FREDERICTON, N.B. — A workload study of teachers in Prince Edward Island shows they are spending more time doing administrative and other tasks and less time interacting with students.
The study also suggests teachers are “near the breaking point” with frustration at the extra duties that limit their teaching time.
The study, prepared for the P.E.I. Teachers’ Federation and spearheaded by the University of Prince Edward Island’s Ronald J. MacDonald, was presented Wednesday at the 2011 Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, N.B.
The study was a followup to a similar workload assessment done in 2002. It shows that teachers spent on average 2.3 hours less a week interacting with students in 2010 than they did in 2002.
Instead of teaching, they were doing administrative work and preparing work plans to address students’ requirements — students with special needs, for example, or who didn’t know enough English for the standard curriculum.
The administrative work has also cut into their lunchtime, which declined from 2.1 hours in 2002 a week to 1.5 hours in 2010.
MacDonald says the increase in the administrative workload appears to have happened gradually over the course of the decade, but it’s now at the point where the teachers are resentful, and he suggests they may be “at the breaking point.”
“The stress of the job today seems to detract from what they want to do,” he said. “There’s a sense out there that teachers love their career teaching children, but they are sick of the job — the extraneous workload unrelated to instruction.”
MacDonald said the teachers are also frustrated with standardized practices they say limit their ability to teach as they see fit.
“One of the things they noted is that they are losing their sense of autonomy,” he said. “They used to go to school and teach. Now they have to teach in a specific way.”
I just don't go whining to the media every time I have to do something in return for generous pay.