Let Teachers Work Independently on Professional Development Days…..

I cannot count the number of wasted ours that I have spent in really bad professional development. I know that today many teachers are sitting through professional development today – well planned, maybe useless, and very, very, very boring. I would guess that adds up to tens of thousands of tax payer dollars being spent on days where worker production is at all-time lows. What is worse is it is taking valuable time from our teachers being able to prepare for their students. Teachers need independent time to work. Far too often our profession is required to produce content for professional development days when really the most valuable thing we can have teachers do…is just to work in their classrooms.

In many other professions, people are afforded time to sit down in a cubicle or an office and work. Not so in teaching. Their planning time is not really planning time. It is gobbled up with academic coaches promoting the next best thing or a principal having to do a required meeting or data(data! data! data!) conferences or collaborative whatevers.

Teachers need time to return parent phone calls or initiate communication with a parent. They need to finish paperwork(gobs of it folks…just gobs of it). More importantly, they need time to think, dream, and create. If we want great lessons, then we need to give teachers time to think. Some may say, “Well, that can be done collaboratively.” My answer is flatly, “No.” Some people (many people in fact) just need the noise to settle down. How man times have you hears someone say, “Everybody stop talking. I need to think.” I bet parents say that every, single day. Why is that? Well, sometimes we just need to be still. That is a Biblical principal. We don’t need to hear the building pontificator gobble our minutes. We need time to do things on our own. I would bet that half of adults don’t really like working collaboratively. They don’t need to. I know it is blasphemy to say that, but some people don’t need other people to help them do their jobs. Honestly, I have often found collaborative planning in education to be the safe harbor of really lazy people or people who just aren’t good at their jobs. So, they need someone to bring them along.

What happens when we don’t allow teachers to work alone when they need to? We force teachers to do all of that after school. Grading, communication, actual lesson planning(it ain’t all done in collaboratives, folks), collecting materials for great lessons…all of it after school. I once calculated my over time for a year. It was around 360 hours or roughly two hours per day. That is 45 days extra of work or 9 weeks. Gasp. Want to guess how long teachers get for summer vacation? 10 weeks. The overtime of many teachers is equal to their summer vacation time.

Not paying someone a fair wage is un-Biblical. It is stealing. If you are a board member, a central office leader, an academic coach(or whatever the new catchy name is), or a principal…if you are asking your people to work unpaid overtime, you are participating in the act of stealing. That is one of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shall not steal.” That was a serious enough offense that God commanded Moses to write it on a stone tablet. What man conceals in terms of theft, God sees every bit of it.

stealing: the action or offense of taking another person’s property without permission or legal right and without intending to return it; theft.

When we take someone’s time without paying them for it, we are taking their property without the intent of returning it. We are doing so without their consent and without fair payment after consent.

As we build our professional development schedules, we need to always consider two things. We need to focus on giving teachers time to do their jobs and preserving instructional time. If we are robbing them of time during their work day, we are stealing time from them and their families after we are done paying them. It is unholy not to pay someone fairly for a job. We have a term in the Engish language for forcing someone to work for free. That is called slavery. Another gasp. Are we asking a profession to work for free against their will? I think so. It isn’t that teachers don’t want to teach, but they need to have lives apart the profession. If we don’t, the result will be burnout. The result will be a lack of motivation. The result will be a lack of excellence. The result is that your system will gain a bad reputation. I mean, who can achieve excellence when you don’t even have the time to plan for average?

In closing, if you work for a system which gobbles up your time…leave. The culture which produced that will take decades to change. Do your homework. I have said this before – prospective teachers can learn a lot about a school system by reading reviews about it. If you want to create awesome lessons, then you need to avoid places which emphasize excessive collaboration and data mining of students. These places are time sucks. Even if you have to take less pay, work at a place which values your time and will let you work individually when you need to.

I will close with this Bible verse. I think it sums things up…..

Proverbs 11: 1-3 The LORD detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him. When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.

ProTip: Learn to say, “No,” when you don’t have time after work to complete a task. A great administrator will respect that answer. A bad administrator will resent the answer.

Bonus ProTip: If you are an administrator, try this. Have your teachers write down the amount of individual time that your teachers are allowed to work each day. Have them add it up for the week. Is that enough time for them to do the job you are asking them to do? If it isn’t, you need to ask yourself another question. When exactly do you think that work is being completed? If the answer is after work hours, you are stealing from them.