What does a teacher do?

Lesson Planning and Preparation

If one wants to engage students in the curriculum and not 'stand and deliver' is is necessary to create engaging, interesting fun lessons that meet the curriculum requirements and most importantly are personalized and differentiated to meet the learning needs of all students.  

Teaching Lessons

Administrative tasks such as  attendance, checking homework, collecting assignments and returning marked student work cut into each period.  The time remaining is spent on the lesson and answering questions/helping students as they work on the class lesson.

Grading Student Work

Assessing student work unfortunately has an administrative component.  After assignments are graded the scores are entered into a mark book.  As much as I love technology I do not trust it so I always have a paper copy on a class list from which I transfer each grade into the digital web based mark program.

Meetings

Grade Team, Subject Department, Professional Learning Community, Staff, Student Learning Team , Outside Agency and Parent Meetings are just some of the meetings that teachers are required to participate in on a regular basis

Extra Curricular

Contributing to the whole school community is a time consuming requirement and teachers need to be involved in a variety of students extracurricular activities coaching sport teams, or art, drama, music, math, science clubs.  Increasingly schools encourage students to get involved in leadership, charitable and community service activities.  Once again teachers are called on to set up and lead these out of school activities.

Parent Contact

In addition to parent teacher interviews which occur two or three times a year teachers are also required to attend a variety of after school or evening events.  Parent teacher interviews, meet the teacher, School open houses, concerts, drama productions, awards ceremonies, recognition ceremonies, school dances, sporting events are just some events where teachers interact with parents and guardians.  Parent support is vital to a teacher especially with 'challenging' behavioural students.  Teacher instigated parent contact/communication is made to discuss learning, behaviour, and social concerns as well as students on an individualized education plan (IEP).