Five Ways to increase Teacher Planning Time

By Nancy

This past week I witnessed a teacher meltdown during a staff development workshop; after a day of training on a new curriculum, she asked the presenter how she and her teammates were supposed to assimilate all the new materials when they had only 30 minutes a day to prepare for 6 hours of instruction. The large group training venue was not appropriate for this teachers’ meltdown, but her question was valid. Everyone in the room felt the same stress and frustration.

According to a report by Stanford and the National Staff Development Council, in which they compared the US teacher workload with other top-performing countries, a US teacher on average only gets 3 to 5 hours per week of planning time, compared to 15 to 20 hours per week for teachers in other nations to prepare lessons, meet with parents and students, and work with other educators. US teachers also have far more direct student contact time than any other nation. The report shares some specific examples of what other top-performing nations provide for their teachers. For those of us teaching in the US, the examples from places like Korea and Singapore sound like a fantasy fulfilled by Oprah.

Across the nation, as reform has increased expectations, educators are responding with demands for more time to prepare, collaborate, and analyze student work. The response from school boards and district administrators is sympathetic but limited: there is no room in the budget to pay for more planning time. That may seem like a dead end, and lead to more meltdowns. So what can we do? We can stop waiting for someone else to give us time, and we can find ways to create time. Here are five ways that some teachers have already used to increase their planning time:

1.       Use regularly scheduled assemblies and large group presentations to merge classes with fewer adults supervising; trade off supervision duty to create released time for planning.

2.       Find a buddy teacher in another grade, and combine classes for buddy projects between students, alternating supervision to provide individual planning time.

3.       Find another grade level team of teachers to coordinate grade band buddy projects, providing your grade level team collaboration time on alternating weeks.

4.       Ask for funding (from your principal, your parent group, a grant) to provide substitutes that move through your building to release teams for collaborative planning.

5.       Communicate the need for planning time with your school board, parents and community; join the union bargaining team and negotiate for increased planning time in your contract.

September is over, and that honeymoon phase for both teachers and students is coming to an end. The start of the year thrill of new faces, fresh starts, and first-day clothing choices are over. In our district, the workshops, staff trainings, and after-hours meetings have started and new district initiatives have begun; teachers are feeling the effects of top-down requests for adjustments to almost every area of their daily work.  Add in the external demands from the local community, state standards, and federal requirements, and you’ve got information overload. Consider all of these separate but equally important directives funneled down to one teacher alone in a classroom, trying to plan every learning target with 28 students they are getting to know.

While we are waiting for policymakers, legislators, and school boards to catch up with us, we teachers have to start taking the time ourselves, working together to create the planning time we know is needed in order to bring quality instruction to our students. How much planning time do you have, how do you create more, what has worked for you and your colleagues?

Comments

[Kristin]

Great post Nancy.

When my daughters were born I realized how much time I used to work on evenings and weekends. Now that just doesn't happen, so I have to be extra efficient during the workday.

The biggest time-saver for me as an English teacher has been to move away from the 1500-2000 word essays and to assign a mini-essay every week. It's 400-500 words max, and each student focuses on whatever skill he or she needs to improve. Instead of spending 10-15 hours grading 150 essays, it now takes me about 2 hours, and I do it at school. Sometimes I grade an essay on a clipboard while the kids are working in groups and I'm periodically checking in with them.

As well as saving me 10 hours every assignment, their writing has improved more quickly because they're getting feedback right away and have more chances to practice. There's no point in them practicing the same mistakes for 1500 words. I'm sure math, science and history teachers have discovered similar ways to reduce grading time. I've gotten pretty fast at planning, but I teach 50 minutes of my subject. My husband, who teaches 5th grade, is crushed by planning 5 subjects. Plus, his students can't work independently while he runs to the copier.

Am I the only one who thinks elementary teachers should have more than 50 minutes of planning time a day?

[Nancy]

Thanks for sharing that great idea, Eva. The way you and your colleagues shared those health lessons sounds like a great way to reflect, revise, and improve delivery too. Maybe we teachers need to specialize more, as some already do, and share our students: you teach our combined students the math and science, I'll teach language arts and social studies.
Sounds like you work with a great team!

[Eva]

Thank you for writing about this important topic. I'm going to take all the suggestions back to my team. One thing we did recently in our 5th grade team was take a middle school approach to teaching our health lessons (some new curriculum that has been added to our plate this year due to cutbacks)--we each took one of the 4 lessons in the monthly unit and then rotated thru the 4 groups of students. After the first lesson we smoothed out the rough spots and the other 3 were taught much better and students did well on the unit test. So instead of prepping for 4 lessons we only had to do one. That was a definite time saver!

[Nancy]

Exactly, Mark. And you've seen the research that says those moments you share as you pass in the hall is what truly impacts teacher practice.

My thinking behind the first five on my list was to start sharing ways to create time. Then we use professional judgement about how to spend that time: responding to parents, learning about our content, creating new lessons based on specific students, collaborating with our colleagues, working alone, analyzing student work, or even organizing our classrooms. A few hours here and there will put only a small dent in all that. We will still all work at home and on weekends, but we might have fewer meltdowns if we feel like we have some control.

The first thing we have to do is stop expecting someone else to 'give' us time - because clearly that is not happening - and work together to carve time out of our days. What happened with the teacher whose meltdown I witnessed was that she confronted another educator who was blindsided and who did not have anything to do with her limited planning time. My heart went out to both of them; to all of us, really.

[Nancy]

Great addition to the list, Bob, and exactly what I was hoping to see: a list that will generate contributions by professionals on the front lines. Thanks.

[Mark]

In my assignment, I get 50 minutes of planning time a day. However, that is (always) occupied with the kinds of tasks which I cannot do at home--which is where most of my planning actually takes place. During my plan period I'm calling parents, meeting with admin or counselors about kids, returning a mountain of emails, making photocopies (since my TA is not allowed to), filling out paperwork for IEPs, 504s, absences of my own, homework requests for kids in OSS.

I'm not complaining...I know these are all part of the job and are important in their own ways.

My point is, though, that nowhere on that list was actual "planning," or even assessment of student work. That happens MAYBE one day a week. Planning and assessment are my homework. I have a common plan period with two of the three teachers on my team, but most of our "collaboration" ends up happening in the few minutes we pass one another after school or via email.

[Bob Heiny]

Kudos, Nancy. Great adaptation to real life with a list of prompt doables. Please consider adding one thing I did as #7 in your list: Coordinate lessons with other teachers and swap selected students (sometimes across grade levels) to gain a more homogeneous grouping of students most likely to meet lesson learning criterion.