6 important Teacher Tasks

 Teacher Tasks

What do teachers really do? Every task that teachers perform falls under one of six categories. Many states such as the state of Florida use these and similar categories when observing teachers. They truly are a great way to organize your thoughts and systems around teaching. Following are the six teacher tasks with information and tools to help you grow and enhance your day-to-day teaching experience.

1) Planning, Developing, and Organizing Instruction

One of the most important parts of teaching takes place long before the teacher begins any lesson. Planning, developing, and organizing instruction are a major part of any teacher's job. If a teacher is effective at planning their lessons, they will find that their day-to-day teaching tasks are much easier. Unfortunately, many teachers do not have the time to truly create effective and unique plans for their classes. This is especially true if they are teaching multiple preps. However, every teacher should attempt to upgrade a couple of lessons each semester. This will help keep them and their material fresh.

Planning Instruction

Planning, Developing, and Organizing Instruction

Good planning is the first step to an effective classroom, and one of the six main teacher tasks that excellent teachers must master. A well-planned class reduces stress on the teacher and helps minimize disruptions. When teachers know what they need to accomplish and how they are going to do it, they have a better opportunity to achieve success with the added benefit of less stress. Further, when students are engaged the entire class period, they have less opportunity to cause disruptions. Obviously, the demeanor of the teacher, the quality of the lesson, and the method of delivery all play into an effective day in class. With that said, it all starts with a good plan.

Steps for Planning Instruction

1. Look over the state and national standards and your texts and supplemental materials to determine what concepts you must cover in the year. Make sure to include any required test preparation material. Use this to create a plan of study for your course.
2. Create a personalized lesson plan calendar. This will help you visualize and organize your instruction.
3. Plan your units using of your overall plan of study and your calendar.
4. Create detailed unit lesson plans. These should include the following items to be effective:
   • Objectives
   • Activities
   • Time Estimates
   • Required Materials
   • Alternatives - Make sure to plan for those students who might be absent during your activities.
   • Assessment - This includes classwork, homework, and tests.
   More on Creating Lesson Plans
   
   
5. Transfer your broad unit plan to a planning book to keep yourself organized. This will help with implementation and focus. This is where all the unit plans come together to give you a broader picture of the year.
6. Write a daily lesson outline and agenda. The details included will differ with how detailed you wish to be. Some teachers create a simple outline with times attached to help keep them on track while others include detailed notes and written information. At a bare minimum, you should have an agenda prepared for yourself and your students so that you appear organized and you make smooth transitions. It is very easy to lose student attention as you search for the page that you want them to read or fumble through a stack of papers.
7. Create and/or gather any required items. Make handouts, overheads, lectures notes, manipulatives, etc. If you are going to start each day with a warm up, then have this created and ready to go. If your lesson requires a movie or item from the media center, make sure that you put in your request early so that you are not disappointed on the day of your lesson.

Planning for the Unexpected

As most teachers realize, interruptions and unexpected events often occur in class. This might range from pulled fire alarms and unexpected assemblies to your own illnesses and emergencies. Therefore, you should create plans that will help you deal with these unexpected events.

• Create mini-lessons to help fill up any time that might be left at the end of a class period. Even the best teachers are sometimes left with extra time. Instead of just letting students talk, use this time for extra instruction or possibly educational fun. Further, if an unexpected assembly is called leaving you with just 15 minutes of instruction, these lessons can be a godsend.
• Emergency lesson plans are a necessity for all teachers. If you cannot make it to school at the last minute or have to leave to deal with a personal emergency, you need to leave lesson plans to help your substitute. This combined with your substitute folder is important to help your classroom continue to function without you.

2) Housekeeping and Record keeping Tasks

For many teachers this is the most annoying part of teaching. Time has to be spent taking attendance, recording grades, and following through on all necessary housekeeping and recordkeeping tasks. The way that a teacher handles these tasks says a lot about their classroom organization skills. With effective and easy-to-use systems in place, teachers will be able to spend more time focusing on actually instructing and interacting with their students.

Teacher Housekeeping Tasks

Housekeeping and Recordkeeping Tasks for Teachers

The job of teaching can be divided into six teaching tasks. One of these tasks is dealing with housekeeping and recordkeeping. Each day, teachers must take care of the business of teaching before they begin their daily lesson plan. While required daily tasks might seem monotonous and at times unnecessary, they can be made manageable through the use of effective systems. The main housekeeping and recordkeeping tasks can be divided into the following categories:

• Attendance
• Collecting Student Work
• Resource and Material Management
• Grades
• Additional Teacher Specific Recordkeeping Tasks

Attendance Tasks

There are two main housekeeping chores related to attendance: taking daily attendance and dealing with students who are tardy. It is very important that you keep accurate attendance records because the situation might arise that the administration needs to use these to determine who was or was not in your class on a particular day. Following are some key tips to remember when taking attendance:

• Use attendance at the beginning of the year to learn students' names.
• If you have students complete warm ups at the beginning of each class period, this will give you the time to take attendance quickly and quietly without disrupting learning.
• Assigned seats can speed up attendance because you can quickly glance at the class to see if there are any empty seats.

