Rethink Teaching By Rethinking What Teachers Do Each Day

Teachers perform many, many different tasks each day. They lecture, facilitate discussions, grade quizzes, monitor hallways, fill out forms, counsel kids, struggle with obstinate technology, and much else. Asking teachers to list what they do in a typical week outside of teaching can yield dozens of responses in short order.

Heck, special education teachers can spend 40 percent of their time filling out paperwork (and, in some cases, additional hours each week driving from school to school). Elementary teachers can report that as much as a quarter of classroom computer time is lost to technical difficulties and forgotten passwords.

In 2022, teachers reported working an average of 54 hours a week. If teachers are already shouldering a full load, doing more of one thing necessarily means doing less of another. After all, I’ve noted that America’s kids spend a lot more time in school than you might think. The same is true of teachers. In 2021, at every level of K–12 schooling, American teachers taught at least 200 hours a year, more than the OECD norm. By international standards, teachers in the U.S. spend a lot of time in classrooms.

We Need to Pay More Attention to Teacher Time

As I discuss in The Great School Rethink, I’m struck by how little attention gets paid to how this time is used. What’s happening during that extra 200 hours? How diligently are school leaders protecting teacher time from distractions? These questions should be routine. Yet, they’re not.

When I work with teachers, they almost invariably report that they’ve never been part of a meaningful effort to unpack what they do each day. That makes it tough to know if time is being used effectively or what might be done differently. 

In Japan, for instance, schools may minimize transition time by having students eat lunch in their classrooms and teachers moving from room to room while students stay seated. Japanese teachers have much larger classes than their American peers, but that, in turn, means they teach fewer hours and have far more planning time. Is such a model better than ours? Worse? What are the trade-offs? Such questions should occasion far more reflection than they do.

Helping Teachers do Less and Teach More

For educational leaders looking for a concrete way to kick off that conversation, here’s a suggestion: Make time at your next staff meeting, department meeting, teacher workday, or professional development session for teachers to break down what they’re doing all day.

Break participating teachers into groups of no more than about a half-dozen and give each group a piece of poster board with a marker (or a virtual breakout room if you’re online). Ask each group to identify all the discrete tasks they can think of that they performed in the past week. The point is to unpack particulars, which means that “teaching” or “grading” isn’t a sufficient response. Instead, for instance, groups should specify all the different kinds of teaching, whether that’s large group, one-on-one, remote, or what-have-you.

After 15 minutes or so, have the groups pause and circle the five tasks that take up the most time. And then, ask them to start the five activities that they deem most valuable for students. Finally, give the whole group a chance to discuss.

Three Insights on Aligning Successful Teaching Time

There are at least three useful insights that tend to emerge. First, is that a lack of alignment between circles and stars highlights that many teachers are spending a lot of time on things that they don’t think matter the most for kids. Second, teachers are asked to juggle an astonishing number of tasks, and that can make it tough to focus. Third, getting a window into all this can be eye-opening for school leaders and administrators, who intuit all of this but rarely really see it laid out.

All of this can help move to talk about what teachers do all day, from the stuff of bull sessions (grumble, grumble) to that of problem-solving and rethinking. Is this really what we want professional educators to do all day?

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