No article about teaching has resonated with me more than this article by Jose Vilson, a math teacher in New York City with tons of accolades who is also my favorite teacher-writer. His article really spoke to the realization I had early on in my teaching career that US teachers do not have nearly enough planning and preparation time. At my first high school as a teacher, I taught 5 periods a day (2 chemistry classes, 2 physical science classes, and 1 remedial math class), but only had 1 period a day to plan all those lessons, grade all those papers, set up all those labs, and call all those families. Since then, I have made it a priority to find a school that makes an effort to minimize the number of different subjects each teacher has to teach, and I have managed to find that, but what I have never been able to find a school that gives teachers more than 1 period a day to do all of their planning, preparation, grading, and communication about student progress.
The second high school I worked at made an effort to really help their teachers improve their teaching. Every Wednesday, the students were dismissed 2 hours early so we could have 2 hours of professional development and/or collaboration time. Often, this time was used for the typical staff meeting, or generic science professional development on the basics of teaching the scientific method, or time to meet with other teachers in our grade level to discuss specific students who need extra support. All of these things are good, but on these days each class period was shortened due to the early dismissal, meaning my planning period was shortened. Since Wednesday is right in the middle of the week, far from the weekend, it would be an ideal time to provide teachers with some extra time to re-calibrate and tweak their lessons for the end of the week based on how the beginning of the week went. Unfortunately, this school’s “Wednesday Professional Development” rarely provided time for that, and I left school with a heavier take-home workload, and more stress, than a normal school day with a normal-length planning period.
On a couple of occasions, I had so much work to do that I had to take a personal 1/2 day for the afternoon on Wednesday so I could skip Professional Development and sit in my classroom and set up a lab, grade tests, or plan for the rest of the week. It’s ridiculous that I had to do that, but I think it really demonstrates the reality of teacher workload and the lack of time we are given to tackle that workload.
A common “solution” to the tension between the need to provide Professional Development and teachers’ need for work time is “collaboration.” One year early in my career, during weekly Professional Development, they would have all the teachers take their grading and go to their department head’s room. The idea was that everyone could do their own grading while somehow simultaneously talking to other teachers and get advice about topics their students struggled with on the assessment they were grading. I was able to get a bit of grading done, which is better than none, and we were able to help each other a tiny bit, because we’re all science teachers. But since we all taught different science subjects, and I was the only chemistry teacher, the collaboration aspect of this activity was just not worth it, and I could have gotten 5x as much grading done, and the quality of my feedback to my students would have been better, if I had been allowed to work alone in a quiet room.
Now, I’m all for half-days or full days devoted to professional development or collaboration, but it is NOT a replacement for, or a solution to, the lack of teacher work time. While I have learned great things and gotten amazing teaching tips through PD or collaboration, it has never once reduced my workload. If I learn about a good lab or a better way to teach a topic by collaborating with other science teachers, I need to then go back to my room and do the actual work of setting up and practicing that new lab, re-writing that lesson plan, adjusting that assessment, re-writing that exemplar, etc. It’s good work to be doing, because I am improving my practice and I love becoming a better teacher, but it’s important to keep in mind that collaboration and PD does NOT reduce teacher workload or save teachers time.
Too often, school improvement initiatives emphasize more professional development and more collaboration time for teachers, but they never seem to allow for more time for teachers to get work done. I’m not sure if it’s because there is a general unawareness of how much work teachers need to do, or if it’s coming from a place of distrust (as in, if we allow teachers more time to work alone quietly in their room we can’t trust that they’ll use that time to actually do work). I generally thing it’s the latter, but sometimes I think it’s the former (especially when I’m at a school that is renovated – this has happened to me twice – and they install classroom lights on a timer that turn off when there is not enough movement in the room, meaning during my planning period the lights cut off every 10 minutes and I have repeatedly stand up from my desk and walk around the room to get them to come back on.) It’s very clear to me that school classroom architects believe that teachers never need to do any work that requires lighting when students aren’t in the room, and based on how little prep time teachers are given in the US, I’d say the general public believes the same. No one seems to realize that, when students aren’t in the room, teachers need to spend a ton of time planning lessons, grading student work, setting up hands-on activities, cleaning up hands-on activities, testing out and learning new technology, getting broken technology fixed, organizing supplies, making photocopies, contacting families about students, filling out paperwork about students, and reaching out to case managers and counselors about students. Contrary to popular belief, amazing lessons don’t just happen on the fly in the moment; amazing preparation (not amazing PD, not amazing collaboration) leads to amazing lessons.
We cannot PD our way into improving education in the US. We often look at the success of other countries, like Finland, and hope that changing our curricula, or our standards, or our standardized testing structure will make us better. I think one of the most-overlooked, yet most telling, statistics is that Finland’s teachers spend an average about 600 hours a year in front of students. US teachers spend nearly 1,000 hours per year, on average, in front of students. What do you think Finland’s teachers are doing with all that “free” time? Surfing the internet? Chatting with their colleagues? Well, based on their country’s results, it looks like they are using that time to plan and prepare awesome lessons and get meaningful, important work done! (And I’ll bet their schools are even willing pay for their classroom lights to be on while they do it.)
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