decision fatigue | Teachers in Their Power

In this section, you’ll find teacher stories, interviews, and videos related to the topic of decision fatigue.

“Decision fatigue” is the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after continuously making decisions (Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength).

How many decisions do teachers make in a day?

It’s often cited that teachers make over 1,500 decisions each day. This fact appears to originate from the following research:
- Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that report .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.
- Researcher Philip Jackson wrote that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable and call for teacher decisions.

Margi Bhansali

I went to school to be a journalist. My financial aid package required that I take on a work-study job. So during my first year of school, I worked with Jumpstart, an AmeriCorps program where they put college kids in Title I preschools.

Tamika Fluker

I was working at The Bridge Home at St. Mary's Women and Children's Center. It’s a shelter for infants to 12-year-olds. If the Department of Child and Family Services pulled a kid from their home, we housed and counseled them.

Diana Callope

I have one student who really sticks out in my mind. I had him in my class when I taught seventh grade, and then he was in my class again when I switched to eighth grade. So I got to have him in my math class two years in a row. And he would do a lot of odd jobs around the room — hanging posters, things like that.