“There cannot be greater rudeness than to interrupt another in the current of his discourse.” —John Locke

“WHAT!?!” is the exact word I shouted…in the general direction of the noise…as the Associate Principal opened my classroom door and quickly stepped in with a purpose.

Let me start from the beginning – it was February (circa 2005) and my first period class was an Advanced Placement Physics course. We were about two days behind my scripted instructional pacing for the course; not ideal but acceptable. However, AP scores were very high in our program the year before (as the posted score reports reminded us all each day) and we were focused. Or, I should say, we were trying to focus when, on this particular day, a student aide from the office knocked and entered several minutes into my first period lesson. The aide was delivering a check-out note to one student for later in the day. A couple of minutes later, another knock on the door. A colleague down the hall had sent one of her students on an errand to get something she needed from my prep room. A short time later, a third knock as a student in our class entered after having checked in to school about 15 minutes late. Quickly thereafter, a fourth knock; one more insignificant reason.

Each knock on the door halted the flow of our lesson. Each interruption shifted student minds from constructing meaning to considering NPS (non-physics-stuff). Each person who walked in momentarily derailed the pedagogical experience. I almost had us completely back where we would have been when — yes — a fifth rat-a-tap tapped on my closed door and, somewhat uncontrollably, I wailed, WHAT!?!, with significantly more exclamation than inquisition.

And in walked the Associate Principal – a pleasant gentleman in his third or fourth year at our school – trying to figure out what was happening. My entire class looked at me. I looked at him. He looked at me looking at him. The students looked at him look at me while I said “My apologies to you Mr. (last name). You are the fifth knock on my door during this important class period and I clearly should have yelled at all of them and not you.” as I smiled and made sure he knew I was serious about the apology but not-so-much about the greeting. He was there to ask a student something so they stepped in the hallway and our lesson resumed from a stand-still once more.

It was at that moment that I made a pinky-promise to myself that if I ever became a school leader, it would be my personal mission to eliminate every avoidable class interruption so teachers could teach and students could learn without having to down-shift into neutral and then gear up again. The research literature is clear on what class (e.g. door knocks) and school (e.g. intercom announcements) disruptions do to student learning and it is what you would expect, quite disruptive to teaching and learning.

If you are a current or aspiring school leader with managerial obstacles that are preventing your teachers from doing their best teaching and also preventing your students from fully preparing for their next high-stakes academic experience, we can partner with you to craft solutions for those operational challenges.