The recent round of sub branch meetings provided an opportunity for dozens of conversations with members about their work and what they see as the ever increasing demands on them by their principals (often driven by their employers), by school systems, by regulatory authorities, by parents and school communities and by government policy.
One discussion was so detailed I asked members to write a few things down for me. What follows is not a compilation of all the conversations I had but rather the edited text of the response from members in a single primary school.
What is clear is that this work would easily require more hours per day than face to face teaching.
This is some of what they do outside of face to face teaching, and although they attempted to indicate an average time per week for each activity, I’ve excluded those details:
• planning our work for the following day
• marking, annotating and assessing work for the 30 students times seven subjects per day
• collaborating with grade partner for the above
• writing Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for each KLA for each lesson for each day
• meeting with parents and other professionals, including staff meetings, briefings, school to school meetings, case management meetings
• programing, rewriting and reinventing new programs each term for each KLA (seven hours times seven subjects = 49 hours per term, which equates to one hour per day). This does not include daily dating, annotating and evaluation of programs
• personalised plans – these are individual learning programs for students with needs which, on average, take about two hours per student to create or update for anywhere between 10 and 20 students per grade and also includes differentiated and scaffolded work tasks for each KLA each day, and
• supporting external professionals such as occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychologists and paediatricians providing student data, written reports and completing compulsory paperwork as well as preparing paperwork for case management and required student data collection.