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A School Year Is Long Enough To …

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I have not yet met a person who does not have an opinion on the length of a school year.  By and large, most people who are not students, parents of students, in the business of school or reliant upon child labor don’t care and “I don’t care” is an opinion.  The remainder, a minority of our community – parents, grandparents, employers and others whose daily life is touched by school – form their opinion from their personal experience, their self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  Normally, this blog sets a proposition, examines what we know and think about the topic, and creates an action or To Do with a rationale.  Today, I will start with the conclusion.

The Big Duh

A school year must be the length of time necessary to teach and cause children to become competent in an annual curriculum.  It need not be longer nor shorter than that, but it must be long enough to teach an annual curriculum. 

What Do We Know?

Over time educators have packaged learning into grade levels and content courses and courses of study and each package is an annual curriculum.  Elementary school is parsed into 4K or pre-kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st grade through the last grade of your school’s organization, typically 5th or 6th grade.  Each grade level is a step on a curricular scaffold building a child’s knowledge, skills and dispositions about learning school year by school year.  Secondary school is parsed into content courses of English/language arts, math, science and socials studies and perhaps a world language.  These are stacked or sequenced, as in English 7 through English 12 and Algebra through Calculus.  Some content courses seem to be stand alone courses, like Marketing or Personal Finance, but have underlying content and skill structure in English, social studies, and math.  Also, secondary school instruction provides continuous courses of study in music, the arts, and technical education.  Year after year of instruction in choir, band and orchestra or in painting and ceramics or technical training refines and improves student performance.

The packaging in terms of time began when our communities were agriculture-based and children could attend school when not needed during the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons.  Packaging was reconsidered when child labor laws were implemented and regular schooling replaced daily work.  A school day mirrored a work day and a school week mirrored a world week and school calendaring filled the community need for day care for millions of children nationwide.

Curricular packaging has been refined and fit into grade level and course competencies.  A child’s progress through the 3 R’s was a pathway up the scaffold of reading, writing and arithmetic.  At one time, a 6th grade education or the ability to read, write and cipher at the 6th grade level was an adequate adult competency.  Later, the level of competency advanced to 8th grade and children could stop attending school after completion of 8th grade or the age of 16.  That was good enough.  Today, high school is the completion of 13 or 14 years of schooling and a generalized competency of 10th grade or better.

Our contemporary school scaffold is a child’s annual demonstrated competence on annual curricula that validates promotion to the next annual curricula and eventually graduation.  The time required to complete each step of the scaffold or each packaged curriculum is approximately 180 school days or 36 weeks of school.

There are no prizes or awards for schools that have shorter or longer school years.  There is no economic incentive to add days to a school year.  School revenues and contracts for all school employees are a set amount in a school’s annual budget and decreasing or extending a school year does not alter these major expenses.

Why Is This Thus?

Why is 180 days the seemingly standard for a school year?  The question was asked and answered more than 100 years ago.  The world’s richest man of his time, Andrew Carnegie, was committed to the role of education as the essential strategy for improving life in the early 1900s.  In 1906, he funded the Carnegie Foundation led by Harvard President Charles Elliot to study and recommend standards for a college education.  At the time, the national college graduation rate was less than 10% and the quality of a college education was dependent upon the college.  There were no national standards for education.  The Carnegie Foundation literally defined college and university education in the United States for the next century. 

The Foundation also recommended changes in public education.  For our purposes, the Foundation defined a high school Carnegie Unit as a (one) credit awarded for completion of 120 hours of instruction over the length of a school year.  A school year, then, is the length of time to required to achieve 120 hours of instruction plus assessments plus other school requirements.  According to the Carnegie plan, a high school student could earn six to seven credits per year and 24 to 28 credits over four years and high school graduation became the completion of 24-28 credits. 

Using the 120 hours of instruction as the standard for an annual curriculum and allowing for reteaching and make-up lessons for students absent from school and for the additional legislative mandates that must be accomplished in a school year, 180 days became the normal length of a school year in US public schools.  Ninety days was a semester and 45 days was a quarter or grading period.

Since 1906, much as changed in the field of teaching and learning, yet the basics of a Carnegie Unit and the standards for a school year have remained largely unchanged.  A discussion of a school year begins with 180 days.

