Teachers Need 2-3x as Much Prep Time

I would like to see teachers get two to three times as much prep time as most teachers have right now.

And I think typically teachers get a one hour prep time or maybe one period, maybe 40 minutes, you know, somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour I think is typical for prep time.

But what's happened over the last couple of decades is that time is being used for other things.

It used to be the individual teacher's prep time.

You can do your planning, you can do your grading.

In some schools you could probably even run errands during that time if you needed to.

but it was your time to allocate to whatever you needed to get done.

And now I feel like there are so many other kinds of meetings.

There are committees, there are teams, there are different student-focused meetings.

There are all these different things that are taking up teachers' prep time.

And there's no new prep time being added.

We've added all these mandates, we've added all these meetings, but we have not given teachers more time to prep.

And I think they probably need two to three times what they're getting realistically.

If you look at what college professors get, you might teach 15 hours a week out of a 40-hour reasonable work week.

And of course, there are almost no K-12 teachers who are getting that much prep time.

I've come across a few, believe it or not, there are people out there who are getting multiple hours per day, but I think that should be the norm.

I think it should not be the exception because realistically, if you are going to teach two, three, four, five different classes, you need prep time during the day.

And I think this idea of having teachers do all of their prep, all of their grading, all of their planning, at night or on weekends or over the summer or just on their personal time is making teaching a much less attractive career for a lot of people.

So a lot of people are just saying, no, I'll take a different job that is not as fulfilling that I can leave at the office.

I would rather do something that I can walk away from each evening and say, okay, I did my job, now I get to go home and I don't have to take work home with me.

Like that is so, so appealing.

to people in comparison to having to take all this work home.

And it's actually even a bigger contrast than that with much of the private sector, because many industries have gone to a four-day work week, or you can go virtual two or three days a week, or maybe fully virtual, fully remote, or there are all these flexible work arrangements.

So it is not the norm that most office workers, most people in professional jobs are in the office for 40 hours a week anymore.

I don't see that changing for education.

I think probably most of our work is going to be in person in most types of schools, and I think that's perfectly fine.

But I do think this needs to become a job that is more doable within the workday so that people do not have to take as much home.

And if you think about when that's really feasible for most people to take things home, it is not throughout your life, right?

There are seasons of life when maybe you can take more home.

I was a teacher in my early 20s when I was very young, didn't have any kids, didn't have a lot of other things going on.

I could devote pretty much all of my waking time and energy to teaching.

But the idea of doing that with kids, the idea of doing that with any kind of personal life, of kind of outside involvement, That's just very, very, very challenging.

And I know a lot of people are in that situation.

So how much teaching prep time, how much prep time would you need during the day realistically?

Leave a comment and let me know.