The International Schools Review Forum

If you are secondary, how many class periods per week do you teach? Are you upper school or primary?

What do you consider an acceptable number of contact periods with students per week?

Most of my schools the load has been 3/4 daily, or 75% overall at secondary. My present schoo is 5/8. My very first post awhile in the past was 4/8.

shadowjack wrote:
> Most of my schools the load has been 3/4 daily, or 75% overall at
> secondary. My present schoo is 5/8. My very first post awhile in the past
> was 4/8.

Sorry, does 3/4 daily mean three or four periods per day, or does it mean three fourths of the available class periods per day? So, for example, 6 out of 8 daily class periods?

Perhaps it would be useful to talk in minutes and hours per week rather than periods per day. In the schools I’ve worked in periods ranged in length between 37 and 90 minutes long, and there were anywhere between four and eight each day. Might have been nine a day in the 37 minute school. It’s been a while.

Its also more sensible to consider your course load on a weekly basis, since it is common for secondary ITs to have their daily load change over the week. One day in a week may be fully packed, and one day is your bank day, which is very lite, half the day is preps. Typically, 60%-80% of the fixed, available, weekly, instructional time is teaching contact hours or periods is common, with 75% being about average. So if youre IS has 8 periods a day over an 8 hour day, and your an IT without studio/lab periods, and all your classes are seminar courses, you should expect on average to have 6 instructional periods a day with students and 2 periods as prep (or 1 period prep and 1 period conference) and about 30 minutes for lunch. You might also have some portion of a period for homeroom/mentor/enrichment and a portion for duty either before, after or during the contact day. Which all my change depending on the day of the week. Three of your days may be very similar to that, but one day in that week you might have nothing but lunch free and another day that week you may have more prep periods than instructional periods (your bank day).

sid wrote:
> In the schools I’ve worked in periods ranged in
> length between 37 and 90 minutes long

I wonder how they arrived at 37 minute periods...

We never knew. It was a mushroom situation. Long long ago.

@sid

I agree with this:

Perhaps it would be useful to talk in minutes and hours per week rather than periods per day.

and have presented different schedule proposals in this way, and also in percentages to show similarities and differences in models.

Some people really disliked this being presented as a % - I think they felt that it reduced the act of teaching to something cold and dry. It was interesting to see how changing the presentation of a message can have such an emotional reception.

The percentage of homeroom teacher contact time over the week in our Primary is 62.5% for G2 to G5 and 66.7% for KG/G1.

As an elementary specialist subject, student contact time is 18.6 hours per week. I prep 14 different lessons per week and teach each lesson to two groups of kids.
I'd love to hear what others are teaching, and I think this format of contact time and number of lesson plans is a clear way to compare our teaching loads.

I prefer hours to percentages. Percentage adds in another variable: percentage of what? Of a forty hour work week? Of a forty five hour work week? Of a thirty five hour work week?
Or is it a percentage of the available teaching time, which is generally less than the total working hours?
With straight-up hours, we see how much actual contact time people have.

14.66 hours (16 x 55 min classes). 70%-ish of the available teaching time in the school day.

angelica1981 wrote:
> shadowjack wrote:
> > Most of my schools the load has been 3/4 daily, or 75% overall at
> > secondary. My present schoo is 5/8. My very first post awhile in the past
> > was 4/8.
>
> Sorry, does 3/4 daily mean three or four periods per day, or does it mean three
> fourths of the available class periods per day? So, for example, 6 out of 8 daily
> class periods?

This means that out of 4 80 minute periods, one day you will teach 3, the other day 2. My first post, before the nature of International Education changed, was 2/4 each day :-)

sid wrote:
> I prefer hours to percentages. Percentage adds in another variable:
> percentage of what? Of a forty hour work week? Of a forty five hour work
> week? Of a thirty five hour work week?
> Or is it a percentage of the available teaching time, which is generally
> less than the total working hours?
> With straight-up hours, we see how much actual contact time people have.

Sid - 20 x 80 minute classes a week = 1600 minutes. 5/8 - 1000 minutes a week or 16.66666666666666666666666666666666666 hours a week.

So roughly 3.3 hours a day. That does not include other assigned duties such as School activities, assigned supervision, student free period supervision, lunch or recess supervision, school functions, etc.

But those are distributed and tend to be light-ish in nature where I am.

That also doesn't include marking, prepping and planning :-) Thank goodness for small class sizes!

I have 16 periods a week, with each period being 50 min longs with 3 preps (2 AP and 1 regular) This is 13.33 teaching hours, which is a little over 40% of the 33 hours a week I spend in school. This doesn't include coaching, but I get a stipend for that (and it's a volunteer position) so I'm not including that in the above. I also have lunch duty (40 min per day) for one week every 2-3 months.

Compared to the 70 hours a week I sometimes worked as an engineer, this is nothing.

Our school defines a FT teaching schedule up to 16.5 hours a week. That includes homeroom but not duties, after school activities, etc. Most teachers come in around 14 to 15 hours. A couple teachers a year need to go a little above, and they don’t have to do duties or after school activities.