We must always be aware of the influences of money and politics in public, as these are constantly at play in public education.  By rule of the US Constitution, the responsibility for public education is delegated to the states.  Hence, the funding and rules related to public education are legislated by state government.

It is honest to state that state funding for public education is allocated according to money available not by money needed.  This basic understanding tells us that legislatures with a need to fund many state programs that compete for a limited annual state budget are always looking for ways to reduce or contain costs.  Public education, prisons and highways are the three largest expenses in state budgets.

The school year is an example of such manipulation.  For decades, a school year was 180 days of instruction.  First, start with this as the number of interest:  180 times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the largest cost of a school year.  More than 80% of school costs are paid in salary and benefits to employees.  If school funding is considered on a per day basis not a per year basis and a school year is defined by hours instead of days, then the total sum of money spent for salaries and benefits can be changed.  Second, change the number of interest to:  hours of instruction times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the cost of a school year.  The total remains the same as long as the hours of instruction equal 180 days of instruction. 

In Wisconsin, 437 hours of instruction are required for Kindergarten students, 1,050 hours for grades 1 through 6, and 1,137 for grades 7 through 12. 

Third, allow schools to determine the length of class periods and the number of hours in a school day so that each grade level meets the legislated number of instruction hours.  Now, a school year can be less than 180 days.  More importantly, the cost of school is reduced by each day of salary and benefit that is removed from the annual school calendar. 

Politics and economics not student learning drive the contemporary defining of a school year.  Today, a school year can be reduced to the bare minimum of days required to complete mandated hours of instruction, a number in the 170s.

Yes but!  If we add the concept of educational accountability to the definition of a school year, how much teaching and learning is required for a child to competently complete an annual grade level, a content course or a course of study?  There is no magic in the Carnegie Unit.  Critics of the Unit have harped for decades on its arbitrariness.  Yet, the idea that the completion of a rigorous course of instruction should be the basis of how we “package” a year of school keeps us returning to the idea of the Unit.  A school year must be accountable for learning not just time in class.

To Do

Accountability for learning matters and competency is the metric of measure.  The number of hours in a school day or in a school year is just the vehicle for achieving competent learning.  School Boards approve and adopt annual curricula for all children in all grade levels and courses with the intention that children will successfully and competently complete each.  We must honor this element of local school control of public education. 

We have a national problem with proficiency.  A majority of children do not meet proficiency standards on local, state and national assessments.  This is an instructional challenge.  We must improve the instructional tool box used by all teachers to more effectively cause every child to learn.  This is a commitment challenge.  We must hold to the goals of annual student achievement and invoke what we know about the science and art of explicit teaching and the necessity for instructional interventions when initial instruction is not successful.  Proficiency is created when a child is competent in each curricular unit of instruction so that at the end of a school year there is a sequence of proficient learning.  We must intervene at the point of mislearning or non-learning not at the end of school year.  And, to point, reducing the number of days in a school year contradicts what we know about student proficiency.  Teachers need all the time they can have with children not less.

Take Away

As a School Board member, I hear from parents who want to reduce the length of our school year.  I return to the first paragraph.  Most who have an opinion about the length of a school year base their opinion upon personal experience, self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  A Board member’s responsibility includes educating the public about education and local education, in particular.  As an educator who is a Board member, my first accountability is to causing every child to become a proficient learner and to learn.  In the business of causing learning, instructional time is our most valuable resource.  We can improve teaching skills and refine curriculum.  However, without adequate time for all of the layers of instruction, initial through necessary interventions, to be successfully deployed, teacher skill and engaging curricula will not cause the educational outcomes children need.  A school year may be an arbitrary number of hours and days, yet there is a substantial rationale connecting instructional time with learning accountability.  At the end of conversation, we get what we settle for and less time will result in less learning.

Meddling, Muddling, Modeling Not Middling

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A wonderful educator, Mildred Middleton, taught us that it is very appropriate to “M” around in school work.  Education is not static work, she told us.  Everyone and everything is changing, some appearing as  revolutionary and but most feeling as evolutionary, but it all is changing.  Dick, Jane and Spot left the reading shelf replaced with trade books.  Now, graphic books, anyone?  Anyone?  New Math upset the apple cart and then the apples were collected, the cart arighted, and New became one of several approaches to math instruction.  Common Core made everything more academic and accountability made everyone more antsy.  Change is always at hand somewhere around the schoolhouse.

