What do teachers do that you just don't know about?

I normally keep this Blog as my medium for sharing my teaching practice, but today I'm going a bit industrial on it, because I love my profession - but enough is enough.

You may have seen some media about teachers, primary and intermediate teachers specifically, being unhappy with the Collective Agreement offer made by the Ministry of Education after the recent negotiations.

It was an insult.  And it was especially insulting to the most experienced teachers like me, because I'm worth more that a 2.1-2.3% increase per year over the next three years and does not compensate for the very poor increases under the previous National led government.  Teachers like me are the ones mentoring the younger teachers and holding things together.  

As a result teachers have voted to strike after years of being undervalued.

When this announcement was made on the evening of Tuesday 3rd of July, naturally media covered it.  And then the comments flow through.

It's kind of an unwritten rule now to not read the comments, especially the Stuff comments.  But some people (not me, for once I showed restraint) couldn't help themselves. 

One in particular was the wonderful lady behind the fabulous teacher resource maker, Green Grubs.  She regrettably dived into the cesspool that is the Stuff comments and thankfully made it out again.

This is what she has to say on Facebook on Wednesday July 4th:

Urgh - I made the mistake of reading some comments on social media this morning in regards to our amazing kiwi teachers planning strike action, and I'm more than a little alarmed at how out of touch some people seem to be!!  Maybe these commenters no longer have kids at school?  Or maybe they're reflecting on their own schooling experiences from years ago?  Either way, times have changed & what is now expected from teachers is not compatible with a healthy work/life balance. I've got SO much respect for our fulltime teachers also juggling family and life - a whole lot would need to change before I'd consider going back to work fulltime with a young family. So... if you're feeling out of touch with what's going on, find a teacher and talk to them about the issues they're dealing with daily! Kua tae te wā - it's time (for change) and you've got my full support 

She also posted some questions in photos on her Facebook post.  I'm gonna answer these in regards to myself.

I reckon on a conservative week I put in 50 hours, but on a busy week it ranges between 55-60 hours.  Currently my hours at school are curtailed by it getting dark so early... So that means taking more work home with me.  But I usually try to put in 2.5-3 hours after school at school and if I leave earlier than 5:00pm or 5:30pm, it is so I can get to either Warehouse Stationery, David's Emporium, a $2 Shop or the Warehouse to buy stuff for my class.  

I sometimes do work before I go to school, and this is my compromise for not being the earliest teacher to school.... because I'm often the last teacher to go home as I get more done in the afternoon than the morning.  I often take home marking in the evening or spend it making resources.  This can range from an hour to five hours in the evening.  It's not unusual for me to be up until 2 or 3:00am cutting out the activity for art the next day.  At the weekend I will often go into school and spend several hours there sorting out the reading and homework.  If I don't, I will be at home doing other activities for school.  

In the school holidays I will do most of my planning at home.  That will take about 6-8 hours.  I will make resources.  I will spend 1-2 days in my class making it ready.  I will shop some more for my class.  I often attend conferences and courses.  In the April term break I went to the Pasifika Fono.  Most September/October term breaks I attend the NZEI annual conference and ULearn.

I'm constantly reading and finding new ideas for what I can do in my class and with my students and building my knowledge as a teacher.  C.  O.  N.  S.  T.  A.  N.  T.  L.  Y.

Apart from teaching my class, there is duty.  I have, currently, one morning tea duty, three half lunch duties and one road crossing duty.  Everyone supervises the children eating morning tea and lunch in their own classes, so that's an extra.  It means that if I'm on duty at lunch time I have 22.5 minutes to eat my lunch.  Legally you are supposed to get a 30 minute lunch break under employment law, but teachers simply don't get it.  Often your lunch eating time also doubles as a meeting time or dealing with a hurt student or a disruptive student.

Once upon a time I used to coach netball and rugby teams.... but quite frankly, I'm far too busy and exhausted to do that now.

