ABSTRACT
Tim Walker is an American teacher who has taught in Finland for several years. The author had just graduated from college without taking a single education course. But once he started teaching at a Finnish public school, he apologized to his wife for not believing her. Collaboration is virtually impossible when teachers are overwhelmed. Teachers in Walker school were not just collaborating in the traditional sense, by planning and teaching lessons together they were truly laboring together, sharing the burdens of teaching with each other. In a recent OECD study, American lower secondary teachers report spending 27 hours per week just on classroom teaching, which is significantly higher than the average of 19 hours across TALIS countries. From his vantage point, American teachers were often too exhausted to benefit from mandated hours of collaboration. More hours of teaching for American educators means that there are more hours of planning and bookkeeping.