Mildred helped us to understand change and, to steal a line from Apollo 13, to “work the problem”.  While we wanted to apply a single strategy to understanding the phenomenon of change, she used the M’s to help us work the problem even when we don’t know how.

M-ing is valuable for adults and children alike.  Instead of watching people give up because they don’t know what to do or run around with their hair on fire chasing the solution of the moment, we can teach adults and children to be meddlers, muddlers, modelers, and to never accept middling.

Let’s define our terms.

Meddling is being a Thomas Edison and trying dozens of viable options seeking the best option of all.  Meddling is active engagement, hands-on action, and continuous commitment to the work.  Meddling is inquisitive and inventive.  Meddling is an itch being scratched.

Muddling is observant cognitive and emotional inaction.  Muddling is saying to oneself and to others, “I don’t know what to do at the moment.  I need to stop the doing and push the observing and thinking and talking with others.”  Muddling takes personal strength in a world that expects immediate action and results.  Muddling is taking the problem apart to best understand where and how to start and this requires emotional patience.  Muddling can lead to meddling and modeling when a person has sorted things out.

Modeling is the creation and development of a focused result or set of results when a person has committed to an idea or plan.  Modeling is working the plan.  Modeling is shaping the variables at hand so that they contribute to making the plan work or the idea come alive.  Modeling is how a lump of clay becomes a piece of art or an idea becomes a cogent argument or a social problem is addressed to mutual satisfaction.  Modeling is inherent in the teaching of a successful lesson plan and in a child’s personalization of what is learned from that lesson plan.

Middling is mediocre.  Middling is “any answer will do”.  Middling is meeting the minimal, just passing, just above the grade of F.  Middling is not good enough for those who engage in meddling, muddling and modeling.

The M’s are an intersection of knowledge, skills and dispositions about learning and self that are valuable for children and adults in every area of life.  To work the M’s, a person must know things, have skills to manipulate things, and accept the dilemma of not knowing what to do and the liberation of knowing what to do but having the patience to observe until then.  The M’s are acquired not innate. 

When we engage in the M’s, we need to careful.  Modeling is the most attractive M.  It produces the showcase and salves the ego.  Most people grade and reward the results of modeling because modeling typically results in something we can see, touch, hear, read, or smell.  Care needs to be given to also value good meddling and good muddling.  What if we also assessed and graded the quality of meddling or the quality of muddling?  A good modeled result can only be produced after good meddling and muddling. 

Mildred gave us one more pearl that assists us apply the M’s.  When we understood the value and the strategies of each M, she said, “Now, pull up your socks, young man, and get to work”.  And, we have been M-ing in school ever since.

Good Teaching and Good Schooling Grow a Whole Child

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If you talk about improving student academic performance today, invariably someone will say “We need to be more concerned with the whole child than just test scores”. The comment is meant to dissolve the discussion of objective curricular performance by wrapping arms around the subjective developmental characteristics of childhood. The implication is that those focusing on curricular results are not interested in the socio-emotional development of a child and, more implicitly, that increasing a focus on curricular outcomes decreases consideration for the holistic well-being of a child. Whoa!

Take Away

The education of children always provokes the question of “to what end”. Five generations past and more, white, male children were educated to become literate citizens. Female and children of color or any disability were not publicly educated. Three generations past, children from elite families received pre-professional educations and most other children were educated to be productive in the local and national economy. Post-WW2 children were educated to strengthen our nation in a Cold War and for international leadership. A generation ago children began to be disaggregated by their observed characteristics of gender, race, ethnicity and language, and disabilities and disadvantages and education was purposed to close achievement gaps between disparate groups. Across generations there is a common theme that school prepares a child for adulthood, adulthood needs being defined by the times.

A three-legged stool historically supported the rearing of children. The first and most significant leg was family. The second leg was church. And, the third leg was community, including school. A phrase embraced this triad: “These are the parents’ children, the community’s kids, and the school’s students”. Today, almost 50% of marriages end in divorce, only 12% of the population attends church once per month, and traditional institutions, such as Scouts and 4H are under suspicion due to some disreputable adults . The Y (no longer an MCA) and Boys and Girls Clubs provide day care. School, despite its detractions, remains the constant over time in the lives of children, kids and students.