I lead writing within the school.  I am responsible for supporting other teachers and helping them to improve how they teach writing to enable students to improve their achievement in writing.  I monitor the assessment data.

Our school was doing a staff and a team meeting each week, but after my principal attended the Rural Teaching Principals' Conference in May where they had a presentation on stress and workload experienced by principals and teachers, he came back and asked us what we could cut out of our workload.  We brainstormed many ideas and have put many into action.  Meetings was one such target.  So now our staff meetings are one week and the team meetings are the other week.  They start at 3:30pm and finish at 4:30pm (as several staff have preschool children).

Meetings with other professionals either happen after school or in my "lunchtime".  I had an IEP meeting last year take up 1/3 of my CRT day last year... not really an ideal use of Classroom Release Time in my opinion.

In term one we had two nights of Parent-Teacher interviews until 8:00pm, a Meet the Teacher BBQ until 8:00pm and a Gala which I left when it was well and truly dark after 9:00pm.  For our teachers those were 13-14+ hour days during and at the end of a very long, stinking hot busy week. 

During term two, my team had two overnight trips between our five classes.  My class and another spent the Tuesday night at the Hamilton Observatory and the next day at Hamilton Zoo, and our other three junior classes did the overnighter on the Thursday night spending the Friday at the Zoo.  You are constantly on high alert.

This term we have two more nights until 8:00pm of Parent-Teacher interviews in Week 2 (a pure joy on a mid-winter night - not) and our Production in Week 4 on a Friday night.  Yes, that will be my third Friday night this year at a school event.  😕

I spend far too much money on classroom resources and things for my students.  And my principal would be alarmed to read what I've already spent this year on making sure my classroom programme is invigorating and the students get learning opportunities.

What do I spend it on: laminating pouches, classroom storage, books, pens, art supplies, fancy paper, glue sticks (the ones on the school office for teachers are crappy), lollipops (homework bribery), toys, games...

At The Warehouse, the checkout chick or dude often ask if I'd like to make a donation to their charity of the month.  I always point out the shopping just done and explain that is my donation (yet again) to the public education system.

No.  We are trying to provide the support our students need, but access to RTLBs, RTLits and Speech Language Therapists is limited by the fact that there are so many kids in need and these roles are capped by an outdated population based methodology which has yet to change.  Under the National led government, how these people operated and the needs of the child were changed that meant less students were able to be picked up and the focus was on meeting National Standards rather than the needs of the child.  

Also property modifications required for an ORS funded student are yet to even start, despite him starting school in October last year.  The hold up appears to be in the MOE itself.

I am about to initiate my sixth reading group to met the needs of the students who are moving.  My reading groups cover these reading levels: Magenta, Yellow, Blue, Green, Turquoise and a combined Purple/Curriculum Level 2 group.

I have three maths groups, but even these cover multiple levels and abilities within them, and I teach writing as a whole class and then pull out individuals and groups I want to focus on.  Some of these students are independent writers that need to learn how to use paragraphs and speech marks properly... others are yet to write a sentence independently with a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end.

The most rewarding part of my job is when I sit for a moment and soak in all the students' hard work displayed around the room and the hugs I get from children.  I'm also super stoked when they click onto a new concept or do a fabulous piece of work.

The most challenging parts of my job are:

• Being fully planned and organised each day 
• Getting through everything I have planned each day
• Catching up absent students on work they have missed
• The paperwork - marking, recording data, IEPs 
• Fitting all the assessment into two CRT days - it's just not enough
• Difficult behaviours by students

Another teacher on NZ Teachers put up this post after also falling into the rabbit hole that is the Stuff comments:

Dear Colleagues,

After foolishly reading Stuff comments last night and then spending half an hour ranting to my very patient husband I have come to the realisation the people really don't get what we do. And so I think we need more than just a strike. What we need is to show people what our reality is like.

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. So my idea/challenge to you, colleagues, is to harness the power of social media.

