Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.
He writes:
When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.
Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.
Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching.
Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit.
Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip
Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.
Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits.
There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).
We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.
Lightening the Load
So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals.
Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students.
Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority.
Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.
So what are we left with?
Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.
But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–
Curriculum and instructional planning.
The Main Event
As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program.
I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously.
So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.
While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?
Please open the link to finish reading.
what an amazing article! I’m an Executive Director for the Ct Superintendents and a former sup. I’ve been advocating for all that Pandiscio is presenting. Right now it’s a fight against mandated reading programs- so deprofessionalizing and I’ve fought for smaller class sizes forever. As a former elementary teacher, I know it makes a difference.
thank you so much!
wonderful
Fran,
Robert Pondiscio is no friend of public schools. He advocates for charters.
Right now it’s a fight against mandated reading programs- so deprofessionalizing and I’ve fought for smaller class sizes forever.
Thank you.
With modern communications, why can’t a dozen teachers (maybe in different districts and states, gasp) collaborate to design their lesson plan for quadratic equations?
Why hasn’t the US Department of Education funded peer-reviewed academic research on best practices? Or on the appropriate age to introduce certain subjects (for instance, is kindergarten too early for computer-based exams)?
SteveA
In the old days, before teacher micromanagement, this is just what happened, but at the building level. Departments (English, Science, Social Studies, Languages, Arts, Mathematics, Phys Ed, etc), and Department heads held meetings where teachers collaborated to create and share plans. They decided what to teach and how, and because they were personally involved, because they had autonomy, the quality of the work was high. Then morons who are not subject specialists stepped in to tell everyone what to do, from Master of the Universe Bill Gates to Decider for the Rest of Us David Coleman, all the way down to building-level APs and Principals carrying out district mandates to test prep everything. And with this deprofessionalization of teaching came inevitable devolution of pedagogy and curricula.
Note that this didn’t require “modern [contemporary to today] communications,” just empowered colleagues in a room together.
I think you are suggesting that this dozen be a sort of nationwide cabal for all teachers of quadratic equations. I think this is problematic. Sometimes teaching another teacher’s plan is difficult because the teacher who implements the plan needs to know whether the group of students they are charged with teaching can proceed at the rate designed in the plan, or if their subset of the student body will need more time and multiple approaches.
In those department meetings of yesteryear, people talked about their individual students and classes and their needs.
In Japan, significant time is set aside each week for just such collaborative lesson planning and discussion. It’s a system called Lesson Study.
“I think you are suggesting that this dozen be a sort of nationwide cabal for all teachers of quadratic equations.”
No, I’m suggesting collaboration. I witnessed a large high school in suburban Chicago where the teachers met to discuss what had worked in their section on the American Revolution. They analyzed test results to improve by learning from each other. There was no administrator in the room. Working collaboratively lightens the load.
Of course, this was not a “failing” school, so the teachers had greater autonomy.
Some schools, like the one I attended, are too small to do this on their own, but the faculty could collaborate with teachers from other districts or states.
Steve: then I totally agree with you
The U.S. Department of Education created a “What Works Clearinghouse” some years back but it doesn’t get much attention. Maybe DeVos closed it.
Teaching is one of the few careers that require a sick person to leave detailed plans for a temporary replacement. That is why many of us rarely take a day off and drag ourselves in to work when we are not feeling well.
One of the billions of things we were required to do in my last job was to complete and file with the office three days’ worth of Emergency Teaching Plans, with photocopies of any handouts or other written materials used.
THIS is the most important thing about teaching, at least at the middle- and high-school levels. Teachers have far, far too many students and a laughably small amount of prep time (that is, laughably small to anyone who actually bothers to prepare significant lessons for his or her classes), and literally impossible amounts of add-on work in the form of mandates to watch other teachers’ classes, oversee car or bus line or cafeteria sittings, do test prep, proctor tests, fill out (often in duplicate) ridiculous amounts of paperwork (grades, attendance, IEP and 501 reports, evaluation materials, lesson plans, bellwork professional development paperwork, and so on). If anyone ever bother actually to sit down and sum up the number of hours required of middle-school and high-school teachers, he or she would soon see that these requirements exceed the amount of hours in the day or week, and so, the fact is, that people are fudging the work, submitting bs material whenever they can, thrown together rather than reasoned out. A high-school teacher might have 180-200 students, and he or she is supposed to give each individual, differentiated attention.
Right. MIGHT AS WELL REQUIRE TEACHERS TO FLAP THEIR ARMS AND SO FLY. Or to locate objects by remote viewing. Or make sense of any proposal by Donald Trump. Or enter that parallel dimension and recover the lost ships and airplanes of the Bermuda Triangle. Or bring back a golden apple from the tree at the edge of the world. Or net the Salmon of Doubt.
