With a student teacher, I can certainly get some work done. Generally I go across the hall and work in an office and peek in every ten or fifteen minutes to see if everything is going well ...she only teaches two hours. Today I walked down to one of the calculus teacher's room just to see what was going on...many are my former students. Since the AP exam is over with, he's been teaching statistics. Today they were working with binomial distributions. One kid asked why the variance of a binomial distribution was npq. The teacher wasn't sure...I left the room and found out how to prove it. I came back in and presented. Kids were happy, I was happy, and the teacher was happy.While I was out looking it up, I was in another room where kids were doing probability. The problem was just an introduction problem - but I was curious on how it could be solved. In my room I found the solution using a nice layout on Excel and sent it to the teacher who will show his students.
This is just with one extra hour since my student teacher had my fifth hour. With the holiday on Monday, I had no homework to correct, so I could see and participate (directly and indirectly) in their classrooms. And I think that all three benefited from my time "off" today.
Why we don't have more time to work with each other is something that I've never understood. The chart to the right is from the OECD and shows the number of hours secondary teachers are in front of a classroom during a year. It is nice to know that the rest of the world decides that it is in the best interest of the educational system to let teachers have proper time to grade, contact parents, and work with students one-on-one. An hour a day just isn't cutting it for me, particularly since my prep period happens to be the same period that many of my students in special education have their support class, which means that they come down to me for help at times. No, I don't mind it, but with kids in the morning, kids during my prep, and kids after school means very little time for me to work on my own or with colleagues. Beside, with only 1/6 of the school's teachers preparing any given hour, the chance that someone is preparing for the same lessons I am is negligible (this year I don't have any planning periods in common with teachers who teach what I do).
I suppose people will look at the fact that teachers "only" teach five hours a day as a perk. But I know that the time that gets spent making those PowerPoint demonstrations in business meetings dwarfs the amount of time presenting them. When can we expect the same amount of time to perfect our lessons?
6 comments:
Loved your post! Last year our Principal, who is, to be honest, really good at listening and doing some cutting edge stuff, listened and gave us two planning periods a day. All teachers at a single grade level (for example, seventh) have the same two planning periods. The first block is considered personal planning and the second block is team or subject area planning. This has enabled me, and the other two 7th grade science teachers, to do all our planning and prep together. It enables us to have parent meetings and still have time to grade, plan, etc. It enables us to take one period a week and work with kids on reteaching. We all noticed we were a lot less stressed this year. What did we have to give up to get this? Five minutes per period. We now have 45 minutes per period (as opposed to 50, and when I first started, 55). This was a challenge for some of us, but after a while it worked. This extra period also gave the students an extra related arts which they loved. It made a huge difference this year.
I, too, loved your post as well as Mrs. Bluebird's comment. If only all schools could/would provide that extra time for planning I believe there would be a huge difference in public education. Just a thought.
Teachers should have time within the school day to plan, grade, and particularly to collaborate with other teachers and parents. My district recently pared the secondary school day down to the barest state minimums (including shortening the time between classes and calling half of lunch hour academic assistance) for economic reasons. There was one small benefit. They couldn't cut teacher's hours, so all teachers now have a common planning time at the beginning of the day (and they have to be in the building). Not ideal by any means, but it could have been a small silver lining. According to the Union newsletter, this was a very bad idea. In some schools they were now being expected to collaborate! In other schools, parents wanted to meet with them during this time!
So--I know a bit about Japan and some other countries. Japan uses that non-classroom time in observation of other classrooms, presentations by master teachers, ongoing professional development--things that we aren't really up to speed on, and may not be too excited about.
I do note that even when you bump the US time up with the addition of an additional hour per day (a 20% increase or so?)--the total falls pretty far below the 2080 that is generally considered the standard working hours for full time employment.
I would be curious to know if there is a similar table for how many students are in the classroom the teacher is in front of. It might be that hours x students is more uniform than hours by itself
(quote) "I do note that even when you bump the US time up with the addition of an additional hour per day (a 20% increase or so?)--the total falls pretty far below the 2080 that is generally considered the standard working hours for full time employment."
This is just time spent in front of the students in a class, not planning or grading or prividing extra assistance or attending professional meetings or meeting with parents or performing administrative functions or researching new teaching methods or .... you get the point.
Where exactly did you find this statistic? Did you create the graphic yourself based on numbers from the OECD, or is there a link directly to it?
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