If every single teacher in the country took at least one photo a day, depicting an aspect of the job; the clock showing arrival/leaving time, the field or court where you are coaching those kids, the making of sandwiches, the phone you spent x hours on about a child ... then perhaps people would start to understand our realities.

Obviously, we need to protect our student's privacy and to make sure we are within our school's policies, but if all of us did this; principals, teachers, teacher aides, support staff ... perhaps the message would gain some momentum.

If each one of us does this between now and our strike then maybe, just maybe our nation and nation's media would have a better understanding. So what do you say teachers of New Zealand, are you with me? #itstimetounderstand #itstime #letsdothis

So here's what I did on the last Wednesday of term...

  

  

  

  

   

   

   

And that is fairly typical of a day in my school life.

It is now the term break, or as families call it, the school holidays.  This time is not a holiday for me.  It is non-contact time.  Some call it mandatory sick leave, because most teachers are absolutely exhausted and sick as a dog by the last day of term (that was me at the end of term one).  There are some days where I take time out, but really, it's a time when I reset in the classroom and do all the things I don't have time for during the term, including sleep ins, and activities such as:

• WOF and service for my car
• WOF and service for my body (doctor and dentist)
• I catch up with friends and whanau who think I've fallen off the face of the earth
• I make a heck of a lot of soup to go in the freezer for my school lunches
• I do my planning
• I sort out my classroom
• I do as much of my photocopying as I can and sort it into weekly folders
• a big clean up of my home

So the next time you hear some know-it-all saying teachers fingerpaint from 9:00am-3:00pm and have twelve weeks of holidays a year, please feel free to share this post with them.

I'd also like to make it abundantly clear that I understand the current coalition government has a limited amount of funding for our settlement... but a three year term and those piddly proposed increases just do not cut the mustard.  I too have bills to pay... 

Dr Adam Lefstein - Keynote 2 - ULearn14 - Teacher professional discourse and learning: what we talk about when we talk about our practice

The second key of ULearn14 note was presented by Dr Adam Lefstein from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.  This is his bio from the ULearn site:

Adam Lefstein is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where he conducts research and teaches about pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning and educational change. He’s particularly interested in the intersection between research and professional practice, and how to conduct research that is meaningful, rigorous and helpful for educators.

His recently published book, Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning through Dialogue (with Julia Snell, published by Routledge), investigates the possibilities, challenges and dilemmas of dialogic teaching and learning, and offers practical tools for using discussion of video-recordings of classroom practice to hone teacher professional judgment.
Previously, Lefstein worked as a teacher and facilitator of teacher learning at the Branco Weiss Institute in Jerusalem, where he also directed the Community of Thinking programme.

You can find out more about Dr Lefstein's book at http://dialogicpedagogy.com/ and follow him on Twitter at @ALefstein as of today.  Click here for the collaborative document from the Keynote.

Below is the Storify of the tweets I and others tweeted during Dr Lefstein's Keynote presentation. 

Sadly Storify has deleted itself from the Social Media landscape and none of my Storifies exist anymore.  😭😭😭😭

A day later (and then several weeks later) I have had a chance to reflect on what we heard from Dr Lefstein yesterday.  Teachers tend to talk a lot.  We talk all day to students, we talk to the parents who we encounter in our day and we talk to our colleagues in meetings, in passing, at lunchtime.  But how often are our conversations with our colleagues of a quality that the participants come away with something they know will improve their practice?

In 2006 I was lucky enough to do the Middle Leadership Course at the Leadership Centre at the University of Waikato.  Murray Fletcher was the facilitator of the course and one of the centre points was active listening.  This keynote gave me pause to go back and reflect on what I learnt in this course and to synthesise what I know already with what I heard yesterday.

I was particularly taken by the comparison of teacher professional discourse being compared with a doctor's medical round.  When doctors do their rounds they have each other to discuss the patient's condition with.  They may consult with the nurses who have a more direct care of the patient.  They toss ideas around and come up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan. 

