Teaching is an incredibly difficult profession. Even with summers off, occasional snow days, and extended vacations around holidays, it’s an exhausting job that, if done well, requires substantial work. Especially since the COVID-19 school shutdowns, this fact has been obvious to nearly everybody. When I first committed to teaching middle school, I knew I was signing up for at least one full year of challenging, frustrating work that would often require late nights and work-filled weekends. That proved to be truer than I could have known.
Everyone knows that teaching requires a lot of work. But what’s less apparent is what teachers actually do. At first blush, it seems obvious. After all, the work teachers do is quite visible. They stand in front of a classroom and teach their students, which in itself is work. Other obvious aspects of teachers’ work include their lesson planning and grading. Simple deductive reasoning suggests these discrete buckets of teacher work: If a teacher teaches, he has to teach something, and he can only teach that thing if he has planned it out. Similarly, a teacher must conclude whether what he is doing is having the intended effect, which suggests that he must review students’ work and grade it against a rubric. One can be forgiven, then, if one assumes that teaching involves the action that one observes (that’s the actual teaching part of the job), as well as the things that one infers from those observations. In other words: Teaching, viewed logically, consists of three things: delivering instruction, preparing for the delivery of instruction, and assessing the results of that delivery.
But if you’ve been reading my newsletter for long enough—or if you’ve ever talked to a teacher before—you know that those deductions are far too simplistic. In fact, teaching requires far more than just three separate but related actions. One of them is classroom management. That’s teacher-speak for controlling one’s students and ensuring that some learning can be achieved. Like I’ve written before, that’s far easier said than done. I suspect that most people—including most people who go into teaching—are not inherently confrontational (as I am not). But if you think you can manage the behaviors in your classroom without sometimes seeking confrontation, you’re living in a fantasy world. A teacher’s behavior management will be utterly ineffective without intense planning in the weeks and months leading up to the first time her students enter her classroom. Moreover, in order to maintain some semblance of order in her classroom, she’ll need to have a laser-like focus on being consistent. Without consistency, which is exhausting work, even the best-laid plans of teachers will go up in smoke.
Another source of work that teachers must perform is parent communication. This goes hand-in-hand with classroom management. In my experience, the best asset to have on a teacher’s side is a cooperative parent of an unruly child. In contrast, the biggest thorn in a teacher’s side (besides the child himself) is an obstreperous or apathetic parent. In addition, the academic work of teaching suffers without good parent-teacher communication. If a student is not performing well on the work assigned by the teacher, it’s far better to alert the parent early on so that the final grade is not a shock. Plus, if a mom has any sway over her child—a tall order for middle schoolers—she might convince her child to pay more attention in class, which makes the job of actually delivering instruction a lot easier. So parent communication is key to both behavior management and instruction. As such, good teachers spend a lot of time per week emailing, calling, or even texting parents. One mentor of mine suggested picking one day per week and making all of your phone calls and sending your emails that day, which often means staying after school until after 5 p.m. Other mentors suggested sprinkling communication throughout the day. Either way, parent communication requires a lot of time.
Still, that’s not all. On top of their teaching, behavior management, and parent communication duties, teachers also have to pitch in to help the actual functioning of the school. For some teachers in my school, this meant monitoring the hallways when they did not have classes. For others (including me), this meant babysitting kids at lunch and at the bus stop after school. And everyone had to attend professional development sessions every other week or so after school. (Of course, not all schools do this the same way.) When I taught, those types of duties added on five or six hours of work per week.
But what I really wanted to get into in this newsletter is the part of the job that nobody enjoys doing. It’s also the part of the job that takes up far more time than it’s really worth. I’m referring to paperwork.
When I first began teaching, I felt almost blindsided by the amount of paperwork that I had to do. Of course, in our digital age, “paperwork” is a bit of a misnomer, since everything happens on computers these days. Regardless, I spent hours each week submitting to this sort of administrative drudgery. Lots of it made sense on the surface. For instance, one of the tasks that we had to perform was logging behavioral incidents in our school information system. This meant that every time a kid flipped me off, skipped my class, threw a punch, or consistently refused to follow my explicit instructions, I had to “log” that incident in the computer. If this was a particularly poorly behaved student, over time his records would prove this, and we could use this documentation as evidence that we could present to parents who refused to believe that their angels could do anything wrong.
