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Teacher Collaboration & Planning Time Survey

Weekly Late Start or Early Release
Posted on 02/21/2019

Educators across Jeffco have expressed their appreciation and support of our Strategic Plan and the work to individualize education to better meet the needs of every one of our 85,000+ children. One common request (and urgent need) has been increased time for teacher collaboration and planning. Some schools have been able to schedule late starts while others have faced challenges with transportation scheduling.

With this goal in mind, a task force comprised of principals, teachers, parents, and district staff including the transportation department, was formed to explore the viability of a late start schedule for schools across the district. As this task force explores the best way to go about these changes, they would appreciate your input! We need feedback from everyone, including families, educators, support staff, and others who support our students. Please complete this survey by March 6.

Survey in English       Survey in Spanish

 

Why does the survey matter?

We love our teachers! They work hard for students. Expectations and time demands continue to significantly increase for educators. This is the right work to help our students, but we need to think more strategically about how we schedule and use time. Why a need for more time?

  • Teachers pull from multiple resources and collaborate with others to plan the best instruction. Additionally, transforming student experiences to provide more hands on, engaging instruction connected to “real” tasks takes more time. Research shows this creates better results for students.
  • Teachers often share students across classes and subjects, which requires more time to share information on students and needs.
  • To truly provide more personalized instruction, educators must deeply understand student needs. We have more data on our students than ever before, however this requires time to look at the assessment results, student work, perceptual data and more to address urgent needs.
  • Teachers are addressing more significant social emotional needs in their students than ever before. Again, it’s the right work but it does take more time to work with other experts in the building to help students, talk with a student, call a family, access resources, and so on.
  • Our elementary teachers typically receive one 45 minute planning period each day to:
    • Plan learning for next day, week, month including learning goals, differentiated instruction, unit outcomes, assessments, authentic tasks, projects, and more
    • Respond to email
    • Make parent phone calls
    • Meet with families
    • Meet with teammates
    • Gather resource & supplies for instruction, set up or clean up the classroom for various subjects
    • Plan field trips, special activities, connect with parent volunteers and/or community groups
    • Consult with the instructional coach
    • Analyze data from both classroom work as well as standardized tests to inform the next day’s learning, organize groups, determine interventions
    • Discuss strategies with colleagues for struggling students
    • Consult with special education teacher
    • Consult with mental health provider
    • Meet with principal on various topics
    • Work on individual professional development
    • Review & grade student work
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