SUSAN BARBER

Not taking work home has become a hard fast rule for me, but this was not always the case. I spent years carrying essays on field trips to my house, my children’s sporting events and arts performances, after school events, faculty meetings – you get the idea. The bag of essays was an accessory for my daily wardrobe.

I prided myself on being efficient and using every extra minute; others did as well. Parents, colleagues, and friends admired my dedication to my students (did they really???) and my writing copious amounts of comments on their essays. This seemed to work for me but at what cost? I was doing all of the things but never fully present at anything. There was no clear line of separation between work and personal life, and my mind was never fully at rest. 

When I changed schools eight years ago, I knew I needed to make some changes, and a new school offered the perfect opportunity to instill new habits. No more lugging papers around town and having them steal time at events. I limited my work at home, often taking an unfinished set to finish at night or only one set of essays to score over the weekend or finishing up lessons for the next day at home.  A Saturday morning in the coffee shop or a couple of hours during the week or on a Sunday night eased my load in the week and kept me from completely being underwater. This change was definitely more reasonable and more manageable and a step in the right direction of having a more balanced life.

September 11, 2022. My mother, a widow, went from living alone to needing full-time care overnight. As the eldest daughter, I was immediately her power of attorney for all things. School became secondary out of necessity for that entire semester. I operated out of exhaustion that fall, often spending nights in the ER and leaving school every day after class to handle the mound of legal and medical decisions and paperwork. And here’s what I observed: I was taking zero work home during that time and my students were not set back academically in the least. After I returned to a more normal schedule,  I knew this was my opportunity to not return to my old paradigm of teaching.

I learned a few other things as well. 

Education systems are set up to reward- even honor – teachers for doing work not only in the classroom but outside of the classroom as well. Sponsoring clubs, coaching sports, working at Saturday school, tutoring for the ACT, chaperoning the dance, chairing a department – most of these things are often outside of school hours and can take time away from our main job: teaching. Most celebrated teachers are the ones who go above and beyond inside and outside of the classroom with the indirectly stated expectation that a model teacher does all the things. 

I also learned that I had an elevated sense of my importance in my role. If I didn’t have the perfect lesson and just the right time, students wouldn’t maximize their learning. If I didn’t write loads of feedback on an essay, students would not grow as writers. If I missed a day of work, the entire year had potential to go off the rails. In reality, learning and growth could still happen without the perfect lesson, lots of written feedback, or even me being present. I was putting more work on myself than was necessary. 

Finally, students will most often rise to the level of expectation we place on them. At times, I seemed to be the one doing most of the heavy lifting in my classroom but realized that students can – and should – also share the load. Students began to self-assess their own writing, reread passages they didn’t understand more closely instead of relying on me for an explanation, and take charge of their own learning in ways that would have never been possible before. 

So here’s where I am today, and I will also give some caveats knowing that each of us have different personal lives, systems we work within, personalities, and experience and capacity levels: 

1 – I quit taking work home. The only exception would be if we have potential for a snow day (LOL – I live in Atlanta) or it’s a long weekend/extended break and I am not traveling. This decision has allowed me to fully separate from work – not just physically but mentally and emotionally. My job – our jobs – tend to press in and consume us. Heavy grading loads, multiple preps, assigned duties, students’ mental health, and a multiple of other things often feel heavy. Taking full weekends off – no nothing from school (papers, email, planning, etc) – allows me to rest and return on Monday with renewed energy and commitment in a way that I haven’t been able to before. 

2 – I made a deliberate choice to not take on extra responsibilities outside of my classroom. This was a difficult decision because I – like most of us – want our students to have a rich school experience and know that includes extra curricular activities. I have sponsored so many clubs, been department chair, and served on different committees, but I’ve noticed especially in recent years that this work is increasingly expected from teachers as part of the job. I recognize that some coaches and clubs have stipends (albeit meager in most cases) but many extras don’t. I am no longer willing to participate in a system that expects free labor from teachers. This tipping point for several of our faculty was last year when teachers at my school were asked to clock out (yes, we fingerprint in each morning upon arrival) if we needed to leave a few minutes early as this sometimes happens for afternoon appointments. Even though teachers find coverage for classes (I have 4th planning and am always happy to cover for a colleague who needs to scoot out early), clocking out in spite of us being salaried communicated that our pay was tied to our official minutes on the clock, and we are not credited for after school conferences, meetings, dances, etc. 

3 – While it may appear I am doing less at school, in reality I am focusing all of my time and attention on being a good teacher, and my instruction has improved. Even when I was taking work home, I felt spread too thin and always behind at school. So how do I do it? 

