Fact: Public education suffers today from a shortage of prepared and licensed teachers. Fewer undergraduates are enrolling in baccalaureate teacher preparation programs and the largest generation of teachers, Boomers, is retiring. We need teachers.
Fact: 40% of teachers leave teaching within five years. A multitude of factors dissuade them for continuing in the profession they trained for and entered.
Fact: Teacher burn out is a reality and too many teachers resign not retire from teaching. These pre-retirement leavers who accommodated most of the factors that chased initial teachers from the classroom find late in their careers that the same factors erode their commitment to teaching
Given these three facts, to what extent are schools working to retain high quality teachers and to what extent are schools exacerbating the problem with practices that defeat a veteran teacher’s professionalism?
Professionalism may be at the heart of the matter. Is a teacher a laborer in the classroom or is a teacher a professional expert in causing children to learn? There is a significant difference. We anticipate turnover in the labor market. We anticipate the lifespan of professional careers. Daily schoolhouse practices that are based upon these two different anticipations have a lot to do with the three facts cited above.
I will use preparation time for teaching as an example of a daily schoolhouse practice that is a misused resource and a contributor to diminishing professionalism.
Take Away
Today’s classrooms contain more diversity of culture, socio-economic background, native languages spoken, academic proficiency, and motivation to learn than ever before. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it reflects our community and contemporary culture in the United States. Such diversity is, however, a challenge for clinical teaching. For clinical teaching, each child presents a unique and challenging mind to be taught. Clinical teaching engages each child individually, assessing their current level of understanding and skill, and causing each child to learn from that beginning point. And, in a clinical teaching model, this assessment is the basis for preparing each day’s lesson plan.
Daily preparation of lesson plans is more critical today than ever before. The following illustrates four attributes of preparation for effective teaching and learning:
• Motivation – The immediate lesson piques each child’s interest in learning. From a unique question or the “hook” of a surprise to a review of yesterday’s lesson, effective teaching actively connects children to what they are to learn. The literature is replete with the connection of non-motivated children and failed learning. No motivation, little learning.
• Differentiation – The lesson includes materials for children at different reading levels. Even though the vocabulary and complexity of the text must differ, the prepared material helps each child to reach similar understandings and competencies relative to the lesson objectives. The objective is learning, the pathway to learning will be different for different children.
• ESL – Students whose native language is not English require help in being ready to learn, such as previewing vocabulary, interpretation of terms in their native language, physical models and, most importantly, time in each lesson to check for their understanding. Knowledge is reached no matter the language.
• Engagement – The lesson must ask each child to actively respond with “this is what I think” or “this is what I feel” and provide teacher feedback a child’s response. If a child is not actively engaged in the lesson, the child is a spectator.
• Good lessons do not happen by accident. They are carefully constructed and refined. Good lesson planning, review, and improvement require time.
What Do We Know?
Teachers in one-room schools did not have prep time. My grandmother taught in a very rural one-room school in southwestern Wisconsin. Her assignment was to teach 40+ children in grades 1 through 8. From the moment children arrived at school to the moment they departed, she was the only adult in the school and was constantly on duty. She prepped at home.
The provision of prep time for daily teaching is borrowed from a collegiate model. College professors and instructors typically worked within a balanced schedule of student instruction and professional work, including office hours for meeting with students and preparation for next instruction. The collegiate model includes the expectation that professors consistently engage in professional reading, writing and research.
Prep time in most schools is a product of collective bargaining. It emerged in teacher contracts in the 1950s and 60s as teacher associations aligned with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or National Education Association (NEA) and engaged in bargaining. The provision of prep time was treated as a benefit subject to the give and take of contract negotiations. Minutes of prep time were argued and depending upon the contract was approximately one class period to prepare for all other classes of instruction.
In 2018, a study of prep time revealed “that out of an average 7.5-hour workday, the most common amount of planning time provided to teachers is 45 minutes per day. Across the country, prep times vary, from 15 minutes per day day to more than an hour in some districts.”
https://www.k12insight.com/trusted/teachers-don’t-have-enough-prep-time/
Why Is This Thus?
The bargaining origin of prep time muddied the issue of prep time. The argument of who directs teacher prep time – teacher or administration – was argued but not answered. Is prep time within a teacher’s teaching assignment or is it a benefit outside of the assignment? If it is within, then administration can direct how a teacher uses prep time. If it is a benefit beyond a contracted teaching assignment, a teacher determines how prep time will be used.
