Teachers Cope With Endless Distractions

Beeping cellphones, fire drills, natural disasters: For today’s teachers, it’s less a question of if the school day will be disrupted than what now?

Engaging students in learning and keeping them on task is increasingly difficult, teachers tell Education Week. Class disruptions, while not new, make doing so harder, and every minute of uninterrupted time matters.

Reporters who spread out across four states for 2025’s edition of The State of Teaching Project noted the constant stream of disruptions faced by the teachers they profiled. Even if each interruption only takes up a few minutes of a teacher’s day, they can add up to a lot of lost instructional time over the course of the year.

Prior studies have found classrooms can average 15 such disruptions a day—roughly two weeks of lost learning time in a school year—and students make less progress at schools with more interruptions.

Here’s a look at how four teachers cope with distractions, from the mundane to the disastrous.

‘That’s going to be annoying’

Clayton Hubert, the art teacher for the 400-student Red Rock Central school district in Lamberton, Minn., tries yet again one November morning to explain to his 8th graders the difference between inspiration and theft in art—a critical distinction for his students working on entries for an upcoming poster competition by the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“When you’re thinking about what to do for your piece, you can always look for inspiration, like this,” he says, pulling up an online image of two hands holding a globe, “but you can’t just copy—”

DRRRRRRRRRRR.

Loud, high-pitched whirring of drills from down the hall blasts over his explanation. It’s the class’s fourth day in a new school building, with ongoing construction.

“—can’t just copy it,” Hubert tries again when the drill stops. “It wouldn’t be cool to trace over this and say it’s—”

DRRRRRRRRRRR. The drilling cuts him off again.

“That’s going to be annoying today,” Hubert huffs, to the students’ laughter. He quickly finishes his thought and has students shout out their ideas based on the prompt.

With construction ongoing, it’s not always possible to wait it out, but Hubert makes a virtue of necessity. He switches from trying to talk over the construction noise to spending the rest of the period talking with students one on one to keep them engaged and on task.

‘Just helping the teacher with whatever’

Everyone from the federal government to researchers to district leaders have told schools to invest in intensive tutoring to help catch kids up. But the responsibility for making these programs work and integrating tutors into class falls largely to teachers—and the logistics sometimes get in their way.

In late October, Rachel Griggs-Hopkins’ Calculus class at Sweetwater High School in National City, Calif. is deep into a review of finding tangent lines and slopes on a graph when a tall man slips into the classroom and hovers near a wall. It’s Ben Feaver, a new tutor with K Tutor, a provider hired by the Sweetwater district to help ramp up math performance.

Griggs-Hopkins is visibly startled—she hadn’t known she was being given a tutor today—but gamely introduces him to the class.

“Let’s take like 10, 15 minutes, see if we can work through these—and speaking of working through, we have a tutor over here. What was your last name again?” She waves him forward. “All right, so Mr. Feaver is here for … the rest of the year? I don’t know. He’s just an extra person to answer questions and help you, right?”

Feaver is supposed to work with five different classes throughout the school day, but his role is more of a teacher’s aide: “Just helping the teacher with whatever.”

The two educators haven’t previously met or had time to coordinate about how Feaver can best help. Griggs-Hopkins spends the rest of the class period bouncing between her planned lesson and asides to Feaver, giving him a quick-and-dirty updates on what her students are covering, and making sure he knows the concepts well enough to help students who struggle.

Griggs-Hopkins says she appreciates extra help, but wishes teachers had more say in how staffing and other policies roll out. A 2024 study of class instructional time finds visits like this from other staff were among the most common interruptions.

“I feel like [district administration] makes a lot of top-down decisions without talking to anyone at the site level,” she says. “And then you don’t know what’s going on and it usually makes your life harder.”

The anecdote provides some insight into a surprising finding on a new national survey fielded as part of EdWeek’s State of Teaching Project: A higher proportion of teachers told the EdWeek Research Center that their morale would improve if their school scaled back tutoring, compared to those who wanted more of it.

‘Cellphones were less of a distraction’

Even in winter, San Diego doesn’t get much precipitation. But math teacher Cristina Hernandez watches gray ash fall like snow outside her modular classroom at Bonita Vista High School on a Friday morning in January.

The Palisades and Eaton wildfires have been burning all month—close enough that several other Sweetwater Union high school district schools south of Bonita Vista have already canceled school today. The air was clear when Hernandez got to school, but by the end of first period a change in the wind brought clouds of ash and an eye-wateringly strong bonfire smell that permeates the mostly outdoor campus.

“We’re just a little too far away to be canceled. We’re close, but not close enough. Kids are just covering their mouths with their hands or their sweaters, but it’s, yeah, bad,” she mutters. As student cough, Hernandez hands out face masks from her pandemic stash.

In her sophomore Integrated Math 2 class (a California class combining algebra and geometry), Hernandez doggedly pushes through a lesson she had been looking forward to before the fire: how to factor quadratic equations. It’s the turning point into the course’s harder content.

“This is a really interesting time where they start to level up their math skills and from here on out, learn new functions,” she says. “I really like being able to introduce them to something brand new, and we’re just getting started right now.”

Well, sort of getting started. Hernandez has to fit explanations of differences between linear and quadratic equations between office announcements and students’ anxious questions about the fire’s proximity to their school and homes.

She breaks off at another office announcement: “Teachers, we encourage you to keep your classrooms open—”

And Hernandez passes it on to her students: “You guys are highly advised to grab your lunch from the cafeteria and then stay indoors as much as possible.”

Eventually, after ongoing questions, Hernandez accepts the lesser of two distractions: She lets her students keep their cellphones, normally tucked away at the start of each class period.

“I know a lot of them are watching the fire on their phones or wondering if their parents are going to come pick them up,” Hernandez says. “I already knew, you know, that was going to lead to a bit of distraction, but if that made them feel a little bit better, it was less distracting.”

‘Take a look at this’

As schools have become more technology-rich, they add a new dimension of interruptions.

For the most part Kassandra Geyer’s time as an interventionist at Horizon Elementary in Volusia County, Fla., is straightforward and relatively uninterrupted. But little distractions do happen.

One day in early February, as Geyer’s 3rd grade group reads out details from a text about the Apollo moon landing mission, a student from neighboring Ragan Reynolds’ classroom walks in with a malfunctioning laptop and shows it to Geyer. Teachers know Geyer tends to be tech-savvy and willing to help students.

“Ms. Reynolds said you can take a look at this,” the girl says. Visits and requests for help from students from other classes also make up about 9 percent of classroom interruptions, according to the instructional-time study.

Geyer quickly takes the device in one hand as she shifts papers on her desk.

“Go ahead,” she quickly instructs her students as she turns to fiddle with the device. “I want you to think about the words that he said in the first paragraph, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ Think about what that means and talk to your shoulder partner as far as what that means.”

Moments later, Reynolds enters. The device couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, the teacher explains.

After some clicks of her own, Geyer advises Reynolds’ student to restart it. That does the trick.

Geyer says she takes the everyday distractions in stride—and has fun when she can, like making the best of her turn to run the school’s scheduled fire drill.

Typically the assistant principal pulls the fire alarm while Geyer helps check that all teachers got all their students out to the field. But Geyer has gotten to pull it twice.

“It’s as good as you think it would be,” she says with a grin.