Teachers do do this as well, but not usually as they teach.  It usually happens in the staff room at lunch time or in a meeting to create and IEP.  Because the nature of teaching is generally one teacher in a single cell room with many children, there generally is no other adult for the teacher to confer and work with to solve those problems or take a different tack with teaching the moment that it happens.  Our conversations tend to be reactionary, after the fact, rather than in the moment.

In regards to Rule 1: Don't talk about pedagogical problems, I agree that teachers as a rule are not used to people watching them regularly, to have people come into their classrooms and talk the practice of teaching as the teacher is teaching.  However, I believe that most teachers are pretty good at talking pedagogy, particularly if something is not right - however this doesn't seem to happen in the class... it's always and after thing and mostly focused on solving an issue rather than analysing and celebrating what works and then exploring the possibility of changing that up.  Often our pedagogical conversations are based on putting out a fire rather than preventing the fire.

Teaching is an aspirational vocation.  We all have great plans at being the best teacher we can be, having the most amazing programmes, engaging children in meaningful and inspiring learning.  But we soon realise that we can't juggle all the balls at the same time, if one thing is going well it may be to the expense of another, and there is always a bit more that we can do as teachers.

Which brings me to Rule 2: Don't mind the gap between teaching aspirations and classroom realities.  There will always be the gap between what we what to provide and achieve with our learners compared to what really happens, but even though we may never consistently achieve to meet the standards we (or others) set ourselves as teachers, we should never give up or lessen our expectations.  We need to continue to challenge ourselves and exceed our previous best to keep the passion alive and extend ourselves.  We need to be clear what our leaders expect of us and our leaders need to know what we expect of ourselves as well, which means discussing and planning your aspirations with your team or senior management.

Rule 3: Dichotomize is about the opposing forces in our classroom, in our teaching, in our own perceptions and realities which are facing off each day as we teach.  This has always happened, and always will.  But good discussion with a trusted colleague will help you to identify those which are really hurting your teaching and holding back students from achieving and will enable you to come away with a bag of tricks to try to change the situation.

Rule 4: Trust your own unique experience - this is important that our experiences shape us as teachers, but we also need to be open to other experiences by our colleagues, because they may spark and idea or a system we can make our own for the betterment of our own teaching and the learning of the students.

Rule 5: No precise professional language is where Dr Lefstein and I have a fundamental difference of opinion.  I find that teaching is littered with teaching language and phrases that people who are not teachers do not understand.  I often find myself translating acronyms like RTLB, explaining what synthesising in reading is, or a number of other things as parents and friends look at me with glazed eyes.  We have plenty of technical teacher talk.

Rule 6: Hyper-criticise Dr Lefstein showed part of a video of Sir Tony Robinson on a show called The Teaching Challenge and this is the blurb for the video:
Sir Tony Robinson, presenter of Time Team and Blackadder, hated school, but has returned to take on a history class at Shireland Language College in Smethwick, Birmingham.
His challenge is to teach a lesson on the worst jobs in history relating to the evolution of public health and hygiene since 1300. He faces not only the pupils, but also the school's formidable head of history, Colin Vigar, who offers a robust critique of Tony's performance. (2005)
And Tony was rigorously critiqued by Colin.  But is a rigorous critique helpful to a teacher receiving feedback?  Personally I don't think so, and neither did the room, nor Dr Lefstein's research.  Feedback needs to be structured, specific and constructive.

Rule 7  - seems to have disappeared during the keynote so we moved on to the next rule.

Rule 8: Focus on what's missing is when the discussion focuses on what did not happen rather than on what did happen.  That can be very down heartening to the teacher who is being observed when they are only told what they haven't done and should have done instead rather than building on what was achieved.

So what did I come away with from this keynote?

• Professionally discussing our teaching practice is important to helping me be a better teacher.
• The conversation needs to focus on what actually is happening.
• We shouldn't ignore our own experiences, but should be open to the experiences of others too.
• Feedback needs to be structures, specific and constructive - the aim is to build up the teacher to go forward, not tear the teacher down.
• It would be beneficial to have discussions with another professional as event occur, although in teaching this tends to be hard as we are a single teacher in a single room with a class most of the time.
• We should talk about the challenges we face and not be staunch.