Teachers have not helped the argument that prep time is personal time. Historically, students and parents had a distinct perception of how teachers used their non-teaching time. Back when people were allowed to smoke in schools, teacher lounges were smoke-filled havens. Student stories of looking into a lounge clouded with smoke shaped the common image that a teacher prep period was a bathroom stop and time for a cigarette, nothing more.
In the No Smoking era, the use of prep time as personal time extended beyond the teacher lounge. If prep time is personal time, then a teacher can leave school during a prep period to accomplish personal errands, such as banking, going to a pharmacy, or quick shopping. Parents and community members who greet a teacher who is shopping during a school day do not make a critical connection of prep time with the need for instructional preparation.
From the administrative perspective, prep time is part of a contracted teaching assignment and is vulnerable to reassignment based upon daily school needs. As there is a shortage of teachers, there also is an ever-greater shortage of substitute teachers. Principals look at prep time schedules to fill daily substitute needs in classrooms, hallway and cafeteria supervisions, and other non-teaching work. Some teachers report losing more than half their prep time each month to administrative re-assignments. If prep time is part of a teacher’s daily contract, then prep time is available for reassignment. Needs must be met!
Reassignment is a creeping problem. Covering a class for a colleague who is absent from school due to illness or family emergency seems very collegial and natural for a professional teacher. It is a reciprocal agreement – I will cover for your incidental need and you will cover for mine. The creep is that coverage moved from an English teacher covering for an English teacher to an English teacher covering the auto shop and physics class and a lunch shift. Reassignment of prep time has become a generalized practice without concern for a teacher’s preparation to teach the new assignment or the concept that “we need a body” in the halls for a class period.
Perhaps being a “helper” is in the DNA of most teachers. One of the first things out of a teacher’s mouth whenever a problem arises is, “How can I help?”. The outcome of this frequent response is that a teacher willing to help with coverage does more and more instructional review and preparation for teaching at home.
Is reassigning a teacher during a prep period to cover an additional assignment a use of an administrative resource or a misuse of a teaching and learning resource?
This returns us to the Take Away above. The unprofessional treatment of teacher prep time erodes teacher professionalism and career sustainability. In a recent national survey, 60% of teachers who reported that they are considering leaving teaching and it was not the teaching that caused their dissatisfaction. It was the overwhelmingness of everyday non-teaching factors, including constant loss of prep time.
To Do
The following steps will not immediately alleviate a school’s shortage of teachers or substitute teachers. These steps will make an immediate repair to and bolstering of teacher professionalism in any school.
1. Make a clear and inviolate connection between quality preparation for instruction and effective teaching that causes all children to learn. Make this an earthquake policy – broken only in the event of earthquake (valid everywhere but California). Establish a quid pro quo – high quality instruction for the protection and support of instructional preparation.
On a daily basis, the administration demands a continuous progress instruction for each child that is based upon a clinical assessment and alignment of each child’s learning readiness and needs, and, each teacher will use daily preparation time, including before and after school time, to create such continuous progress instruction.
2. Provide administrative support for instructional preparation. The new mantra, “How can we assist your preparation for causing each child to learn?”, replaces “We need you to be a hall supervisor this class period”. The absence of support of instructional preparation cannot be a cause for less than effective teaching. Part of administrative supervision of teaching includes the supervision of instructional preparation. Principal oversight of prep time assures that prep time remains protected and is targeted on effective instruction.
3. Make a clear and inarguable connection between protected preparation time and the achievement of annual curricular goals. Too often a defense of low achievement is the lack of instructional support or the constant interruption of instruction and its preparation for non-instructional reasons. There should be a reciprocal here. Better preparation will beget better instruction that will beget improved learning performance.
Imagine a month of school in which every teacher is provided with protected preparation. Equally imagine a month in which principals casually yet purposefully oversee instructional prep time to provide their support of needed resources. Finally, imagine a year of school and the learning outcomes that can be attained when a school prioritizes prep time, clinical instruction, and student learning. Then, imagine the professionalism of principals and teachers in a school that connects protected prep time with improved student learning.
The Big Duh!
Trends are phenomenon that have a life cycle. The trending perception that teaching is not a desired profession can be altered by our professional practices. I wager the proverbial dime that a school that protects and supports instructional preparation and connects protected prep time with effective teaching and learning outcomes will be a school that both attracts teacher candidates and retains veteran teachers.
A school leader may say “We cannot afford to protect teacher prep time. We don’t have alternative resources to cover our daily demands.” I respond by saying, “As a profession of teachers and educators, we cannot afford the continuation of non-professional practices. Change now or continue the trend of diminishing teacher professionalism and the perception of a teaching career”.