An analysis of how teachers spend their time (this is expenditure of time by teachers) requires
one to capture the sequencing of activities undertaken by the individual teacher. This
sequencing of activities over a typical hour, day, or week (or any other defined time interval)
is important in time analysis. This sequencing has always been considered as a future
research agenda that required “accounting for in future research efforts” (Avery et al., 1996, p.414). Therefore, this thesis makes significant contributions to the literature and empirical
examination of time-use in teacher’s workloads, by: (i) focusing on the teacher as the unit of
analyses, (ii) presenting a conceptual framework of teachers’ time-use, and (iii) providing a
suite of empirical models to support the conceptual framework. The theoretical framework
presented in the thesis, as well as the model and its empirical components, – in particular, the
use of activity budgets, time budgets, and time shares that capture the dynamics of teacher
time allocation behaviour, have been identified as often ignored in the literature. So, in this
thesis, the duration and timing of teachers’ activities is examined and expressed in terms of
time budgets and time shares. Dummy variables are also created in order to capture some of the salient properties presented in the qualitative data. The time-space separation of activities
must be observed strictly.
In this chapter key estimating variables that are of interest to teachers, planners and
academics, and affect teachers’ workloads and time budgets and time shares, are explored. The selection of the variables is motivated by the literature on teachers’ time-use, the impact
of time-use on schooling, as well as some stylised facts and past findings on how teachers use
their time. It is of interest, therefore, to examine how teachers allocate time, and assess the
sensitivity of these time allocations to institutional and personal factors, and the likelihood
The choice of explanatory variables and the empirical models are all aimed at having a peek
into the blackbox of models of teacher time allocation and are inextricably linked to the
economic models of individual and collective time-use. This link is not coincidental but is
grounded in models of the household time-use choices because of (i) the link between
teachers’ private time and public time, (ii) the link between teacher’s work and teacher’s
leisure, and (iii) the general or specific tradeoffs in teacher time allocation behaviour. The art
and act of income generation for each teacher’s private time and public time, and also the tradeoffs between private and public time, require different investments in the respective
times. The time budget survey and 24-hour diaries used in the study cross over private and
public time, and capture data on a phenomenon (teachers’ time-use) that occurs both in time
and space and in the context of the school and home environment. In the polychronic time
framework that teachers are assumed to work within, it is clearly the case that out-of-school
activities are also performed and synchronised into school-time.
The individual teacher ultimately serves as a useful unit for analysis and planning, since the
teacher’s time allocation behaviour shows - the allocation of effort, the specialisation of effort and the extent to which time is used as both a resource and also a constraint. Educational
change may disrupt the observed patterns of time allocation or represent a different type of
constraint to education workers. Clearly, it is often hard to predict the effects of educational
policy on each individual teacher; however, the responsiveness to change by individuals is
captured if the patterned behaviours of teachers are analysed or understood in terms of time
budgets and time shares across selected sets of activities.
Although such an approach is purely quantitative, more can be extracted from previous data
on time-use by using qualitative analyses to complement the quantitative assessment of
workloads of teachers, teachers’ work lives and time allocations. The conceptual framework of the teachers’ thumbprint presented in Chapter 3, and the empirical component thereof
presented in this chapter (Chapter 4), both contribute to an understanding of how qualitative
and quantitative data on teachers’ time allocation can provide that theoretical and empirical peek into the black box of teacher time-use. The variable public time (daily time-use) is
useful for understanding teachers’ time allocation. However, during public time a lot of activities are pursued (singularly or jointly as the case might be). In that regard, it is
imperative to partition public time into various activity times, and then look at those activity
times in terms of their share of total public time. Initial reaction to this approach is that public
time for teachers has been changed from polychronic time to monochronic time. That is only
the case if each of the time budgets or time share equations is estimated independently of any
other time budget or time share equation. In a model where all activity times are estimated
simultaneously, clearly the framework is still within the polychronic time framework. In this
thesis, the estimation of the time budgets and time shares as a system, using a suite of techniques, makes the analyses of time allocation essentially polychronic.