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This is an article in a series by the Teacher Welfare program area of the Alberta Teachers’ Association.
Teachers are professionals who are employed by school boards. This arrangement continues to cause tension between teachers and their employing school boards as teachers seek to exert themselves as professionals and school boards seek to control their employees.
The skills and knowledge certificated teachers in Alberta possess are codified in the Teaching Quality Standard. Teachers employ the skills of their profession in the instruction of students under the care of one of the 62 public and separate school boards in Alberta.
Teachers’ payment—salaries and benefits—is for the professional service they provide. Payment is defined through the collective agreement between the Alberta Teachers’ Association and teachers’ respective boards.
Teachers expect certain conditions under which they will provide professional service. Public education in Alberta is organized under the School Act by publicly elected local school boards that employ teachers. Teachers do not own their classrooms, charge individual parents fees based on service provided or employ their own assistants. Such an individual payment scheme would be contrary to the goals of public education. Teachers, therefore, as employees of school boards, negotiate payment for their professional services and the conditions under which they will provide those services as a collective under the provisions of the Labour Relations Code. Most simply, we attempt to leverage our position as employees to assert our rights as professionals.
The conditions of practice include all the structures required by teachers to provide their best possible professional service. Teachers know that providing that service requires many hours of effort and that more effort put into preparation by teachers means better learning for students. Research conducted by Economic Policy Committees (EPCs—the committees of teacher volunteers who direct bargaining in each local) indicates that teachers spend on average 1–1.5 hours in preparation and assessment for every hour of instruction. Therefore, teachers who instruct for 5.3 hours a day can expect to spend 5.3–8 hours in preparation. Capping a teacher’s instructional time would mean more time for preparation. This does not mean that students would be instructed for fewer hours.
The time teachers spend instructing or undertaking other assigned tasks, such as PD, staff meetings and supervision, is called assigned time. A cap on assigned time would likewise ensure adequate time for preparation. As teachers well know, capping what can be assigned during the school day does not cap teacher’s full work day because of the work associated with providing instruction. Instead it would provide at least some time during the school day for teachers to do the work necessary to provide high quality instruction.
Another condition of practice is class size and composition. How many students can a teacher reasonably provide quality instruction to? Again, teachers know that the different needs of students in a class affect a teacher’s ability to provide professional services to each student. Combining class size and class composition is necessary to produce an accurate class size number.
At present, teachers have little in the way of collective agreement language on the conditions of professional practice. Based on surveys conducted by EPCs, it is apparent that teachers realize that they, not the school board and central office officials, must set the conditions of their own professional service.
If these conditions are negotiated into collective agreements, then they have been agreed to by teacher representatives, central office officials and school board trustees. That agreement is then ratified by teachers and the school board. Any further disagreement about the conditions in the collective agreement can be solved through the disputes resolution mechanism in the collective agreement. Language on conditions needs to be easily implemented and workable in each school, while still providing the necessary limits required for the best possible professional service.
Economic policy committees are now developing opening proposals for bargaining, and these will be presented at bargaining unit general meetings in each local. Teachers interested in the conditions under which they will be providing professional service should read those opening proposals and attend meetings.