The “whole child” interest is valid and wholesome. It also is either uninformed, misinformed or purposefully distracting.

What Do We Know?

Who the speaker is matters. The commenter may be seeking help. A parent advocating whole child may be addressing the lack of support from the other two legs and looking to the school for non-educational support. Or, the parent may be facing a significant challenge or problem in raising the child and looking for non-academic help from school. Or, the commenter could be a social worker or law enforcement officer who understands the implications of an “unwhole” child and knows that school through mandatory attendance represents a singular, and positive constant in the life of most children. And, the commenter could be a politician needing to make answers to confrontative problems, like community violence and drug and alcohol addictions, and so he legislates that schools will address mental health issues.

Educators have a simple and direct response. It is – “Good teaching and good schooling grow a whole child”.

Why Is This Thus?

Good teaching understands the concept of readiness to learn. Readiness means that a child is physically, intellectually, and emotionally prepared to engage with a teacher and prepared instruction for the purpose of learning. Even though a child may be present in the classroom, sitting at a desk, and looking ready to be taught, this may not be the fact. Good teaching looks closely at the child to appraise “is this child or are these children ready for this?”. Good teaching listens to other teachers, parent communications, counselors and school health personnel and understands when a child is not ready to or may be significantly distracted from learning. Readiness to learn considers all facets of the child.

Readiness to learn are daily measures taken several times each day. A child’s night before and amount or quality of sleep affect readiness to learn. Breakfast or its absence affects readiness. A bus ride or walk to school affects readiness. A child’s experiences in the morning classes and at recess and passing from class to class and at lunch can affect subsequent readiness to learn. Good teaching is a child first attention to each student and looks for any of these enhancers of or distractions to learning. A child who is not ready or clearly distracted will not learn.

A balanced curricular program understands and helps to educate the whole child. Balance is access to curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular opportunities. Interestingly, adults seem to think that all children seek opportunities to sing and play an instrument, and be on stage in a play and make the varsity each season and to paint and make pottery and be on the debate team or Key Club or dance team and take a load of academic classes. While some may, most do not. What they want is opportunity to explore what they want to explore. And, opportunity to extend learning in the areas they choose. Balanced curriculum provides an expanse of experiences and open choices that help grow a whole child.

Today a whole child must be a contemporary child. When adults don’t like what is happening in education, they either make comparisons to what life, childhood and school was like when the adult was young or they call upon theory as blatant truth. From the get go, yesterday is past and there is no getting it back and the past was not perfect. Believing that school in the 80s or 90s was more focused on the whole child than today is just plain wrong. Additionally, believing that school can operate on a theoretical model of whole child education is tantamount to believing every girl should look lie Barbie and every boy like Ken.

To Do

Good schooling and good teaching facilitates a whole child by:

  • offering a wide variety of educational opportunities for all children and letting children choose. Inclusive options let children explore and develop their skills and interests and talents, not just those that adults prescribe.
  • celebrating child successes. Some children who do not have supportive homes or family networks do not know what a celebration of success feels like. Success begets more success and celebrations are part of that begetting.
  • making 360 degree observations about each child. Listening to parents, bus drivers, cafeteria servers, hall monitors, custodians – everyone who makes a comment about a child helps good teaching to grow a whole child. At the same time, good teaching filters commentary that pertains to teaching and learning and passes non-teaching and learning commentary to other school resources.
  • helping children grow from their failures and mistakes. Neither of these close children from future teaching and learning. Instead, they make it more compelling. A whole child experiences bumps in the road to her future.
  • engaging with every child as frequently as possible. When a child is able to ghost through a school day without a direct teaching-learning conversation with a teacher, this child is falling toward unwholeness. We must know that some children choose this silence and invisibility. If we are listening to all our sources about children, we will know when a child may needs to be left alone and when to re-engage them. Otherwise, engage all children continuously. Children shall not be ghosts.
  • lastly, the assessment and measurement of learning in all areas of academics, activities, arts and athletics should be embedded in our attention to the whole child. The fact that a state mandates schools to test all children in reading and math is not a negative. In advocating for a well-rounded education for all children, the state and each school should have an assessment and measurement system informing us about each child’s growth in art, music, world language, history and civics, and financial literacy. We should have measurements in tech skills. And, please, we should have strategies for assessing a child’s social and emotional well-being and abilities to be collegial and collaborative. Without systems of assessment how will we know a child is whole?

