Promoting Pedagogical Pruning: Helping Faculty Visualize, Prioritize, and Pare Back Instructional Tasks
Everyone I’ve ever worked with seems to agree that faculty are overloaded. And yet, when I’m asked to develop a training program, facilitate a workshop, or give a talk, I’m usually asked to introduce faculty to something new. I’m rarely asked to include time for reflection so attendees can identify what they’re already doing right. And I’m never asked to help faculty identify what they might cut from their to-do list entirely.
I’d like to offer more workshops that encourage faculty to do a bit of mindful task trimming—a sort of pedagogical pruning session, if you will. This process isn’t something I take lightly. I like teaching, and I really like plants, and clipping new buds and branches can feel like a tiny death. But I also recognize that pruning is an essential step for sustainable growth.
Assigning Real Numbers to Instructor Time Constraints
In 2014, the Obama administration issued guidelines to help institutions estimate how much time instructors should spend on instructional tasks outside of class time. (The original document has been removed from the U.S. Treasury Department website, but you can view an excerpt here.) While these guidelines were created to help institutions determine when adjuncts should be classified as full-time employees, the formula for instructional task time is relevant for both part-time and full-time faculty.
According to these guidelines:
For each hour spent in the classroom, an additional 1.25 hours (75 minutes) should be allocated for instructional tasks.
Additional service requirements such as office hours and mandatory meetings should not be included in the 1.25-hours allocated for instructional tasks.
So, for a typical three-credit hour course, the formula looks like this:
3 class meeting hours x 1.25 = 3.75 hours per week spent on tasks outside of class
If this information is new to you or it’s slipped your mind, let it sink in for a minute. For the vast majority of college courses in the US, instructors are supposed to spend less than four hours per week on all of the following tasks for that course:
creating, reviewing, and curating course materials
designing and revising learning activities and assessments
evaluating, grading, and providing feedback on student work
responding to questions from students and providing individualized support outside of office hours
…and everything else we ask them to do. For example, keeping up with new technology. Or “minor” administrative tasks—like serving as the first line of defense in the war between academic integrity and the multi-trillion-dollar AI industrial complex.
Visualizing the Formula
It can be difficult to wrap our brains around just how little time instructors have to juggle all the tasks on their plates. To address this, I created an interactive tool to help instructors visualize their workload.
The goal of this tool is to help instructors:
visualize where their time is going
recognize when they’re over-allocated
prioritize how much time to allocate to specific tasks
think through which tasks they might cut in an effort to “rebalance”
Inputs can be adjusted to account for different course loads and term lengths, and instructors can experiment with different proportions as they think through how they want to allocate their time.
The tool is a work in progress, and there are several features I’m thinking of adding or improving. Feel free to share feedback in the comments or via email.
Conclusion: Battle Burnout with a Bonsai Master’s Mindset
It’s easy for faculty (and anyone supporting faculty) to feel overwhelmed these days. Higher ed is facing so many challenges, and it can seem futile to focus on individual actions when larger, systemic issues undermine our work.
I can’t single-handedly increase faculty compensation or the number of hours instructors are credited for working in a given week. But I can help faculty document where their time is going, prioritize tasks based on their impact on student success, and identify lower-impact tasks that can be pruned.
I can also remind instructors that pruning isn’t lazy or heartless—quite the opposite. Pruning a spindly shrub allows it to focus its energy on developing deeper roots and sturdier branches. (If that metaphor isn’t going to fly at your next budget meeting, I’ve also heard that healthy shrubs take fewer sick days and are 17% more productive.)
Instructors might be a bit more complex than shrubs, but both need to conserve their energy and be selective about where they invest it in order to thrive.
This is really useful and easy to use - thank you!