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Maryanne Wolf
September, 2025
Elbow Room is an invitation to move beyond false binaries in literacy debates and to see reading development as dynamic, requiring multiple emphases and areas of expertise in our teachers. The key for educators is knowing what to prioritize — when, and for how long — based on each learner’s strengths and needs.
Grounded in research on the reading brain, the paper highlights two inseparable emphases: expanded foundational skills and deep reading comprehension. At different points in development, one emphasis may carry the melody while the other plays harmony, yet neither is ever absent from instruction.
Wolf honors what educators already know, while inviting them to keep expanding that knowledge — so they can attune instruction with increasing precision, knowing when, and for how long, to shift emphasis for each learner, and doing so in a systematic, explicit way that helps all children grow into fluent, deep readers.
On the Clock: The Centrality of Time in Teacher Work
This paper proposes an ecological framework with six interconnected components, demonstrating that policy does not directly shape classroom practice. Rather, policy influences the professional contexts in which teachers work, which in turn interact with individual teacher characteristics to shape how teachers allocate their time. Teachers’ allocation of time then mediates how effective they are at their jobs, and it shapes affective outcomes like emotions and attitudes. Critically, the framework frames these relationships as systemic and reciprocal: teacher effectiveness shapes professional context and individual trajectories, while affective outcomes circle back to reshape teacher identity and commitment.
On the Clock presents evidence that time constraints undermine effective policy implementation. Without sufficient time to learn new practices, implement them with fidelity, and collaborate with colleagues, even well-intentioned policies can lead to superficial compliance, temporary transformation, or complete failure. Using the recent wave of literacy legislation as a case study, this paper illustrates—through the hypothetical case of Ms. Smith—how even committed, skilled teachers face impossible constraints when policies add significant responsibilities without restructuring existing time demands.
At a moment when teacher satisfaction and interest in the profession are at historic lows, On the Clock sounds an alarm: If schools are to improve in meaningful ways, they must do so in commensuration with our collective ability to make teaching more successful, more rewarding, and more sustainable. The framework offered here provides a foundation for that work. Only by attending explicitly to time can education reform become as feasible and as humane as it needs to be in order to work.