Hey Tappsters!
Welcome to the FIRST EVER USA Teacher Tapper blog 🇺🇸🎉. We’ve now got our first Tappers joined on the app and sharing their school experiences with us 😍🙌.
NEXT, our mission is to reach the first 150 teachers! 📣 Help us get there by telling your colleagues and friends 📲 so results get more accurate and we ALL learn more every day!
BUT as we have 50+ teachers answering every day, we can start sharing some (tentative!) useful edu-data insights with you…
1. Speedy tappers
The average time for answering questions is a super speedy 12 seconds 😲💥 that means the average tapper is zooming through all three questions in less than a minute.
This is much faster than the average English Tapper (27 seconds) and mainland Europe Tapper (29 seconds).
It also means answering Teacher Tapp questions is even quicker than…
🥾 Tying your shoe laces
🏃♀️ An elite sprinter running 500m
☕️ Making a cup of coffee in a French Press
As our panel grows, will USA remain at number one?!
Partly the difference is likely because we are using shorter questions at the moment. When a panel first starts there’s more ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions. Once we start digging into policy, things get a bit longer!
Secondly, the first people on the panel are usually edu nerds 🤓 Which is ACE! We are all about the research-excited. But you do tend to read quicker than the average person too!
2. Disrupted lessons
It’s a frustrating and all-too-familiar scenario: the lesson comes to a standstill as students become so off-task that the teacher has to pause teaching to manage the disruption.
This happened in 50% of classrooms. But is this typical for all school days? Not necessarily. We ask this question on Fridays, which we know can be different — for both students and teachers. End-of-week fatigue, excitement for the weekend, and less structured lessons can all contribute to this shift.
However, we do that so we know what the worst situation is. If we collect data on other days, people sometimes complain and say, ‘but it’s so much worse on Fridays!’ Hence, we use the end of th eweek as our baseline.
Additionally, we gathered this data in the fall, when students are perhaps on their best behavior after the long summer break. Could the time of year also play a role in behavior patterns?
We’ll be tracking these trends across different days of the week and throughout the school year, so we can uncover how classroom behavior fluctuates over time.
3. Weekend plans
Although Fridays can be challenging for behavior, not every teacher gets to enjoy the “Friday Feeling.”
Many spend their weekends with students, whether in school or at other events. In fact, last weekend, 35% of teachers reported spending time with students over the weekend, with 19% in school and 16% at other venues, for example at a sporting event.
This shows that for many teachers, their work extends well beyond the classroom, even into their weekends, which might influence how they manage their energy and focus throughout the week.
Of course WE KNOW THE SAMPLE IS SMALL! It’s so tiny right now that these figures could be super skewed. There’s only one way to change that!
Get as many people as you can to start answering on Teacher Tapp so that we can make these figures robust – and really start to share with the policymakers and thought leaders. 💪
Daily Reads
Great news! Of the 50 teachers we have on the app already, lots LOVE the Daily Reads! 🤩
This week our most-read blog was a report on child poverty from The Hechinger Report.
Have you seen a great blog you think would make a great daily read? Let us know by emailing usa@teachertapp.com and we will check it out!
