On any given day, middle school students begin gathering their books and lining up at the door waiting for the hell to ring five to ten minutes before class is officially over. In other classrooms, students finish their assigned work and chat among themselves, sit at their desks doing nothing, or. in the worst-case scenario, get out of their seats and begin to disrupt class. And in many classrooms, several minutes are squandered each time learning activities are changed. Even in the most benign of the above examples, quality instructional time is being lost al a number of points during teachers' lessons. Some educators might say that it is only a few minutes here and there, but even live minutes a day adds up to a significant loss of instructional time each semester. Revisiting the relationship between lost minutes of instruction and the quality of teaching may be warranted. Current state and national educational expectations, with their emphasis on results on high-stakes tests, serve as incentives for each teacher to plan every lesson carefully and to use classroom time as effectively and efficiently as possible. In other words, we should be paying more attention to both aspects of the time on equation: purposeful use of time and quality instruction. Following my own years as a teacher and as an assistant principal and principal for more than 25 years, nearly half in middle level and now as a teacher educator for more than 10 years. I have observed many classroom teachers in a variety of urban and suburban school districts. While I have seen firsthand innumerable lessons of impeccable quality, I have also seen more than a few poorly conceived lessons and wasted classroom time that involved both beginning and veteran teachers. Lack of attention to time on is not the only reason for less-than-adequate student achievement. However, it is a factor teachers directly control. The purposes of this article are to highlight several aspects of using time effectively through a series of vignettes, to apply the current research on time on task, and to offer to middle school educators a variety of ways to help remedy lost time on task. Time on One of the main themes of the Effective School movement was increasing time on to improve and student achievement (Lezotte, 1997; Lezotte & Pepperl, 1999). One of the seven of effective schools they found was the opportunity to learn and time on task (pp. 115-116). They advocated not only making judicious use of classroom time but also ensuring that what is taught has been carefully thought out and is of the highest possible quality. This body of effective research, which originated with Edmonds and the Connecticut Department of Education (as cited in Lezotte & Pepperl, 1999), was also echoed by the National Education Association (Hawley, 2002), and United States Department of Education (Bennett, 1986) and provides the conceptual background for this article. A schematic diagram that relates the focus of this article to the correlates of effective is found in Figure 1. As research on effective shows, time on involves both the time associated with learning and the nature and quality of the tasks devised by teachers for their students (Lezotte & Pepperl, 1999). While other correlates also contribute to the process, improving time on can lead to better instructional outcomes. Before exploring some solutions to the time on challenge, we will examine three vignettes that illustrate how lost time can undermine otherwise effective lesson planning. At the end of each vignette, the predominant problems are analyzed, and suggestions for improvement are offered. Vignette #1: Behind from the start (Mr. Brown, eighth grade science) Mr. Brown has been teaching middle school science for five years. At the beginning of each period, students noisily enter his classroom and take their seats after considerable interaction with each other. …