Tardies can cause a lot of disruption for teachers. It is important that you have a system ready and waiting for when a student is tardy to your class. Some effective methods that teachers use to deal with tardies include:Dealing With Tardies

• Tardy Cards
• On Time Quizzes
• Detention

Assigning, Collecting, and Returning Student Work

Student work can quickly balloon into a housekeeping disaster if you do not have an easy and systematic way to assign, collect, and return it. Assigning student work is much simpler if you use the same method everyday. Methods might include a daily assignment sheet either posted or distributed to students or a reserved area of the board where you post each day's assignment.

Some teachers make collecting work completed in class a real time waster without realizing it. Don't walk around the room collecting work unless this serves a greater purpose such as during an exam or to stop a cheating situation. Instead, train the students to do the same thing each time they complete their work. For example, you might have them turn their paper over and when everyone is done pass their work to the front.

Collecting homework should be done at the beginning of class to stop students from finishing their work after the bell rings. You might stand at the door and collect their work as they enter the class or have a specific homework box where they are to turn in their work by a certain time.

One of the biggest thorns for many new and experienced teachers is dealing with late and make up work. As a general rule, teachers should accept late work according to a posted policy. Built into the policy is a system for penalizing late work to be fair to those who turn their work in on time.Late and Make Up Work

The problems arise around how to keep track of late work and ensure that grades are correctly adjusted. Each teacher has their own philosophy about late work though your school might have a standard policy. However, whatever system you use has to be easy for you to follow.

Make up work is a different situation entirely. You have the challenge of creating authentic and interesting work on a daily basis which might not translate easily into make up work. Often quality work requires a great deal of teacher interaction. You might find that to make the work doable for the student, you have to create alternative assignments or provide detailed written instructions. Further, these students typically have extra time to turn in their work which can be hard in terms of managing your grading.

As a teacher you may have books, computers, workbooks, manipulatives, lab materials, and more to manage. Books and materials have a tendency to "walk away" quite often. It is wise to create areas in your room where materials go and systems to make it easy for you to check whether all materials are accounted for each day. Further, if you assign books, you will probably want to do periodic "book checks" to make sure that students still have their books. This will save time and additional paperwork at the end of the school year.Resource and Material Management

Reporting Grades

One of the key recordkeeping tasks that teachers have is to accurately report grades. Typically, teachers have to report grades to their administration a couple of times a year: at progress report time, for student transfers, and for semester and final grades.

A key to making this job manageable is to keep up with your grading as the year goes on. It can be tough sometimes to grade time consuming assignments. Therefore, it is a good idea to use rubrics and if possible to space out assignments that require a lot of grading time. One problem with waiting until the end of a grading period to finish grading is that students might be "surprised" by their grade - they have not seen any previously graded work.

Each school will have a different system for reporting grades. Make sure to double check each student's grade before finally submitting them because mistakes are much easier to fix before they are finally submitted.

• Creating and Using Rubrics
• Tips to Cut Writing Assignment Grading Time

Additional Record keeping Tasks

From time to time, additional recordkeeping tasks might arise for you. For example, if you are taking your students on a field trip, then you will need to efficiently collect permission slips and money along with organize buses and substitutes. When these situations arise, it is best to think through each of the steps and come up with a system for dealing with the paperwork.

4. Presenting Subject Material

Once the planning is done and students are sitting in class waiting to be taught, a teacher is at a critical juncture - how will they actually present their subject matter. While teachers typically decide on their main mode of delivery during the planning phase, they will not actually implement these methods until they are face-to-face with their class. There are important tools that all teachers should have in their teaching arsenal no matter which method of delivery they are using including verbal clues, effective wait time, and authentic praise.

5. Assessing Student Learning

All instruction should be built around assessments. When a teacher sits down to develop a lesson, they should begin by determining how they will measure whether the students learned what they were trying to teach. While the instruction is the meat of the course, the assessments are the measure of success. Therefore, it is important that teachers spend some time creating and refining valid assessments for their students.

6. Meeting Professional Obligations

Every teacher must meet certain professional obligations depending on their school, their district, their state, and their area of certification. These obligations might range from something as mundane as hall duty during their planning period to something more time consuming like participating in professional development opportunities required to get recertified. Further, teachers might be asked to sponsor a club or chair a school committee. All of these require a teacher's time and are a required part of a teaching career.