• I use tried and true lessons instead of doing new things each year. I am creative by nature and allergic to routine, but reusing lessons with minor tweaks saves  so much time. Do I get bored? Sometimes, but it’s the students’ first time through the lesson. 
• I give very few written comments on writing. Row by row rubric numbers if using a rubric and a glow and grow comment; that’s it. I am available to conference before and after school with students and am able to cover so much more ground that way. See Brian’s comments (no pun intended) for more information on this. 
• I don’t grade everything that is completed in class (practice is practice regardless of whether I put a grade on it), and grades that are in the formative category are scored quickly, receiving a 100 (completed everything as assigned), 85 (mostly completed as assigned), or 70 (gaps in completion). 
• I take advantage of time when students are reading, working independently, or even show a related movie (gasp) to grade. My students are no less needy than yours but there are times that I tell them they have to dial in because I need to dial in. 
• The English department at my school is working on this as a team, so I don’t feel like a renegade all alone. Our department chair encouraged all team members to make one of our TKES (our evaluation system) goals to be that we would not work outside of school more than 2 hours each week. Not only does this provide support and accountability in our desire to work outside of school, but we have power in our collective voices.

We are all in different spaces and places in life, and I in no way am saying you should live by this rule. But I would challenge you to think about your work habits and some things you can possibly let go. 

Author’s note: This portion contains several em dashes but was fully written without AI.

BRIAN SZTABNIK

I’m just going to say it — giving feedback on everything is a lousy idea.

In theory it sounds great, but most of the people that tout it are not the ones doing it. They are far from the classroom. That distance does not allow them to comprehend this unrealistic expectation. In the end, it does more damage than good.

I’m speaking from experience 

Early in my career, I would take all my paperwork from the week with me to the local Starbucks on Sunday evenings to grade and comment till closing. One time, I had a stack of 60 college essays that needed attention. My goal was to spend those hours loading each page with feedback because I knew how important these pieces were to their long-term futures.

I had the best of intentions when I started but each time I had to write, “show, don’t tell,” the fury of my pen increased. I wrote it at least 20 times. With each successive comment, emotion eclipsed reason. That evening my feedback crossed a threshold where it stopped being productive and became harsh.

My comments on one essay were particularly regrettable. I used the red pen punitively, not positively. There were far too many exclamation points. I wasn’t building a writer in the margins; I was breaking one down. The teacher in me had turned into a vengeful copy editor.

I cringed the next day as I handed back those essays. These were personal stories, and I turned them into a crime scene of red ink. My embarrassment was not a result of what my students lacked; it was the numerous ways I failed as their teacher. 

Let me list those ways:

• I had not conveyed the expectations well. Nor had I taught students the difference between show and tell properly. The repeated mistakes were a reflection of my inadequate teaching, not poor student performance. 
• I believed that I was sacrificing for my students by spending all those hours at Starbucks, and I believed, somehow, that I deserved better from them in return. That disappointment transferred into harmful comments. 
• I expected students to read the comments and correct the deficiencies themselves. The margins of the paper were my feedback, and they could “see me if they had any questions.” 

I needed a better system, one with boundaries between my school time and personal time. I also needed to rethink my process for setting expectations, modeling those expectations, guiding students through those expectations, and providing feedback through it all in a constructive way to enable long-term growth. 

Now, flash forward to the present. 

Let me share what happened in my classroom this week, so you can see how I moved past the negative comments, the feelings of resentment, and the lackluster results. 

We are working on AP-style essay writing in our Poetry II unit that focuses on the Romantic poets. 

• We spent three days focusing just on thesis statements. We reviewed the rubric to clarify expectations. We wrote one together as a class as a model. Each day, there was a five-minute thesis challenge. The thesis statements they wrote were either submitted on Socrative, so that everyone could vote on the best ones, or they were submitted on Google Classroom, so I could pull four statements at random for constructive critiques the next day. 
• We evaluate thesis statements for the 3 Cs – CLARITY, CONCISION, and COMPLEXITY. This allows for targeted feedback beyond superficial “it’s good” or “It needs work.” Students must use math terms (add, subtract, divide, multiply) in their critiques to pinpoint areas for improvement. Here’s what it sounded like from a student this week: “I would ADD a conjunction, probably but, ¾ of the way through the second sentence. THis would allow them to talk about the shift in tone and make it more COMPLEX.” Another student said: “This thesis statement needs to be DIVIDED into two sentences. It would really help with CLARITY.”
• Students are the ones providing the feedback, not me. When this happens, their understanding of expectations is strengthened because the onus is on them to articulate the feedback in a structured way.  It has led to stronger thesis statements across the board. 
• The final two days of the week were spent developing strong body paragraphs. Again, we reviewed the rubric to clarify expectations. Students worked in groups of four to write a cooperative body paragraph, then they voted on the best model. Both days ended with a 12-minute body paragraph challenge. The paragraphs were submitted on Google Classroom. I pulled four paragraphs at random for constructive critiques the next day. 
• The critiques are efficient and hyper-focused because they evaluate only three things:
  • Is the claim for this paragraph insightful?
  • Is the evidence high quality and high quantity?
  • Is the commentary sharp or superficial?

There is nothing novel or extraordinary about this method. It is what a teacher should be doing. Creating an environment in which learning and feedback occur in a continuous loop, without judgement, shared by student and teacher.

It may be easy to read this article and say that the most important shift was that my comments went from punitive to positive. But that would be misleading. That was a byproduct of more important changes. Now, feedback occurs more frequently. It is given to the whole class instead of each individual. Students play a significant role in providing that feedback. Their understanding of the expectations are clearer. Their repeated practice of those expectations is more frequent and risk free. And the results are more impressive.