At my last school, I had to take attendance (1). Then I had to put absences on a slip of paper and send these to the office (2). Then I was required to email the attendance to the office (3). Then I had to enter it into the online attendance database (4). And enter it into my gradebook (5). Then, at the end of the day, I was required to mark the attendance on a form put up in the teachers’ mailroom (6). Then, at the end of the grading period, I was required to check attendance in my gradebook against that in a printout from the district office and make corrections. (7)
I wish I were making this up. I’m not.
So, l had to enter the same attendance SEVEN TIMES.
So, how does a system get that ridiculous and that heedless with regard to teacher time?
Well, every so often, some genius of an administrators has a brainstorm in the shower and says to himself or herself, “We should have the teachers do x.” And then he or she has the teachers do x without regard to a) how much time it takes, b) whether it is necessary, c) how much else teachers are doing, and d) whether the requirement is redundant.
And when questioned about this, they always say, “It’s just this one little thing. Why are you making a big deal about it?”
And they put a demerit note in your evaluation file.
Your attendance story brings to mind something I did regarding time use when I was teaching. This was when we had an administration that listened, though was often powerless to change what went on. I began a log of time interruptions in my classes. After a few weeks had passed, I reported on minutes lost. Everyone, including myself, was astounded at how much time had been taken by mundane aspects of school life. And this was before the testing came in and the scripted curriculum came about and the administrators who were extremely put off by implementing this crap had retired or moved on, leaving in their wake a new generation of administration that was incompetent in ways that are still breathtaking to consider. Run on sentence. Life sentence.
Run on sentence. Life sentence.
ROFL, Roy. Much love to you and yours.
Great comments. Realistic and honest. I would add one dimension to the piece–more assertive and creative teacher unions. I started teaching in a small city in Ohio in ’64, then on to Columbus. Finally finished in small city Chillicothe. As bad as things appear sometimes now, they were probably worse in the ’50’s. Class sizes were out of control and teachers had no rights. There was no maternity leave or personal leave, for instance. Women teachers were forbidden to wear slacks. Men had to shave their beards.
Strong unions and strong collective bargaining helped a lot. In big city Columbus we were able to get the school board and community to provide class size limits, and other provisions which lightened the load just a bit. Adequate leave provisions were negotiated. But much more needs to be done.
The issues manifest at the local level, but they are usually state and national in scope. We probably need more militancy by both major unions, with more effective strategies, etc. Strikes are a last resort. Public education is important. Coalition with other unions and civic groups helps.
The only way the federal standardized testing mandate, which forces people to spend enormous time and resources on invalid, pedagogically USELESS tests, will end is
IF THE MAJOR TEACHERS’ UNIONS GO ON STRIKE NATIONALLY TO END THE MANDATE
Until that happens, the major teachers’ unions are COMPLICIT IN CHILD ABUSE. I am not exaggerating when I say that. I am not using hyperbole. I am stating a fact.
It’s SHAMEFUL.
ABSOLUTELY CORRECT! But it will likely never happen. The “industry” is making money and keeping high earners (mostly Dem voters) employed. Who cares about the kids? They’ll get over it, they’re resilient…after all, they have been given some great SEL to go along with all that wonderful testing and curriculum in a can.
A strike–or a boycott. But either would need majorities participating, to avoid reprisals, firings, etc. Short of either–or before either–a massive public education campaign is needed. For sure the problem won’t fix itself. With all the attention to “A.I.,” I’ll post a poem I wrote just a few years ago. It’s still a possibility–especially in a Trump-run America:
Wikibrary: Lines written in the Columbus Main Library, one day as it closed—for renovation.
by Jack Burgess
“The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
‘Yes, now…”’ From “Answer,” by Fredric Brown
Stone walls held the learning we needed,
as cathedrals held God, but now
we carry all knowledge in our hand,
on our wrist, as marble buildings buckle.
Next the chip.
Where will it ultimately be placed?
On the end of our proboscis so we can
wisely follow our nose, finger tips antennae
direction for the best signal?
Or the tongue.
How do you think wisdom will taste?
But skewered into the brain will be the
logical choice. More direct, and when we say
“Something is on my mind,” we’ll really be saying, everything.
Finally, when we ask the Fredric Brown question,
“Is there a God?” the answer will be the same,
but no longer science fiction:
“Yes, now.”
Wonderful, Jack. Thanks for sharing!!!
Greene has obviously been there. I salute him for trying to tackle a problem that exists at every level.
The first level is the level of best that money can by: A close friend worked at a fine old traditional school 150 years old, older than consistent public education in largely rural Tennessee. In his teaching experience, he told me he never had a teaching load above 65 kids. I worked at a private school that was attempting to serve the needs of emotionally fragile high schoolers. I never had more than 35 students to teach at any one time. Both of us reflected some years ago that we could have literally spent an entire career with a class load of 10 and still been too busy. The first level of attacking the problem Green approaches is the recognition that good teachers, the ones that want to do a good job, will often spend more time than they have regardless of teaching load. Still, as he points out, there is a place for reason. As Bob points out above, public schools are far beyond reason. The work load he describes is average.
