Wednesdays are saving my life right now.
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, I deliver in-person instruction for 335 minutes each day (down from 350 minutes per day pre-Covid, mainly because we had to make room for rotating lunch periods, which increased passing time).
During that 335 minutes of face-to-face time, I also work in a varying amount of time to simultaneously zoom with my students who remained fully remote.
During those 335 minutes, I say I “deliver in-person instruction,” but I’m a big believer that the person doing the work is the person doing the learning, which means that I work hard to shift the cognitive load to my students… getting them doing, talking, reading, writing.
To shift that load requires deliberate planning and preparation.
And shifting that load means students produce work which deserves feedback and guidance.
When people criticize teachers’ complaints about our workload, I wonder if the public envisions the old school university prof standing in front of the class lecturing. Let me tell you, lecturing is easy. I’m at the stage of my career where I could lecture your ear off for a ninety minute block no problem, no prep on my part required…just give me a topic and a time limit. Plus, the students are just sitting and “listening” so they aren’t generating work that needs feedback or assessment. Is this what people picture when they imagine the work of a teacher?
Anyone with any knowledge of teaching and learning knows what research confirms: that sort of marathon direct instruction, the endless lecture and notes method, is wildly unsuccessful for the massive majority of learners… especially teenage learners compelled by law to attend as opposed to university students paying top dollar to get their college’s name on a resume.
Good teaching requires preparation, intentional design, and feedback (which is sadly, the easiest to let fall to the wayside when time is tight). When I’m at my best, the ratio is easily 2:1, two minutes of preparation, assessment, and feedback for every one minute of student contact.
Add to the whole mix collaboration with colleagues, communication with families, and email…so many emails…and the finite resource of time quickly is exhausted.
Which is why Wednesdays are saving me right now, and why our current Wednesday routine is one I’m hoping we can continue into our post-COVID transition.
Right now, Wednesdays are full-remote days for our student body. Students are off-campus (except for small group intervention or scheduled appointments with staff), and teachers have created independent learning experiences that students continue to engage with. The pressure here is to ensure that the “homework” we design is effective and advances learning… and considers the varied non-school environments that our students may be learning from.
But Wednesday, sans structured student instruction, enables us to make home contacts, collaborate with peers on instructional design, provide feedback on student work, and build more responsive lessons.
Yes, these are things we’d be doing anyway. But now, there is time to do that work within my work day.
I’m still up at 4 or 5 am to read student work or fine tune the day’s lessons.
I’m still at school most days well after my “work day” is over, and grabbing moments to lesson plan or respond to emails while I cook dinner or help my own offspring with homework.
But Wednesdays are saving me because, for the first time in my career, I at least feel like the system actually considers what my real work is… and is giving me time to do that work at work.
Would I rather my work be doable within my work day, not overflowing into the early mornings and late evenings? Of course.
Wednesdays are a start. We have all this talk about shaking up our system post-COVID. The quality of those moments we spend in front of kids is the direct result of the quality of those moments we spend planning to be in front of kids.
We know our system needs to change, and the systemic and predicable inequities of our students’ experience prove that. System change isn’t just about policies or trainings or different curriculum. How we structure teacher time, in my opinion, is the highest leverage change we can make to our system. Without that change to the fundamental structure of our schools, all the other efforts will be for naught.
