Ways To Measure Teaching | #1 Teacher Talking Time (TTT)

10 Practical Ways To Measure Teaching

#1 Teacher Talking Time (TTT)

1️⃣ The data

This post is based on three online one‑to‑one English lessons, totalling 115 minutes.

I used Microsoft Word’s Transcribe tool to convert the recordings into timestamped transcripts, making the data readable, searchable, and analysable.

Once lessons exist as text rather than audio, it becomes much easier to examine interaction: who speaks, for how long, and in what ways.

2️⃣ Why TTT is misunderstood

Teacher Talking Time is widely used in EFL — and widely misunderstood.
It’s often reduced to a crude rule: teachers talk too much, so they should talk less. Used like this, TTT becomes a moral judgement, not a meaningful metric.

On its own, TTT tells us nothing about:

👉 what the teacher is doing while talking
👉 whether that talk enables learning
👉 how teacher talk interacts with learner thinking

TTT is descriptive, not evaluative — but it’s rarely treated that way.

3️⃣ My assumptions

Before analysing my own teaching, I assumed lower TTT meant better teaching.

Classroom averages of around 70% TTT felt far too high, so I aimed for 80% Student Talking Time, which I largely achieved in group classes.

I hadn’t questioned whether this logic made sense in one‑to‑one teaching.

4️⃣ What the data showed

Across the three lessons, average TTT was 55% although in one of the scripts it was as low as 35%

Initially, this disappointed me.

Just over half the lesson time?

But looking more closely at the transcripts led me to rethink both how I teach and what one‑to‑one teaching actually is.

5️⃣ Reframing TTT in one‑to‑one lessons

One‑to‑one teaching is essentially a conversation between two people.
Seen that way, 55% TTT isn’t a problem at all. It shows that speaking time is roughly shared.

A learner needs to practise speaking — but also to practise listening to another speaker in real time. In this context, TTT reflects interaction, not domination.

(Importantly, this isn’t about 55% being a “good” number. Numbers only make sense in context.)

6️⃣ Conclusions

Teaching isn’t about talking less for the sake of it.

A more useful focus is the quality of our interventions.
What matters isn’t how much Teacher Talking Time there is, but what we do with it and how it shapes learning — rather than simply telling ourselves to reduce it.

Less talk isn’t the goal.

Better talk is.

7️⃣ Question

How do you think about Teacher Talking Time in your own practice — especially in one‑to‑one contexts?