The second level is the realistic expectation in the public sector It is probably not realistic to expect to be able to set tax levels where every school can have a teaching staff that rarely sees more than 70 kids a year. I think it would be a good idea to start with, but I am pessimistic that any state body politic exists anywhere that would fund such a system. The voting public is averse to students having more possibilities than they experienced (back in my day…), and this aversion may easily be exploited by political leaders whose brains are in their wallets.
The third level we should consider is the degree to which political society wants to pile schools with solutions to their problems without any funding commensurate to the job at hand. I am a strong believer that the integration of schools was not just a necessity but a moral imperative. But the implementation of this was seen as the solution to a great societal miscarriage of justice. Put the children together and they will learn to live together. This was a debacle, not just because the racists picketed the schools, but because the tensions within the schools wrecked learning. We had a huge job to do and our funding was based on the fairy tale that all students were ready to learn when they walked in the door. This vision persists today as we think that all students come to us ready to learn, regardless of poverty, stress, and medical condition. Still, we persist in piling on unfunded mandates, requiring schools to solve various problems.
Teachers are like everybody else. They learn to survive in the system they experience. They learn that they are not compensated at a level that would allow them to behave as a doctor, who might be able to place the raising of a family in the hands of a competent spouse and plow into a huge patient load. So they pare back their work selectively because they have to. The more they pare, the more society loses, but there is hardly a way around it.
So they pare back their work
I worked with some teachers who literally just walked into class and had students turn to the next few pages in the textbook and walked them through those. Not many, but some. Teachers who then used the tests that came with the teacher resource package. Those teachers took home almost nothing. Such folks would create actual unique lessons only when they were expecting an evaluation. They didn’t have a workload to speak of. Terrible, terrible teachers. But administrators generally could not tell these from teachers who were actually doing the job.
Teaching like that is what one principal meant when she told me, “If you know what you are doing and what materials you have, then planning is quick and easy. It’s all done for you.”
Ridiculous
When I was a new teacher, I had six different preps and helped coach two sports. Textbooks were usually no help, because they were written for students who were not like mine, so I often came to the chalkboard with little more than a broad idea about what ideas we needed to attack.
A friend had a teacher in high school who taught math by assigning sections of the textbook. He gave literally no instruction, pointed out no patterns in the algorithms, explained nothing about the application of the algorithms, and disdained questions with militant arrogance.
In my first job, five preps, all remedial, and two extracurriculars–drama and track. Impossible.
Roy,
Peter Greene retired after 39 years as a teacher.
This is the life I live as a high school teacher in Brooklyn. And it exhausts me every day.
Brooklyn sounds a long way off. Come to think of it, retirement makes school seem a long way off.
several years ago, I got a student named Todd in my class who moved here from Brooklyn. He was an angry young man, so I thought I might get him to mellow a bit if he reflected on how different a little Tennessee town was from the city. He just shrugged: Brooklyn is just another place to live.
“Evaluating, screening, collecting, promoting and uplifting effective high-quality materials is, unfortunately, not a job that actually exists. Thinky tanks and publishers employ people to pitch their particular stuff, and state and federal bureaucracies are too close to politics and too far from classrooms to be help.”
Undoing the “particular stuff” might require rethinking the ideas entrenched in the dominant institutional mindset. The “particular stuff” will endure in one form or another UNTIL the underlying illusions toward the state institutions are ended.
Plain and simple, IF the state established schooling “for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth” the state would YIELD to the expertise of scholars.
So when it comes to doing more, of what hasn’t ended the “particular stuff” who benefits? Who suffers?
Yesterday, I had to spend an hour looking at bunk test score data and filling out paperwork with answers to illogical administrative questions like, “What are you doing to raise scores?” That was one hour I could have spent adapting plans to the curricular materials that change constantly as vendors try to better market their products. What do overworked I need to be a more effective and efficient teacher? I need the United States Congress to renew the ESSA with a revision that returns the law to its original, ESEA, well intended self. It would nearly solve a plethora of problems I daily face.
Daily. I got so sick of this. That’s the big reason why I retired 3 years ago.
Bureaucrats that write these busy work rules are out of touch with what the realities are for regular teachers. Many days of teaching are like surviving a tornado.
Seriously. When I was teaching, I was so exhausted all the time. Simply far, far, far too much to do. I was a C-level executive at a billion-dollar-a-year company and didn’t work a fraction as hard.
No one teaches us time management skills, I taught in a school in which all the supervisors, including the principal taught one class a day, a truly collaborative school culture
Love this.
That the principal taught and that there was a collaborative culture.
Learning “time management skills” will not solve the problem of the insanely enormous teacher workload.
As it should be, the principal is the principal educator.
Some events took place during third and fifth periods today to remind me of something else I need to ease the burden of teaching. After decades of promoting neoliberal inequality, I need my students to lead better lives. I need fewer traumatized by poverty students. I need fewer traumatized by and enraged by the internet students. The weight I regularly carry home is heavy. I need a new deal. I need a great society.
Amen