The Big Duh!

Good teaching is all about the whole child.

Informed, Nuanced, Experienced Veteran Teachers Are Rain Makers

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Accumulated knowledge, skill sets honed over time, and perceptions sharpened by experience lead to this observation: “At the point of retirement, most teachers know more, can do more, and have more value as teachers than any preceding year in their career”. A veteran teacher who persists through decades of teaching has high value to children, colleagues, and a school in her pre- and post-retirement years.

Take Away

How do schools make the most, in fact exploit, the valued commodity of a veteran educator? The answer is – we don’t. The teaching assignment and expectations for a veteran teacher mirror the expectations of a first-year teacher. We treat teachers with proven talents and teachers of unproven talents as similar “plug and play” personnel.

Teachers, of all ages, still operate in the block box of a classroom. A veteran teacher’s knowledge, skills and perceptions shine in their classroom, but are seldom known or discussed in whole school or faculty settings. The black box syndrome and mentality defeats the value of experience because of its isolationism. Whether the veteran is a Kindergarten teacher with decades of success in causing our youngest children to read or a high school AP teacher with years of causing our college-bound children to earn college credit while in high school, teachers work in isolation of each other and nominally alone within their school.

Informed experience is a value-added commodity that is achieved over time. A recent graduate knows the latest pedagogical theories and best practices and is ready to apply them. A veteran who is up-to-date on the latest theories and best practices adds the value of knowing which theory and practice works best with some student but not with others. The discernment of what, when and why children need specific teaching is an acquired judgment that is earned with experience, yet is undervalued in school.

It is essential to appreciate that all veteran teachers are not created equally. Some vets grow and ripen and enrich with time while some only repeat their first year of teaching over and over again every year.

A faculty group photo helps us observe many truths about our teacher corps. We see many contrasts. Faces and, to some degree, hair color portray two-thirds of the faculty as looking younger and less than one-third looking older. If we compare annual faculty group photos, we observe fewer and fewer of same veteran faces. There is a gradual yet steady decline in the number and in the continuity of older, veteran teachers. We believe that the work force in our nation is “graying” but, in public education, the work force is getting younger and younger. This means that we are losing the professionally-developed talent, knowledge, experiences, and perceptions faster than we are growing the talents of our young teachers.

What Do We Know?

In the 2015-16 school year, teachers in public schools averaged of 14 years of experience. If we interpret this in age as experience, the average teacher is in her mid 30s and has been working as a teacher for about one-third of her anticipated work life.

http://neatoday.org/2018/06/08/who-is-the-average-u-s-teacher/

In that year, the most common public school teacher is in her first three years of teaching. These data are supported by the fact that 44% of first year teachers leave the profession before their fifth year. That means that most schools have a continuous turn over of young and inexperienced teachers. We see this in the faculty group photo – so many look so young.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/today_teaching_force_richard_ingersoll.html

The average retirement age for teachers hovers around 59. Interestingly, many teachers retire before they are eligible for social security. Part of the reason is that salary tables tend to top out with little to no annual salary improvement after a set number of employment years. Some states and districts enact “rule of 30” incentives that encourage teachers to retire when they gain 30 years of experience or “rules of 55” that set the retirement incentive at a combination of age and years of teaching experience equaling 55. A teacher’s annual income of pensions and social security may be equal to or more than their annual working salary well before their anticipated retirement year. Why stay? Why not start a second career with earnings on top of teacher retirement benefits? We have created professional structures that purposefully diminish our teacher talent pool.

https://smartasset.com/retirement/why-your-retirement-age-matters

School leaders know the teachers in their faculty who perennially cause the greatest student learning. They know the “rain makers”. Principals know this through applying Effective Educator processes, comparing student assessment data, and sitting in classrooms observing teaching. They know it through their work with students and parents. And, they know the journeyman teachers who annually do a satisfactory job of teaching. However, this knowledge remains tight-lipped behind screens of confidentiality. If it were discussed, the parent demand for placement in “rain maker” classrooms would be impossible for satisfy.

