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Originally Posted by Fighting Banana Slug
Does the 1200 hrs assigned time include the pd days? I should know this as my spouse is a teacher, but that number seems to imply a fair bit of time to prepare during the school day, and that is simply not the case for her. It may differ a bit for elementary vs high school, as to how the assigned time is actually spent.
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Non-Instructional days are just that. Time required to be in the school working on board-driven initiatives or Principal-assigned duties. It counts as assigned time and is rarely used for self-directed teacher preparation.
Teachers are rarely given time to actively prepare for instruction and when they are, it's minimal. The most common example being Friday afternoons; kids are dismissed at say 12:15, teachers have lunch till 12:45, have a staff meeting and work on some sort of board- or Principal-directed task. They're "required" to be in the building till 3 pm so at 2:15 or 2:30 when that other work is done, they might be "given" 30 or 45 minutes of "prep time". Who really wants to sit there and get down to serious work at 2:30 on Friday?
95+% of teacher planning time is outside of assigned time. It is expected of teachers to do this work on their personal time. Same thing with marking, writing report cards, or completing other paperwork-type tasks. I can count on one hand the number of Non-Instructional days I've had where I can choose what to work on or prepare.