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.

All correct so far. Every class is different and has different needs. My current cohort need 5 way differentiation whereas last year there was only need for 3. I once worked out that planning and marking a one hour lesson also takes an hour on average. Multiply that by 5 lessons a day and that makes up your 25 hours difference.

A long time ago, there were 'unit plans' for English and Numeracy. It suggested what to do on Unit 1, day 2 - and timed down to the minute.

Children don't learn uniformly. Not in a week. It's also good to make links. The curriculum keeps changing.

Planning and marking is time consuming and stressful. Some heads can help with this and others can make it far worse.

There have been lots of threads before where teachers have talked through a typical day.

Even if the curriculum stayed the same every year (and it never does), management would still want to try out a 'new' (although nothing is ever really new in teaching - just re-spun and reintroduced) way of teaching.

In my 10 years it has been:

Learning styles, growth mindset, child-lead learning, mantle of the expert style learning, Singapore-inspired maths, the old literacy and numeracy hours...it goes on..

And suddenly your planning for the three part lesson you prepared last year doesn't have the right balance. It's all mini plenaries and active learning this year - so it doesn't fit anymore.

And that is without the fact that most teachers (in Primary in particular - and especially under the recent new Ofsted framework) have management responsibilities for subjects. They have to arrange observations and feedback for other teachers, order and provide training on resources, monitor subject learning school wide...etc.

Then the last school I taught in did research projects every year. Some were even published.

It all eats time.

Teaching is the easy bit.

In my [primary] school, teachers are moved around every year or so, so definitely not the same!

SLT will keep you in your general proffered age range and don’t change Y6 for obvious reasons but you’re required to teach either Nursery/Rec/Y1 or Y1/Y2/Y3 or Y3/Y4/Y5. So could teach nursery for 2 years and then Y1 and then reception and then back to nursery.

Is it teacher bashing to politely ask about a job you don't do and don't know about? . I used to teach primary OP. It wildly varied. Some years there was a great deal of planning as the curriculum changes in some respects but also a lot of the work for me personally was wanting to enrich the children, look for and provide better quality and more engaging work elements or worksheets or activities to supplement the curriculum. You can spend hours finding the right stuff and setting it up, most of it is done in your own time and there is no end to how long that takes if you want to do down the rabbit hole. In the interest of balance upu can equally put in no effort if you are short of time on a day, a quick google provides printable classroom resources and I don't know any teachers who haven't frequently resorted to that.

Add on to that spilled over marking, school reports, tidying and classroom planning, chatting to parents etc.

When I taught a split year group however I did almost no planning. My colleague had been teaching the same year group for years and so had her own vast resources that she was very on top of and was insistent I simply use hers so we were in parallel. Frustrating and cloying but I did almost no overtime.

My sister still teaches and she is obviously back at work now and complaining of how boring it is, she is home by 3pm and there ow, apparently very little to do. She also did 1-2 hours a day of marking on lockdown and nothing else (from her own mouth). Lots of teachers however were run ragged. People are different, schools are different, headteachers are different and expect different things, peoples work ethic and love of their job is different - the same as any other job.

*preferred!

What HavelockVetinari said is bang on.
It does get less planning as you have more ideas built up and templates from previous years but generally other than the odd year where you are in the same year group and nothing changes in the curriculum (rare but very occasionally does happen) then there is lots to update.
In some subjects you can reuse things but teaching is a professional job and you follow research and keep up to date with current best practice so have to update or redo things. If I was doing the same lessons my class did 6 years ago I would be an appalling teacher as what we knew as best practice then was different to what we know now and you have to adapt.
Different class needs etc. too.
And as you get more experienced, you are often then leading subjects or areas and have more workload from that.

Hi I'm a secondary school teacher.

Everything needs to be adapted to the class and the individuals in it.

Sometimes whole schemes need to be re-written to react to weaknesses identified in exams.

Even when the lessons are all there ready to use, you will have marked a set of books which will identify that you can't move on with this class yet to the next lesson as they haven't, for example, grasped the effect of Shakespeares use of natural imagery to display the importance of kingship in Macbeth (except those 3 kids who grasped it really well so you are going to introduce a bit of feminist critical theory with them to challenge them further - but also one of them still can't use semi colons so they should do an activity on that first)

Basically, you aren't just standing at the front reading off the same PowerPoint every year, you are teaching 30 unique individuals at a time.

Not a teacher, but I present two or three times a week in my job, on similar topics each time. But each presentation still needs hours of prep, because each audience I present to is different, in size, knowledge or perspective, and the wider context (e.g. news cycle) will have changed since the last presentation.

It all has to be tailored to the specific audience. Same for teaching. If you aren't doing that in any job that requires communication, you won't be doing an effective job.

Maybe you could volunteer to shadow a teacher next term. Some trainees do this and it does give non teachers an insight? Could be helpful for you
My last trainee was surprised when she realised I had to...

1. Run an after school revision class once after school until 5.
2. Meetings every Monday until 5
3. Phone a parent and was on the phone for 45 minutes
4. Staff the dept detention after school until 4.30 each week
5. Sit with the technician and work out orders for resources for an hour after school
6. Drive to a school 15 minutes away to borrow some resources we were borrowing off them

So no time for planning or marking whilst doing those tasks.

She then asked if we could do some paired marking over lunch, I agreed, then a knock at the door 'Miss can I please talk to you'... one upset student took precedent! Kids eh!?

When DH started teaching nearly 15 years ago he spent hours planning lessons. HOURS. This lessened over time, until he got to the point where he could walk into any lesson and teach pretty much off the top of his head. His planning consisted of bullet points in his planner for the different year groups, plus some work at the beginning of term if there was a new scheme of work or exam board change.