Why Is This Thus?

In most school systems, a teacher with 40+ years of teaching is at the top of the district’s salary and benefits scale. The first consideration school boards make toward veteran teachers is financial. In many school districts, a veteran may cost twice that of a first-year teacher. If finances drive the decision making, “helping” expensive teachers to retire is a school board and administrative priority.

There is a large scale failure to understand the cost of less effective teachers. Successful initial learning is the most cost effective instruction. When a teacher must re-teach lessons to classes of children or extend the planned time for a unit of instruction, there will be instruction at the end of the year those children will not receive. That instruction must be taught the next year. The accumulated effect of ineffective teaching is graduates who did not learn all of their curricular objectives. Tier 2 interventions requiring “specialists” in addition to classroom teachers add significantly to the cost of a public education. Remedial summer school adds cost in large doses. The greatest cost is the sum of lost knowledge, skills and attitudes children suffer year after year that diminish their capacity for success in college and career. These are not costs in the hundreds of dollars, but in the millions nationwide. Getting teaching and learning right in initial instruction is the gold standard.

Most observers assume that veteran teachers with 30-40 years of teaching are slowing down. Their best years are behind them. They miss the point. Doing the same thing over and over diminishes energy, not the talent to work. Give a proven veteran a new assignment or change the challenges of the children the teacher instructs and the combination of informed experience and expertise takes over. Intellectual adrenalin makes vets act and look like younger teachers.

Too often principals respond to student and parental wants and demands and place veteran teachers in high popular demand or politically visible assignments. Parents want rainmakers teaching AP and college prep track courses. Rarely do parents of low achieving children stress principals to assign rainmakers to children performing below grade level. Some times teacher assignments are made for parents and not for children.

Lastly, phasing veteran teachers toward retirement is the way schools always have approached personnel. As institutions, schools are slow to change past practice, even poor past practice.

To Do

Use the informed experience and talent of veteran teachers for customized assignments, such as underachieving regular education children or children living in poverty who lack out of school resources. The vet’s understanding of chunked instruction, pacing, modeling, tutored guided practice, and interval reinforcement work well for children needing nuanced teaching.

Use the wisdom for instructional design. We engage large groups of teachers, most of whom are inexperienced or less experienced, to write curriculum and units of instruction. One of our misapplied thoughts is that every voice has equal value. Engage “rainmakers” in designing best strategies for making more rain for everyone.

Assure that talented veteran teachers work with small, discussion groups to refine student understanding. Too often, vets are assigned to large group information sessions because they are more entertaining. Knowing the right question to ask at the right point in a child’s learning is an acquired talent.

Weight employment using the value-added of informed experience and past records of causing significant student learning to create combinations of teaching and teacher coaching. First-year teachers graduate from mentored student teaching assignments straight into “you are on your own” classrooms. And, if they are assigned a mentor, mentoring seldom includes mentor observations because of their respective teaching classroom assignments. Give a proven and productive veteran released time to coach one or two inexperienced teachers.

Create emeritus teaching assignments for retired teachers. With closed-minded thinking, many states make it difficult for a retired teacher receiving a teacher’s pension to re-enter the classroom. An emeritus assignment need not be full-time or full-year. A highly trained veteran-in-retirement can work a very customized teaching assignment to cause children to learn. It may be an assignment that is “on demand” when children need talented and personalized instruction the most. Be creative.

The Big Duh

More than 40% of all teachers who start in the profession leave before their fifth year. The majority of teachers in any school are inexperienced due to this constant turn over. Among teachers who persist in the classroom are those who sadly repeat their first years of teaching over and over again. These often seek their first opportunity for an early retirement. And, there are talented rainmaking teachers whose experience, continuous professional development, and refinement of acquired art and science of teaching make them high valued veteran teachers. School leadership needs to optimize the use of their rainmakers and be creative in keeping rainmakers in the most productive of teaching assignments. A veteran teacher is a talent we cannot afford to waste.

Prep Time: A Mismanaged Resource and Professional Bone of Contention

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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”.