A teacher’s time can be divided, roughly, into three categories. First, the work done to prepare for the time spent with students; second, the time spent with students; third, the work done as a result of time spent with students.
In the first category are tasks like lesson design, resource creation, curation of existing resources, assessment design, etc.
In the second category, the teacher facilitates learning activities as the students do them, presents content, moderates student presentations, etc.
In the third category, the teacher evaluates student work, analyzing that work to determine which content the students have mastered and which content the students should further practice, etc.
Schools become inefficient and ineffective when teachers are required to spend time on anything which is not one of these three categories. The main culprit in this regard is meetings. Teachers held as captive audiences in faculty meetings are being deprived of the opportunity to do work which would help students.
Other non-productive uses of teacher time include the generation of various reports for administrators and participation in evaluation processes which are so badly designed that the resulting evaluations are meaningless.
Sadly, time spent on administrative busy work, faculty meetings, and poorly-conceived evaluation processes is not only non-productive, but rather counter-productive.
The result is not only lost chances for improved education, but actual degradation of the quality of education.
This is true, too, of many “professional development” — or “inservice training” or “continuing education” — events for teachers. These events are often as ineptly conceptualized as other administrative activities.
To improve the quality of education, schools must examine how teachers are required to spend their finite and valuable time. Any use of time which isn’t preparing for contact with students, which isn’t actual contact time with students, or which isn’t used after the contact time with students to process what happened during that time — any such use of time is actively harming the quality of education by forcing teachers to waste a limited and precious resource.
