NOT TEACHER BASHING but do why do teachers have to do hours of planning every day?

[mostwonderfultime]

If the syllabus is the same every year which it is, do you not just use planning from previous years?
I'm sure I'm being naive but just read this on another thread.

@hashtagbollocks

sorry tax i think I meant what does she ACTUALLY do, as if it's organising "courses" for education then these are a great source of bullshittery and waste of time and money hence why i apologised in advance if that wasn't their role

Ah no, Learning and Development managers work within businesses doing performance development, performance reviews and training within that particular company’s field. I suppose if it’s an educational company then they would possibly be training teachers but learning and development managers usually work in finance/IT/tech etc. Hence me being a bit surprised that you were calling it a fad.

As for knowing what happens in primary school because your children go to one and you spend time there...

I can honestly say that my own Teaching Assistant wouldn't be completely aware of the pressures on my time - and she was in class with me every day helping to deliver what I'd prepared!

She came in an hour after me in the morning and left 15 minutes after the bell.

She didn't see the meetings, the management responsibilities, the data collection, the reports, the moderation...all of that. It happened after hours.

She had an idea, of course, because the planner in the staffroom would have all of the data drop deadlines and observation timetables...etc, but she still wouldn't really have been able to tell you how much extra I had on my plate.

So how a parent can, I have no idea.

@hashtagbollocks before teaching I was in charge of specific research projects reporting direct to the board of a FTSE 100 company and doing my degree;I changed careers at age 24 and took a 50% pay cut.
Teaching is bloody ridiculous in terms of workload, has damn near killed me many times (twice literally - a whiteboard fell off the wall onto me in a lesson once), but I wouldn't do anything else.
My husband is still in the city, pretty senior, stressful, high level management - even he admits I have to deal with far more. He can hide somewhere if having an off day, I can't.

I don't understand why a) UK teachers can hear how much better teachers have it in other countries and say they'd like to move there but can't, and b) the attitude against textbooks and workbooks when those are the reason why non-UK teachers get to have a life instead of preparing daily. Many countries use textbooks and workbooks and have happy teachers who have a work life balance. Why not the UK? Textbooks also make it possible for supply teachers to step in and easily take over where the class left off and assign work.

maud, I agree about people in schools not being able to “see” a lot of the work. I work closely with my HoD, she’s quite open about her workload and so on, but even so, as an experienced teacher, I still am aware I can’t really know how her workload feels or the impact it has on her (apart from knowing I wouldn’t want to do it!)

Textbooks cost money which schools don’t have.

Because I need to teach lessons. What an odd question

You clearly don’t understand the job at all

Lol because they do change things every year. Even if they didn't SLT would push a new agenda every year to make themselves look good and the teachers are the ones carrying out these whims and fancies. For example this year the hot thing has been recall, spacing and interleaving ( quizzes in reality) so if you weren't incorporating some kind of glorified quiz your lesson was deemed crap. A few years ago if you were doing a quiz it was frowned upon because they weren't learning anything new ( progress). My friends school have decided that for next year that all lesson plans and powerpoints have to display WALT ( we are learning to) and WILF ( what I'm looking for) criteria but previously it had to be learning objectives. I've not seen WALT and WILF since I trained ten years ago. Unfortunately teaching is a bit like fashion. It changes all the time with the same things coming around in cycles every few years or so but waiting just long enough for you to have chucked the item. Even if you had kept the item it would probably take you more time digging it out than to make a whole new one.

sorry tax that makes more sense then!
Have sat through too many educational gurus explaining the latest thing.
IT etc. would be a bit mad if wasn't updated

I have a year 12 Theatre Studies lesson I'm planning for later this week. I have the basic PowerPoint which I use as a base every year, but every year I have a different number of students in the class, with different abilities.

Last year I had 5 students, this year I have 9. Theatre Studies is practical as well as theoretical, and each student needs a tailored approach - if we look at a Shakespeare speech, they need to work on an equal section - or I need to annotate a second speech for more students.

