Background: The Washington Examiner reports that "Fairfax County (VA) Superintendent Jack Dale is planning to tell principals to ease teachers' workloads outside the classroom, following months of complaints from school employees who say they're overworked and overwhelmed."

I was attending a principals’ meeting held in a neighboring high school. When the meeting ended, I walked through the halls to the rear of the school where my car was parked. At the end of the hall sat a teacher. I exchanged greetings and asked her what she was doing. She explained that it was lunchtime and that she was assigned to sit there every day to prevent students from leaving the cafeteria area and walking through the halls and disturbing classes. I said jokingly, “You should come to our school. Our teachers don’t have hall duty. They used to, but we learned how to train fleas.” “Train fleas,” she asked?

Flea Trainers

I explained to her that if you put fleas in a jar (an old Zig Ziglar story) and put the lid on, and later removed the lid, the fleas wouldn’t jump out, because they were trained that, if they tried to jump out, they would bump their heads on the lid. She laughed. I went on to explain that for years our teachers were assigned to stand or sit in the hallways during lunch to prevent students from walking the halls, but one of the things that I am proudest of was how we dramatically cut extra duties for our teachers. I wanted our teachers to focus on teaching not hall duty.
With a confused look on her face, the teacher asked me how we kept the kids out of the halls. “Easy,” I said. As certified flea trainers, we replaced the teacher with a sign that read “No Students Beyond This Point.” We replaced the teachers with a sign, and guess what? After a “getting-used-to-it” period where we had to patrol the hallways, we received excellent cooperation from the students and there were no more students in hallways than when the teachers sat on guard duty.

Mixed Messages

Shortly after arriving at the school I decided that, if we wanted our teachers to focus on teaching, we had to show them that their time should be spent focusing on teaching. It was a mixed message to say, on one hand that teaching was the most important work in our school, and turn right around and assign teachers to numerous non-teaching duties. So, we removed teacher duties, including lunch, and what our district referred to as “extra-duty assignments,” which were actually part of the teachers’ contracts. I decided to unilaterally eliminate those assignments to give teachers more planning time.

The Bottom Line

Raising the achievement of each and every student is not easy and certainly not convenient. Even when we focus one hundred percent of our time on teaching and learning, we still have a long way to go. Leading schools today is not like it used to be. It's not about the ABCs (Administration By Convenience). It is convenient to assign teachers to extra duties, but we must recognize that doing so dissipates the energies of our teachers and detracts from our true mission--teaching and learning.