Given the amount of planning time he has each day, along with the help of an ai-powered app, Robert can easily turn a printed reading passage and questions into an interactive quiz for students in his elementary classroom.
But if you wanted to design something more engaging, where kids would cut out or draw as part of the lesson, well, there's just not enough time in your 45-minute lecture to design that.
This is in part because Robert may need to take care of many other tasks that might need his attention, such as participating in a meeting about a student who has behavioral problems. On top of that, Robert knows that any hands-on lesson without a computer will need to include enough time to walk students through the instructions. (EdSurge is only using Robert's name out of concern for his privacy.)
Your Generation Alpha students are more comfortable using a Chromebook for homework than without, and getting them off screens requires more time and finesse.
“The way they learn is very individualized, the way their brain takes in information – everyone has a personal assistant in their pocket giving them information,” Robert says. “It's not so much about the planning time it takes. “Kids have a hard time doing things without technology.”
Public schools provided teachers an average of 266 minutes of planning time per week, according to results of the School Pulse Panel administered in December 2023. The panel surveys about 2,400 school principals representing all grade levels.
That equates to approximately four hours and 26 minutes of planning time per week.
Primary teachers receive on average about four hours of weekly planning time, which is 40 minutes less than their secondary counterparts and 49 minutes less than their secondary counterparts.
What is a “good” amount of planning time?
Is an average of 266 minutes of planning per week what teachers might consider a good or sufficient amount? Not likely.
At a minimum, the current average adds up to an amount of planning time that hasn't changed much over the past 10 years, according to data compiled by the National Council for Teaching Quality. The same report found that teachers have consistently identified more planning and collaboration time as job improvements that would entice them to stay.
“Adjusting district planning and collaboration time policies will not be a panacea for all retention challenges,” the author writes. “However, districts would do well to consider how planning and collaboration time could contribute to a greater range of supports for teachers, while also increasing job satisfaction among teachers and improving student learning.”
Beyond the average, nearly half of principals who responded to the School Pulse Panel (47 percent) said their teachers are allocated three hours or less of planning time per week. Only 9 percent said teachers have five hours or more to plan.
These figures also come at a time when, as part of the same survey, 28 percent of schools overall reported increasing the amount of teacher planning time.
Why is planning time important?
Teachers don't just show up to school and deliver stellar teaching without preparation.
As the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted teachers' mental health, the question of whether or not teachers have enough class preparation time has emerged as a component of teacher retention.
A task force on teacher retention last year recommended that Texas lawmakers commission a timing study to help administrators free themselves from any obstacles that hinder teaching, planning or collaboration. (The corresponding invoice deceased committee.) In the fall, Portland, Oregon, teachers and their school district agreed in a new contract that would increase planning time for elementary and secondary teachers to nearly eight hours per week.
“Teachers are expected to do an extreme amount of things in a short period of time,” one elementary teacher wrote to the Texas task force, listing planning, teaching, “endless work,” professional development and meetings as your tasks on a given day. . “The administrator wants memorable lessons, which I agree, but we never have the time to plan them.”
Robert says it's not just the extra work that makes planning difficult: the needs of a generation of students raised with technology are more complex. In his experience, the elementary students he teaches have difficulty completing activities without the help of a computer.
Robert recalls a situation where a colleague designed an activity for students to complete after completing a standardized test, when no one would be allowed to use any piece of technology until all students had finished. The task was to draw an animal in its natural habitat.
Some of his students asked for the opportunity to look up a picture of their favorite animal on a laptop, Robert recalls, or find a YouTube tutorial on how to draw it. He was stunned by his hesitation in trying to draw something from memory.
“Everyone needs technology to function, so the activities I have to focus on technology, or require extreme planning, and we don't have time for that anymore,” explains Robert.
What would really help students is more individualized attention, he says, something that's difficult for a teacher to provide alone. She recently heard that a nearby school district was making staff cuts, but only in positions like paraprofessionals and teacher aides.
“Now the class size is 25 to 1, but the kids need 10 to 1 or 5 to 1, where they work in small groups all day,” he says. “I don't think it takes that much planning time. “We need more people to work in a school.”
