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

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.

In the small but crowded world of the classroom, events come and go with astonishing rapidity. There is evidence, as we have seen, to show that the elementary school teacher typically engages in 200 or 300 interpersonal interchanges every hour of her working day.