Breaks During the School Day: Good or Bad?

Question of Interest:

 

Would breaks during the school day generate greater focus and improve academic performance or decrease the students' ability to concentrate and succeed academically in my future classroom?

 

My research question was derived from my personal experiences in the classroom, and the experiences of my mentors. While in the classroom one day I noticed many of my students were unattentive and fidgety after a particularly long and difficult session. My mentor then made the remark, "they must need a break." However the push for increasing the material learned in a year, has greatly limited "break time". Teachers must become creative in order to incorperate mental and physical breaks for their students if at all. This prompted me to ask which was better. Should we compact material into fast paced, longer sessions where we cover more material, but the students lose focus? Or as teachers, should we implament shorter sessions with more breaks, but lose material we could have covered? It could be possible to find a happy medium between the two, and I set out to discover if that was possible.