I've also had to adapt the content - last year the students did Romeo and Juliet. This year they've already confirmed they want to do Henry V. It's a very different play - I have to re-work the whole approach

Plus several other issues which I won't go into.

It took me about 90 minutes to rework the lesson and I've also had to differentiate the home learning element of it. I also need to plan the delivery over Teams which is a lot different to class delivery.

Their homework will take me probably 20 minutes each to mark. That's 3 hours.

I also teach years 7-10 and have a form, which is pastoral and as it's year 12, we are working on UCAS applications. There are 20 students in my form. Their personal statements and tutor references are as individual as they are and I will spend hours with each of them on this. Hours
If I work with 4 students a week, that will be at least 4 hours a week extra for 5 weeks. At least.

Stuff takes a while.

ineedaholidaynow but what costs more, textbooks that are reused for a few years, or paying private companies for supply teachers when teachers crumble under the stress or when schools can't find teachers to recruit? If the profession is losing quality teachers each year, wouldn't it be better to do something to help retain them, while also giving all teachers more time to themselves and their families each evening?

Then people say I don't understand teaching and what would teachers do if they didn't plan from scratch. Ignoring that it works just fine in many, many countries around the world, including countries with less money where money for textbooks is still found. I've not met a teacher, no matter where they teach in the world, who isn't proud of their work and profession. I don't understand the being proud of planning everything daily concept.

@AspergersMum

ineedaholidaynow but what costs more, textbooks that are reused for a few years, or paying private companies for supply teachers when teachers crumble under the stress or when schools can't find teachers to recruit? If the profession is losing quality teachers each year, wouldn't it be better to do something to help retain them, while also giving all teachers more time to themselves and their families each evening?

Then people say I don't understand teaching and what would teachers do if they didn't plan from scratch. Ignoring that it works just fine in many, many countries around the world, including countries with less money where money for textbooks is still found. I've not met a teacher, no matter where they teach in the world, who isn't proud of their work and profession. I don't understand the being proud of planning everything daily concept.

Simply put - it's not up to us.

Accepted pedagogy changes rapidly. At the moment, text books would be anathema - they do not allow for personalised learning or child-centres learning or...whatever it is we are doing this week.

It's the DfE and Ofsted who decide what good teaching looks like. Teachers just have to jump through the hoops.

I've no doubt that if we wait long enough, text books will come back 'in', but I think, in general, it's against everything we have trained teachers to do for the last 20 years.

The why is not for teachers to know.

*52CreditCrackers

@ultrablue where will we all be if in a few years down the line no one wants to teach? Almost no one wants to teach now - that's why teachers are working crazy hours. For subjects like Physics (that my husband teaches) there were only 43 teachers hired for every 100 places last year.*

Exactly this.. In my son's case, because he was struggling he had to give up Physics A'level, his Physics teacher didn't want to give up on him, got him into the greenpower racing ( not sure if your husband is part of that) and supported him in getting him into his university place. Why? Because he believed in him. I think myself lucky because of teachers, my children are heading towards good futures because of nurturing by their teachers.

It's all too easy not to look past the 9-3 hours that a lot of people think teachers actually work.. Me I have so much respect for teachers, without them were would we be

I'm sorry Aspergersmum.

I don't understand the part a) of your previous post.

Are you suggesting we should all go and teach in Ireland?
Or that we should teach like they do there?

Either is a bit of a leap.

@hashtagbollocks

No, nothing to do with the latest fad or motivation. I suspect you are thinking more of so called 'life coaches'.

I am part of the HR team and my remit covers performance management, talent and succession planning, early years careers programmes (apprenticeships and graduates), implementation of a global HR system and executive coaching. Hope that explains a bit about the role.

I also teach (deliver training) on a wide range of people skills for managers and leaders within my company, such as managing others performance, communication skills, coaching, having challenging conversations and a wide range of employment law and policies.

