Picture from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/aug/31/teaching.teachersworkload
I am doing something very pleasant as I write this; I am listening to Andy Vass talking to Argyll’s newly qualified teachers about “sanity in the classroom”. He mentioned a recent study that indicated that teaching is the third most stressful profession after the emergency services and mining/deep sea diving. This prompted me to do an interweb search on the topic and over the last decade it seems that it is reported in study after study as being in the top five most stressful professions. In the Scottish context of looking for more teacher talking and development time, this seems to me to indicate a second way that we can gain some.
I have often observed that our key organisational weakness in schools is that whenever we add a new procedure or task for teachers, we too often fail to remove some now less important task. The danger for us in the post McCrone environment is that we have a number of hours which we know teachers can work contractually and almost no school is fully able to account for all of these. The result of this is that many of our senior figures continue to insist that additional tasks, like professional discussion should be fitted into the “remaining time”. The problem is that this simply doesn’t work. Anyone who works in schools or closely with them can see that regardless of the contractual boilerplate that says we can ask teachers to meet and learn together after the core business is over. The trouble is they are too tired and stressed.
I wish this was different, and in fact I wish I could just tell them to arrange more after hours meetings to form action-learning groups or to enjoy planning interdisciplinary curricula together, but we have been trying to do this for a few years and it isn’t working. Why would we continue to flog this deceased equine specimen? This gives us two ways forward:
1. Reduce teacher holidays and ringfence the reduction as meeting and planning time. Perhaps one week from the teacher’s holiday year would be possible to negotiate?
2. Reduce the teaching hours to free up an hour a week for teacher meeting time. We want young people to become independent learners so perhaps taking one or two hours from the teacher input side of learning and teaching could free up teacher meeting time during the school week. Imagine that the week has two one-hour study periods during which the whole school becomes a study club supervised by half the school staff with libraries and open areas opening their facilities to learner directed study. Half the staff are simultaneously planning and learning for CfE. This could be win-win. The key question is whether young people could learn the same content in 33 hours input as in 35 hours input. I think they could, if our creative timetablers can take on the challenge.