activity stations. These are areas where learners do certain activities either on their own in pairs or in groups. She has set up four activity stations around the class. These occupy about half the learners in the class. This group is working at a computer. The other groups will get their chance on the computer, but first they must complete their group tasks. This group is doing leaf rubbings. They know what they have to do and are getting on with the task. Here the group is doing a worksheet based on information they will find in a textbook. The teacher decided only to buy a few textbooks this year. The money she saved on textbooks was used to buy other resources such as computer software, posters, reference books and apparatus for the science room. Activity 6.2. We try to make the sounds on the right. The remainder of the class are being taught as a smaller group in the corner of the class. So within one classroom there are several types of learning taking place in different spaces. Nombula has a large class of nearly 60 learners. She finds it very difficult to teach so many children at the same time. She decided to use the space outside her classroom and on the grass. She gives these learners a task to do in a certain amount of time. Then she works with the remainder of the group in the classroom. After about 20 minutes the groups will swap over. Nombula carefully plans the activities that she gives to the learners who work outside. She wants these tasks to be meaningful but also to fit in with the rest of the lesson. She also makes sure she checks the learners did the tasks they were supposed to do. Lesson structure is a crucial part of time and space management and with OBE you need to think very carefully about your outcomes. I find this OBE cycle very helpful for my lesson planning. I spell out my lesson outcomes and then decide on what activities for the children in order to reach the outcomes. And then I have to find a way as to how to assess those outcomes. This is a worksheet I developed to introduce the idea of signs and symbols. And these are my lesson outcomes. Learners must be able to identify the common signs and symbols. They need to think carefully about the meaning of these signs and symbols. They after they need to record their ideas in a table and they will also design their own sign or symbol. Normally I divide my lessons into time slots. For example I usually plan for two kinds of introductions. The first is a settling activity. This may be looking at a worksheet or some resource as soon as they come in. The idea is that you occupy them and reduce the distraction factor. Then I have a more structured introduction. Here I spell out my outcomes of the lesson. In OBE speak these are the performance indicators. I try to paste the lesson so that there is both variety and a time for reflection. Often they will do an activity. Then we will go over it in some way. After that we will do another activity. I am always watching the time. If one activity takes longer than I expected I adjust the lesson. There is no point in rushing through the stuff just because you have prepared it. It is also important to leave time to wrap up the lesson and set up a homework activity.