by Elaine Gallagher
To directors and coordinators: (teachers, too, can read this)
In planning school schedules, we forget to allow enough time so teachers at the same grade levels can be free at the same time, for talking and sharing ideas together. It is very important that at least 60 minutes, once a week, teachers have non-teaching time built into their schedules for collaborative time.
An IDEAL teaching schedule would have an hour a day, 4 days a week, for teacher planning/correcting time, plus an hour of collaborative time with other teachers of the same grade. These times are in addition to a duty-free lunch period.
Your TEACHERS are your strongest asset, and make the difference between an average school, and an excellent school! So give teachers the professional respect and time they need.
No teacher should have to bring work home from school! If part of the job is planning and assessing students, then time in the work day should be scheduled to complete those tasks.
Why Educators Should Be Given Time to Collaborate
Lew Gerstner, the former chairman of IBM, was asked if he felt the key to improving USA schools was simply extending the time teachers and students spend in the classroom–more time on-task, longer school days, longer school years.
Gerstner pointed out that the United States has created a system that impacts students for 13 years (K-12), yet approximately one out of every four students (25%) who enters the system fails to complete it…that is, they drop out.
Furthermore, many of those who do complete 12th grade are incapable of doing what the system was designed to ensure they could do: get a job and do well at it.
Gerstner insisted that if IBM found that one of every four of its computers failed to reach the end of the assembly line, and many of those which did could not do what the computer was designed to do, IBM would NOT solve the problem by running the assembly line more hours in the day or more days in the year.
They would have people sit down together and determine more effective ways to achieve the intended objective.