If you’ve ever worked in education, you know teachers work far longer hours than students and parents may think. While school may end at 2:00 or 3:30, teachers spend hours outside of regular classroom time on grading, planning, prep work, and other necessary tasks each week — plus coaching soccer or supervising an after-school club in many cases!
With teachers typically signing contracts for 180 days of work per year, teaching may sound like a sweet summers-off job. In reality, many teachers use their summers to prepare for STEM and other courses, even though they’re usually not paid for it.
The Amount of Time Teachers Spend Prepping for STEM Courses
According to a report released by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, teachers spend an average of 95 minutes per day at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. This time is in addition to an average of 90 minutes at school dedicated to mentoring, attending staff meetings, providing after-school help for students, and collaborating with peers.
While we don’t have any specific data for STEM teachers, it seems reasonable to assume they spend at least as much time on prep work as any other teacher. Many STEM courses require setting up equipment and technology that isn’t needed in other courses, such as tech learning programs, lab equipment, and engineering project materials. What’s more, many STEM teachers have to do extra learning because they are teaching skills that were not commonly taught when they were students, such as coding, engineering design, or how to use more the complex features of Google Workspace.
With all of that work looming over their heads, STEM teachers could use a break!
How to Reduce Teachers’ Workloads
You can only do so much to reduce a teacher’s workload, but you can make life easier for STEM teachers by using a curriculum that includes all the resources they need. That way, they don’t have to spend precious hours hunting down activity ideas, creating presentations, and coming up with lesson plans when they’re already overwhelmed.
Yeti Academy is a STEM learning platform created with both teachers and students in mind. Each of our STEM modules includes all the lesson plans, activities, slide shows, tests, and other resources teachers need, ready to be printed or used in their electronic format.
We provide a wide variety of project-based STEM modules for upper elementary and middle school classes, including:
- Yeti Code, our flagship multiplayer coding game for multiple levels and grades
- Theme Parks, a Google Workspace curriculum for grades 6-9
- Sports Med, a biology/life science curriculum for grades 6-9
- Sports PR Agency, a digital citizenship course for grades 6-9
- Bike Shop, a computational thinking course for grades 6-9
- Snowboard Shop, a Google Workspace curriculum for grades 3-5
- Super Citizenship, a digital citizenship course for grades 3-5
- The Pizzeria, a computational thinking course for grades 3-5
All Yeti Academy modules are methodically prepared by a highly accredited curriculum designer with years of STEM teaching experience. We know what it takes to help STEM teachers succeed!
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