However, all that time that he used to spend planning, he now has other senior management and pastoral responsibilities. So the number of hours in the day taken up with work was the same.

When lockdown came and he had to switch to teaching fully remotely, he had to basically throw out 15 years of teaching and planning and redo everything from scratch for various reasons I don't fully understand but he hasn't had time to explain. I just know that he can no longer just turn up to an online lesson and teach, he needs to plan a completely different way of delivering the curriculum. His school also switched from 40 min to 1 hour lessons, but fewer of them which I know had a lot to do with it.

I was a teacher for a long time before making the jump into another sector, albeit education-related. You could not pay me enough money to go back, or indeed drag me back kicking and screaming, for all the reasons mentioned here. Most of my primary colleagues worked 50-60 hrs a week - unless you love it, the job is a horror show.

It's a lot of planning, but as has been highlighted by PPs, it's kind of necessary. There's not much you can do to change it. Best bet would be to pay teachers more to reflect the long hours they work and the importance of their job, but the powers-that-be (and the voters who put them there) obviously care more about big business than education.

Marking takes ages. 10 minutes a child not a lot, but would mean six an hour so a class of 30 is five hours' work. And you have to keep doing it.

As dc are only in school for 35 hours that's a hell of a lot of planning and marking.
Quite.

One class of 32 GCSE students write me an essay. Each essay is approximately 2-3 A4 sides. Each essay is read, marked against the objectives, positive feedback is added and some targets for improvement. It's hardly a quick task. How much time do you propose is allocated per child to do this?

Then add in several other classes

'I'm not teacher bashing but...' Yeah. Right.
This is 100% one of these threads where an OP claims they don't understand, throws a grenade, waits for teachers to respond and then the OP and the usual teacher bashing posters show up saying 'see see teachers think they work harder than anyone else... Other people work hard too'

By page 5 someone will have had a go at the holidays too.

2/10

I used to teach secondary English. In my last year I had two top set Y11s so that’s 64 children. They wrote an essay every week - I was a very fast marker but just to read 64 different essays as you can imagine took quite a while - then writing comments and targets on each when that was required. At least two hours of meetings every week. Ringing home to speak to parents about various issues. Staying on top of emails.

I reused and shared planning all the time but you always have to tweak it for each class - you can’t just use templates as they are. I got a lot better at winging it and differentiating on the spot of course but yes, the work outside the classroom is at least equivalent in time to the hours spent in there.

I work in the SEND department of a large secondary school - 1,800+ students on roll with @280 of them being on the SEND register. I also arrange exam dispensation. I rely on teachers providing feedback for reviews plus providing evidence of any support they have provided that will help with applying for exam dispensation. This all takes time out of a teachers day.

It's really hard to explain what goes into a single lesson. But remember that every worksheet, every image on the screen has to be researched for, created, found and put into IT form/printed by the teacher. Every individual target for children of multiple abilities has to be checked and factored in to the lesson. The plan itself has to be put into a particular format for school records (senior management and OFSTED check them) and after that lesson has taken place, the children's work or responses have to be assessed, and that again has to be written up.
Oh, and of course the claim has to be set up for that lesson and cleared away afterwards.

Profile and dynamic of class are different. You can’t deliver a top set lesson to SEND kids (sometimes you can) so you need to adapt. You’re unlikely to have full continuation of classes also, so different kids annually, plus if you haven’t taught the new GCSE/A level, you’d need to update/totally change themes. Differentiation is key, as is taking into account prior achievement/learning.

Claim= classroom

I used to teach 3 year 9 classes in one day. One group was bright, so I could do the basics and then give them extension work. The middle set got the same but with the extension work tweaked. The lower ability group got the basics, and if one our of the thirty kids wanted some extension work, that week was a win.

You have a mix of differing abilities, willingness to learn, ways of learning, that are not uniform across each group. I taught one year 7 mixed ability tutor group where it ranged from a child that couldn't read and ran out of the classroom shrieking if you tried to get her to do anything she didn't want; to a lass who could do Year 10 work with ease. Try tacking that without adequate planning.

Well, yes, and outside of 22 hours teaching and however much planning and marking that entails (which varies for all the reasons up thread), there's also: whole school meetings, dept meetings, pastoral briefings, positive phone calls home, negative phone calls home, report writing or data drops x (up to) 7 Yr groups x 6 times a year, detention supervision, chasing up detention non-attendees, extra reports/feedback for SEND students, safeguarding referrals, recording behaviour incidents on mgmt system, 2.5 hours registration activities a week, running after school clubs, running lunchtime clubs, photocopying, writing praise postcards, finance admin/admin for orders, trip admin (it can take a a week's worth of hours just to put together one trip - but spread over several weeks, obviously), subject CPD, pedagogy CPD, safeguarding training, Prevent training, medical training. That list is obviously not exhaustive.

So you can see how 24.5 hrs in the classroom (22 teaching plus 2.5 tutor time) can easily become 55-60 total! That's without being a Head of Dept or Year group (who can lose just a few hours teaching time to pick up hours extra work).

Because we have to tailor what we are teaching to the abilities and needs of each class to make it accessible to all students

I imagine that if they don't plan then lessons will be tired/boring/not on current national curriculum.

I think it's the unseen hours that must be the most draining for teachers.

Why do people constantly question the role of teachers?

I have never, ever seen a thread 'why do accountants / barristers / taxidermists do / not do xyz' Yet with teachers, it's like they are public property. More so right now. Which makes it even more fucking shit.

I'm not a teacher, but I do always ask people how they would like it if it was themselves and their professions being questioned and undermined all the goddamn time.