ABSTRACT
The work that teachers do away from children, preparing lessons, marking work, recording results, and organising materials for learning, is the most invisible part of their job. Some time is spent on preparation at school, for example at lunch time or before teaching begins. However, much of it (for our teachers, more than half of preparation time) is conducted privately at home, away from school. A considerable amount of it is done at weekends or in the evenings. How much time any individual teacher spends on preparation is probably a mystery, even to his or her colleagues. From previous research in this country and elsewhere (Hilsum and Cane 1971, Hargreaves 1991, Handal 1991), we know a little about how teachers spend their time on preparation, and what proportion of the working week is devoted to it. However, some key issues, such as how much time a typical, experienced teacher needs to spend on preparation, have not been examined systematically. Moreover, there is the further important question of the relationship of time on preparation to the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom, although this is not one on which our data allow us to pronounce.
