Teachers Should Spend Less Time Teaching

Elizabeth Green, author of Building A Better Teacher, makes a counterintuitive point:

We don’t give teachers the space to do anything but work, work, work. They have no space to learn. Whereas in Japan or Finland there are 600 hours per year of time spent teaching, in the US, it’s 1,000 hours or more. So teachers have no time to think, no time to learn, no time to study the kids, no time to study the curriculum. They have no way of seeing anything that’s happening outside their own classroom.

They have no time to see each other teach. Other countries show that time is some of the most valuable time. When you get to have a common classroom experience to look at, then you get things like figuring out that “13 minus 9″ is the very best problem to teach subtraction with borrowing. That kind of learning doesn’t happen in the US.