On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with this. And in our litigious society, it works as a cover-your-ass measure against lawsuits brought by difficult parents of difficult children. When hauled before a judge, the school’s lawyer can say, “look, Your Honor, Kevin received 360 log entries while he was at this school. No, the school didn’t target him excessively. In fact, you could argue the school was incredibly lenient until they had no other choice but to suspend him.” Evidence of misdeeds helps a school avoid looking like it discriminated against a student for whatever reason when it punishes him. Therefore, documenting that evidence by logging it into the school’s information system is a vital role for teachers to play.
But it’s completely ridiculous. When a group of teachers get together, they all discuss the abhorrent behavior of a select few kids. That’s not because the kids are black or because they have ADHD or Autism. It’s because the kids behave terribly in every single class that they’re in. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who causes trouble in schools. Similarly, it shouldn’t take a mountain of paperwork to prove it. The teachers know it, the administrators know it, and the parents know it—even if the parents try to deny it at every opportunity. That teachers have to spend hours per week documenting the evidence when that documentation is entirely superfluous suggests that perhaps we give kids too much leeway and teachers not enough. But because it’s the society we’re in, there’s not much we can do to change it.
Logging behavioral incidents is time-consuming and never-ending. Yet if that were the only source of paperwork, I don’t think teachers would mind it very much. What’s worse is the other bureaucratic hoops that teachers must jump through. There are so many instances of this that I can’t even remember all of them from my days teaching. But one of the worst examples of this was our teaching goals.
Every teacher in my building had to write goals for themselves. The goals had to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based. (That spells SMART, by the way.) Your goal, for instance, couldn’t be “I want to help improve my students’ lives by developing their critical-thinking skills and inspiring a passion for reading novels.” Instead, it had to go something like this: “In order to help achieve my schools’ turnaround objectives, I will increase my students’ reading speed by 10 percent on average by March by developing a routine where students read independently and in partners for 20 minutes three days per week and measure their reading speed once per month.” At first glance, that seems like a fairly reasonable ask of teachers. After all, if you really do want to improve your students’ reading abilities, you should have a plan of attack, and writing out your goals can help you formulate that plan. Fair enough. But consider what the act of writing this goal out means. It means spending some time coming up with a game plan that you’ll probably just abandon when the rubber hits the road; it means coming up with vague, possibly unrealistic objectives (what if most kids only increase their reading speed by 5 percent?) that you may be unqualified to measure; it means, in short, spending lots of time crafting an unwieldy sentence that probably won’t guide your day-to-day practice in the slightest.
Even that would be forgivable if teachers only had to write that one goal. Of course, reality is never that simple. Each teacher had to write a student-learning goal and a professional-learning goal, which had to be distinct from one another. On top of that, teachers were measured throughout the year on whether they fulfilled four standards of practice. Each standard detailed a distinct area of teaching: Curriculum and assessment, communication with families, etc. Teachers, then, also had to write their goals for each standard, along with the pieces of evidence that they would submit to prove they had made progress toward those goals. The kicker was that twice throughout the year—once around January and the second time around April—teachers had to upload all of their evidence to the software the district used to track such things and then send them to the principal and assistant principal for review.
Several things are wrong with this. The first is that it takes an inordinate amount of time to do, which merely adds onto the mountain of work that teachers already perform (again, if they’re doing the job right). The second is that, just as with the behavioral documentation, it’s entirely superfluous. As one mentor told me—as if to justify the whole process—“you’re just submitting the evidence of the things you’re already doing.” That’s exactly why it’s unjustified: If I’m already doing it (and everyone knows I’m already doing it), then why do I need to submit proof that I’ve done it?
But perhaps the most glaring flaw in this is how much time it takes for the principal and assistant principal to review this mountain of data. For each teacher—in my school, that meant around 60—the pair of administrators had to read each goal, plan, and piece of evidence submitted; determine whether the teacher met, exceeded, or did not meet expectations; and then write their reflections on the teachers’ work. According to the assistant principal, doing one of these took roughly two hours. That’s 120 hours of work for two of the administrators who are simultaneously tasked with running the school and ensuring that teachers have the resources they need to perform their own jobs well.
And what was the final outcome of all this work? It’s simple: A stamp of approval and a submission to the state authorities, who had to check whether everything was done right.
There are positive aspects to all of this administrative work. Documentation, despite the attendant headaches, is key for avoiding (or winning) lawsuits. Thinking about what one wants to achieve and writing that down is a good way of clarifying one’s goals and holding one accountable for achieving those goals. Requiring administrators to sift through these data allows them to get a good sense of whether their teachers are actually doing their jobs well.