The examples I gave were just to show that the methods that work for face to face teaching and learning are very different for remote or virtual learning. Everything has to be re-designed and teachers are spending a huge amount of time having to do this, as are learning and development professionals.

The majority of people who aren't involved in teaching and learning have no concept of how long the design work takes and teachers have been overwhelmed with re-design work, marking, phoning and mailing students, marking work and looking after their own children and key workers children.

Or deliberately malicious, given the regular procession on these threads
Always the way:

1. An OP claims to have a genuine question, something like 'but what ARE teachers doing?' or 'I don't understand what teachers do'. Usually at some point in the OP a level of goading is evident such as 'only work 9-3 / don't plan their lessons because it's all from Twinkl / they teach the same things every year/ can't be that hard'.

1. People reply in a mix of good faith and irritation that yet again someone has a beautifully goady thread.

1. Goaders will goad and say 'seee seeeeee look they think they work harder than anyone else... Look at them complaining... I know a teacher who works 9-3 and never works beyond those hours so everyone else must be lying'

@FrippEnos

Teaching is a vocation, how many other people would put 100% into people reaching their full potential in life?

@hashtagbollocks sorry, forgot to say, I work for an engineering company.

Every interaction with a parent or pastoral or behavioural incident has to be logged on the data system. So an incident of Miss can I just tell you....or Flossie hasn't done homework and parent won't agree to a detention, then that is probs another hour minimum of work.

New things get introduced. I want to teach more books with BAME significant characters in (very hard to find - I want modern sassy, girls in stories that are just normal, ie, not trad overt racism/slavery tropes suitable for KS3 and dyslexic readers - the fact there isn't much says it all) so that takes research (enjoyable). I'm also excited about a new scheme of work germinating comparing media representations of A particular novel. Then I've got to come up with how I integrate technology more in my dept.

Then there is marking. When I taught English, each gcse essay could take 20 mins to mark x 25...

Planning is a bit of a generic term given to 'papery shit to do' and includes pointless form filling and responding to some initiative or other.

Some do over plan though. I have one colleague who has taught maths for eleventy billion years. She stays sooo late planning. She is brilliant but plans for her own peace of mind not because she has to - geometry's is geometry, algebra is still the same as ten years ago. So there is a case of some planning for planning sake and then doing 'performance planning' - bit like performance parenting.

I must be unusual then. I've worked in 3 schools in my career and all students had textbooks, at least for GCSE and A-level. Maybe not further down the school (although there were generally class sets of everything, even if they were a bit out of date). One was a state grammar, one was part of an academy chain and one was private.

Well I've just RTFT and wish I hadn't. @TabbyMumz you clearly have no idea about teaching, teaching hours or the requirements of the job.
Absolutely no idea.
You sound really bitter and miserable as well.
I've never heard any teacher say they work harder than anyone else. What I have heard ad infinitum is twats telling me what hours I work, what time I get to school, what time I leave, what I teach, how I teach it ... you probably know how many times I pee as well don't you? (Not as often as I shoud)
Stop being a dick.

Is don't read it as teacher bashing, interesting question that I was never brave enough to ask as my DS 4 years alert did the same lessons, same Egypt projects and same topics in primary, so I was never sure what the planning was actually for.

Lucy yep, you're right. I was thinking life coach type person.
You seen to have a proper grown up job!

@ineedaholidaynow that's why in Ireland the parents buy the books!!

Genuine question. Not being goady.
What do parents like do all all day? Now I don't have children, but I have pretty clear picture of what parenting is about because I read about it online, before you say anything. And I watched my friend's kid few hours, so pretty experienced.
I don't understand the moaning? Where do the hours go? What "mental load and planning?". Like why would you plan bills? You just pay them and that's done by dd, so no time. Or planning a day out? Just go out? Toddlers have recommended sleep 12 hours a day so parents have crapload of time to chill. In fact 12 hours a day. I just think parents are making it sound harder to get sympathy, you know.
Not being goady! I just don't get it.