World Teachers' Day - Why I am a teacher.

Today is World Teachers' Day.  Normally I used this blog as my reflection of what I do in the classroom.  But today I would like to reflect on teaching as a profession and why I choose to be a teacher and continue to choose to be a teacher despite the GERM infecting our quality public education system.

The launch of World Teachers' Day in Gisborne 5th October 2013.

The launch of a year of promoting teaching as a profession and quality public education (that hasn't been affected by GERM) happened this morning on the beach in Gisborne, on the east coast of the North Island in New Zealand, with launches to happen, as October 5th dawns around the world, in Paris and New York as well.

A teacher friend yesterday posted on Facebook to have a Happy Teachers' Day (Hallmark: cue new card/money making opportunity) and try not to mark anything.

That got me thinking, because between two conferences and car maintenance and a planning day with my fellow staff members, I don't have many opportunities to either relax and recharge or get organised in my class during this term break for the upcoming term four.  So instead of marking or photocopying or whatever, I am choosing to blog about why I am a teacher.

I decided to become a teacher when I was about 15 or 16.  Before that, in my very formative years, I had ideas of being Wonder Woman, a doctor or a fireman (gender issues weren't high in my thoughts then), or even the fifth member of ABBA!!!  Later on as I left primary school and was making my subject choices for high school, being a lawyer was my goal.  Thankfully I changed my mind from that, decided that being a teacher was a much better option, and here follows the list of why:

• I like children.  They are usually a lot of fun to hang out with.  They are funny and get pleasure out of the most unexpected things.
• I never wanted to fully grow up.  I reckon the best teachers are the ones that still have something childlike about them.  We don't all have the same childlike 'thing' as each other, because we are all individuals after all, and if we all have different childlike qualities it gives each teacher that 'thing' that will connect with the individual children we teach who need that 'thing'.
• I love learning.  Teachers don't know everything - yet.  Sometimes we decide to teach a unit we know stuff all about, so it sends us off on our own learning, doing research.  Sometimes we learn beside the children, discover new things as they are discovering.  Even with units that I have done for years, like my Anzac Day unit, I learn something new each and every year.
• I love being creative.  It's more that doing things like art or music or dance or drama.  You can be creative with how you display things in the class.  You can be creative with the activities the children do before, during and after their reading.  You can be creative with ICT.  You can even be creative in mathematics!!  Listening to Prof Yong Zhao this week reinforced my belief that teachers are creative people.
• I love seeing the children get that "a-ha" moment and to celebrate their progress.  For most children they make good, steady progress and that gives me a great sense of achievement.  For some others a switch is flicked because things finally click.  Love it.
• I love introducing ICT into the classroom and seeing how the children take it on board as a learning tool and a way to create new things.
  
• I love seeing how the children grow and develop and change.  I'm lucky enough to still be in contact with some previous students or to bump into them when I am out and about and I am in awe of what they have done.  Some have gone to the USA on scholarships for tennis, golf and volleyball.  One has become a radio DJ (apt, as he talked an awful lot).  Some have followed their parents into farming.  Some have become parents.  Some are at university or tech.  Some have represented their province in a variety of sports or joined the National Secondary School Band.  If they have made it through to adulthood in one piece I am extremely proud of them, whatever they have done or where ever they are - once a kid in my class, always one of my kids.
• I love meeting with other teachers and sharing about what amazing things our children have done, said, learned or created; talking about the challenging children and sharing ideas on how to help them; sharing about the great learning we have, are or are about to do.  Then there is are also the professional, theoretical and industrial discussions we have as well.

So on World Teachers' Day, I want you as a teacher to reflect on why you are a teacher; and if you aren't a teacher, please reflect on your favourite teachers and why they were your favourite teachers.

You know, when I come to think about it, some days being a teacher is like being like Wonder Woman.