Informal/Formal Learning and Workload among Ontario Secondary School Teachers. NALL Working Paper.

Following up on an earlier national survey study of Canadian teachers' formal and informal learning, this study had 13 Ontario secondary teachers keep detailed logs of their day and evening activities, along with notations about what they may have learned as a result of engaging in each activity, for 7 consecutive days in late 1999, and again in early 2000. Following an analysis of the diaries, researchers conducted telephone interviews with four of the teachers to further explore their formal and informal learning, particularly pertaining to several province-wide schooling reform initiatives being introduced at the time. The diaries revealed an average teacher workload of 48.7 hours per week. These actual hours of work represented approximately 17 percent more hours per week than the hours calculated by these same teachers when asked in the earlier Phase One survey simply to estimate their weekly workload. The diaries also indicated that these teachers spent an average of 7 hours per week in informal learning specifically about schooling and teaching-related matters through various intentional learning activities. They spent an average of 6 hours per week in intentional informal learning pertaining to a wide variety of other subjects. Appendixes include the original diary survey package, the February revised diary package, and miscellaneous data from the CIF/NALL Survey, 1998-9. (Contains 55 bibliographic references, 17 endnotes, and 6 tables.) (SM)