Hello, friends! I hope you enjoyed my spring break! I am back and hope you are ready for more of my thoughts and feelings.
There’s a big shift underway in the world of education, and it’s sped up recently. Generational and historical moments are combining to take away one aspect of teaching that’s been around forever.
I’m talking about unpaid work.
Yes, every teacher I know is still grading papers and making lessons way beyond contracted hours. Yes, many teachers still have to take sick days to get papers graded…I am sure I have taken at least a month’s work of sick days over my career to devote to essays. And I see quite a few colleagues busting themselves to get National Board Certification, to attend conferences, and to do other bits of education on their own dime.
But this aspect of teaching has changed significantly since I started this gig six years ago, and I am thinking hard about what this means for education and for other parts of our culture.
Early on in my coaching career, I recall a conversation with some colleagues. They were planning how to provide some PD for teachers. The idea was we’d use me and my fellow coaches to offer classes fairly often after school.
I was new. I said “You know, I’m not sure I’d have gone to that after-school PD as a teacher. I had papers to grade, a family to see, dentists appointments, soccer practices, and all that. Plus I was coaching debate all the time: already putting in a ton of time after the bell. I just don’t think I’d have prioritized an afternoon on discussion techniques or management ideas.”
A boss of mine responded thusly: “Well, maybe if you were more professional, you would have.”
YOUCH! And, um, you’re also wrong, boss. But I shut up for the rest of the conversation. I was new in the district, and this was a moment where New Guy had to decide what battles were worth fighting without a continuing contract.
That was 2018. Two huge, massive shiftss have happened since then.
First, there was this big pandemic (maybe you heard about it: it was on the news). As that happened, people began to re-organize and re-prioritize their lives. Life is short. Families matter. Work is an important part of our identity, but not the sole or primary one.
On top of that, Zoom teaching made non-work parts of life so much easier. Plumber needs to visit? I can have them come by while I keep teaching: just might have to say “hold on a sec, turn and talk in a breakout room” while I let them in. No personal time needed!
People liked it. They appreciated being in charge of their time again. That genie wasn’t going to be back into the bottle. On the whole, I think this change was good for teachers, and therefore, for students (since teacher working conditions are student working conditions).
A couple of years later, we had a teachers’ strike in the district where I work. It was contentious, and while we are progressing with healing, it has further shifted teachers’ mindsets.
I hypothesize that our strike was a key component in teachers becoming less tolerant of unpaid work time.
I mean, we always knew about it (the time, I mean).But we’d still get a decent number of teachers to show up to our afternoon and evening things. This year, attendance has shifted. People are unapologetic about missing 4:00 PD. It’s a noticeable change.
Add to those a noticeable subphenomenon: Our new teachers have almost entirely stopped showing up to our after-school new-teacher classes. This might be a generational component on top of the COVID and strike components.
I can’t find any specific articles supporting this, but there is anecdotal evidence (let me know if you have more) that Gen Z is the first generation that takes all of their sick days every year rather than banking them. To me, this is unfathomable. I have accumulated about ⅔ of a year of sick days through my career–this in spite of burning so many of them to grade papers. I will get to cash some of my sick time in at retirement (at a rate of ¼), but that’s not as important to me as the fact they’re available to me in the event I come down with cancer or get hit by a drunk driver and need a ton of time away.
My younger colleagues think differently. They view their sick days as a benefit, and they will take their days.
Related to this is that many of our youngest workers no longer assume that they need to play along with whatever the older generation (like me) thinks they need to do. One of the key characteristics of this generation (here’s an overview) is that they don’t have an automatic respect for hierarchy and authority that prior generations had. They value collaboration and diversity, but don’t value a boss simply because they are a boss. For the most part, I respect this. Not unequivocally, but mindless following of any leader–even me–doesn’t lead to much improvement.
In any event, when you add together a pandemic, a contentious labor action, and a new generation, you have 4:00 PD that is attracting less than 1/3 of the attendance than from five years ago.
I am learning that we are not alone in the education world. My dad, a retired physician, sent me an article from the February 8, 2024 New England Journal of Medicine (here with a paywall: but a nice bonus for my physician readers). It sounds like even medical students are starting to question the breakneck culture of medical school. They are finding that extra hours and extra time is unacceptable. Depending on how sympathetic you are to the students, they are either valuing self-care in a way that is admirable (e.g. “why did previous generations put up with this treatment? how is it different from hazing?) or soft (e.g. “being a doctor is uncomfortable and difficult, so if you can’t handle a level of discomfort as a medical student, maybe you need to consider a different career”).
In both education and medicine, this leads to important and challenging questions. Doctors and teachers have a moral responsibility to do their jobs as best as they possibly can. Related to that, they have a responsibility to improve. But how do we do that in a way that is humane? Do we always value self-care at the expense of students? Do we never? As the NEJM article says,
A morally sensitive conversation about fostering our professional values in modern training environments would require asking similar questions about well-being. How much are we entitled to? At what cost? Who decides?
The good news is this:
I think the answer is exactly where I’ve always thought it needs to be. It’s in instructional coaching.
Teachers improve move through partnership with a knowledgeable coach watching them teach and talking about work challenges the teachers find compelling than they do from 4:00 PM PD, even if they do show up.
Atul Gawande, a doctor and author I appreciate, brought coaches to the operating room and wrote about it in a classic coaching article. In it, he talks about how he continued improving when he felt he had hit a plateau in his skill as a surgeon by bringing someone on to coach him. He didn’t take extra classes after work that took away what was surely already-scarce family time. He found a way to get better on the job.
I honestly believe that teachers feel the same way. I can think of exactly zero teachers who I believe no longer want to get better at their job. They just want to make sure to do it during contracted hours. Coaching remains the best way to do that. Yes, I will still be doing book studies and the occasional after-school class. But I need to meet the teachers where they are.
Meet them where they are philosophically: tired, maxed out on time,
Meet them where they are physically: in their classrooms, teaching kids, from bell to bell.
Meet them where they are generationally: they won’t trust me because of my title, but rather because of the work we do together.
What are you noticing in your schools (and other workplaces)? Are people buckling down on their non-contracted time?
Really enjoyed this. Timely. Learning Walks, embedded into the day so folks can watch teaching and learning in others’ classrooms really shows potential. Requisite trust and organization have to be in place for it to work best. It’s daunting to take it on. Lots of logistics. Coupled with learning cycles, there is power. Have seen, considered, tried some various uses of contractual PD time over the years. Mixed results. A couple of things stand out though. Whether it’s 2 hours plus an early release every other week or 4 late starts a month or one department meeting an on staff meeting… whatever the breakdown, it is the time you have. As factors work against those collective minutes, you get things like inefficiency, mission creep, indifference, cynicism, lost focus, etc. minute by minute, meeting by meeting. A twist on an oft-used phrase of mine would be “there are many meaningful developments of profession; which ones do you want to fund?” You might recall my simile about the Adirondack chair in the spacious manicured backyard. It’s a damn fine choir. But it is just a chair. You’ve got me thinking, Paul.