Lesson plan changes could save ‘20 million teacher hours a year’

The Grattan Institute says providing all Australian schools with access to a bank of lesson plans would reduce teacher workload by three hours a week.

The Grattan report, Ending the lesson lottery: How to improve curriculum planning in schools, says that the lack of lesson planning resources “undermines student learning and adds to the workload of our overstretched teachers”.

IEU General Secretary Deb James said, “While every teacher takes pride in the resources and lesson plans they produce, this shouldn’t require endless reinvention of the wheel”.

“As this report highlights, many teachers are forced to spend a huge chunk of their working week hunting down lesson plans and resources – time which would be far better spent building on and tailoring easily accessible plans to meet the needs of their students.”

The report’s lead author Jordana Hunter, the Grattan’s education program director, told the Sydney Morning Herald that only 15% of our schools have access to a common set of high-quality curriculum materials for all classes.

Hunter says most governments “dramatically underestimate” the time and expertise required for teachers to plan lessons. Most teachers spend six hours a week creating and sourcing lesson materials, and a quarter of teachers spend 10 hours or more. It takes teachers 500 hours to develop a year’s worth of material for a single subject.

“Teachers are crying out for change. Nine in 10 say access to shared, high-quality materials would give them more time to hone their practice and meet the needs of individual students. It would also ease workloads.

“Teachers spend three hours less each week sourcing and creating materials when common high-quality materials are available for all their subjects. If we stop expecting teachers to reinvent the wheel, we could save 20 million teacher hours a year.”

She says to improve learning outcomes for children, education systems, governments and curriculum authorities need to do much more “to ensure equitable access to quality teaching resources”.

The report said the national curriculum and its state variants leave “vast gaps” which mean teachers must “fend for themselves” and without a “whole-school approach” to curriculum planning, “even the hardest-working teachers will struggle to give their students the best education”.

The Herald Sun reported that 64 per cent of Australian teachers pull classroom ideas from YouTube, only 31 per cent use verified state government websites, and only one in five use professional teaching sites.

Eighty-six per cent of teachers reported they don’t have enough time for high-quality lesson planning.

The report recommends that governments invest in materials developed by teachers, not-for profits, education companies and governments and prioritise materials for literacy/English, humanities, social sciences, maths, and sciences.

Amy Haywood, Grattan Institute senior associate, and former secondary English teacher, says she was often “overwhelmed” by the number of curriculum decisions she had to make, and “late-night searches for the best materials for my students”.

“And this was all before I even got to the part where I had to ensure students learnt how to write an analytical essay, let alone devise a strategy to help my struggling students, some of whom were still working on the basics of writing.

“The near-infinite decision-making about the detailed content to teach is replicated across year levels and subjects.”

Haywood says the whole-school approach to curriculum planning reduces teachers’ individual planning workloads, builds teachers’ expertise, and ensures students have access to “common, high-quality learning opportunities no matter what class they’re in”.

She says curriculum materials must be quality assured by independent reviewers, “so teachers can be confident the materials are road-tested and ready for the classroom”.

Ben Jensen, chief executive of consultancy Learning First, told the SMH Australia had “massively under-invested” in curriculum support and lesson plans compared to most high-performing school systems.

“If teachers don’t know what preparation students have had in previous years, they may waste precious time planning for and reteaching concepts and skills students have already mastered, or they may overlook critical concepts and skills, assuming their students have already been taught them.

“For students, this means they can sit in classrooms packed with poorly connected activities, that can be highly repetitive or leave critical learning gaps.”

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare says he is keen to discuss the report with teachers at the second meeting of state and territory education ministers in December

“Teachers have told us they often buy lesson plans off other teachers, over the internet.

“They often pay for it from their own pockets, so they have time to cook dinner for their families.”

The Australian confirmed this, reporting that assignments, assessments, and lesson plans are sold by several companies, on an online marketplace, and on a Facebook group.

A recent national survey of 32,000 teachers found that full-time teachers worked an average of 55 hours a week, much of it unpaid, and that overwork was the biggest reason many were thinking of leaving the profession.

Writing for The Conversation, Grattan Institute Associate Nick Parkinson said fixing the lesson plan problem is about “giving teachers more time for teaching”.

“The burden of having to plan mostly from scratch is taking a heavy toll on teachers. A new partnership is needed between governments, education leaders, and schools to reduce this. Failure to do so is unfair on teachers as well as students.”