In reality, though, most of it is a waste of time. Economists talk a lot about “opportunity costs,” which is a fancy way of saying “the things that you could be doing if you weren’t doing what you’re doing now.” The opportunity costs of all this paperwork for teachers is grading papers, planning lessons, building relationships with students, and developing one’s knowledge of one’s field of teaching; for administrators, it’s walking the halls, responding to distress calls, preparing materials for new and struggling teachers, and projecting power and competence in a school that may lack those very important attributes. Taking so much valuable time away from teachers and administrators simply to check a series of boxes actually hinders a school’s goal of developing students into knowledgeable scholars and teachers into competent instructors.
The problem with taking a sledgehammer to the paperwork mountain is that our society justifiably loves data. We’re obsessed by it. And it’s very important to collect, especially when you’re trying to turn a school around. Quantitative data are helpful for identifying which students are chronically absent, which ones get in fights a lot, which ones are struggling academically, and which ones need to be challenged better. But that describes a minority of the paperwork that’s currently being collected by school districts and states. Most of it is tedious, time-consuming, and antithetical to the fundamental mission of schools.
And it’s not clear that teachers should be the ones collecting it. In fact, it probably works better if others do it. Imagine, for instance, an objective observer spending a random assortment of days throughout the school year in classrooms, in the halls, and in the cafeteria. As he notices things, he writes them down. For instance, he could note a teacher who is effective at managing her classroom, and write down what he thinks makes her so effective. He could see which students are provoking others to misbehave, which ones are putting their heads down, which ones are constantly on their phones, etc. Over the course of the year, he could submit a detailed report to the state, the district, the principal, and anyone else who wanted to read his observations. It might take him nine months to make his observations and an entire month to write his report. It might take readers a week or two to read the whole thing. But regardless, everyone would come away from it with a better understanding of what actually happens in a school.
There are objections to this. You have to pay the guy to do these observations. If you want better qualitative data, you need to send a bunch of these guys to different schools. Not everyone is objective, and not everyone is an equally keen observer. But offloading all of that documentation work to a third party could greatly increase the amount of time teachers and administrators could spend on the things that actually improve their students’ lives.
Sunlight, as they say, is the best disinfectant. Some of the best data are not contained within spreadsheets, but represented through observations and stories. If you’re not convinced, read How the Other Half Learns by Robert Pondiscio. In that, you’ll find an incredibly detailed snapshot of a school that functions very well. If we’re trying to improve schools, the way to do it isn’t by submitting a bunch of dumb reports to underpaid, overcaffeinated bureaucrats in the state’s department of education. It’s by telling stories about what actually goes on within the walls of a school. Without that, not much can change.
Nice writing, many good observations, although I lam thinking of myself as that kid in the back of the room, and thinking I need to have him (you) thinking of it differently, cause he is not me. I agree that talking with peers can be helpful, however my experience (1967-1977-high school business teacher) is often it was a 'bitch' session when talking to collogues and I don't think I took enough time to figure out how to get the bitching to be productive to make changes. But even without 'paperwork'; that talking led to all of us to better identify the 'problematic' kids. At the same time, the 70's were a long time ago and for sure things were different. As I remember there was no way as near the paperwork you describe. My biggest challenge was Monday morning-=and saying I should have prepared better over the weekend. I did find the better I prepare, the better the students seem to be. "Dud". And I wonder if some 'statistic' can be helpful in narrowing down where the 'real problems' are - but of course the challenge is how to fix those problems. I guess my 'easy answer' is Relationship. As I remember the kids that I somehow made a connection with, seem to listen more to me and therefore probably learned more. But as I have said before I grew to 'hate' teaching and worked better one to one. So I agree the 'great' teachers are jewels and we certainly need to reward them.
just a stunning amount of uselessness. opportunity costs are real. i fear i see the result of them all the time, all around me. i think your bad kids are at every cash register i find myself at. they look through me, they don't say hi, they don't thank, they can't solve a problem, they are wholly uninterested in the enterprise they have committed their time to. oh, and they expect a tip. there are about 10% of them that get it. i assume it's the 10% of your kids who are not a problem and actually want to learn. i'm a broken record but it's broke. i'm not sure when/where it started but it's here. i like to think it started with bike helmets and participation trophies. that's an easy marker for me to visualize. maybe not but i'm close. it's what you get when you have too much administration, too much regulation and too much litigation. time for detonation.