Three Evil Monkeys

Well,  I know this is out of context, but I need to jot my thoughts down someplace. I might even find an icon for these peskies:

- multi-tasking: NOT a good idea to mix up teacher-shit¹ with real stuff
- single-handling: NOT a practical approach for the busy teacher
- prioritisation: a bit of a joke with so many priority stakeholders

Notes:
1. I use the seeemingly derogative phrase 'teacher shit' deliberately, and I expect it to cause consternation to a reader.  It is used to help you realise that it is ingrained in a teacher that the professional practices of pedagogy must be dealt with conscientiously, and given precedence over less elevated aspects (ie the rest of your life). This blog expressly advocates an opposite approach. You should periodically refocus and prioritise 'real stuff' over 'teacher shit'

The Script is Not the Play

Indeed. Time for some deep stuff. Metaphors n shit.  The script is not the play. It is really important to realise that a plan represents a possible scenario of what might happen. The reality will be entirely different.

The efficient teacher will NOT do every task on the allotted date, or meet all of her self-imposed deadlines. Sometimes she will be behind plan, sometimes she will be ahead of plan, but at all times she will have a helicopter view of what is happening and what is about to happen (mostly) and is pretty much in control of her life.

What do you mean 'I'm an asshole?'

Oh, I see. It's because in all my examples, I'm making the teacher do marking during vacations and prepare lessons at weekends and stuff like that.

Well, I'm sorry. I really, really hope that your teacher's workload requires you to do no work outside of your regular school day. I also hope that if it does, you can approach the leadership team and ask for some time off.  And I wish you good luck with that.

The fact is that many teacher's end up pulling all-nighters or losing significant 'me-time' because of school commitments.   All I am recommending is that the efficient teacher needs to be in control of this situation.

You CANNOT be serious?

Well, yes, I am. You've clearly guessed that I recommend that the efficient teacher does the same business that I described in the last post for EVERY event in the Department Calendar.

That might sound like a lot of work, but if you think about it, it takes less than a minute to assess each event. Year 11 Assessment 1?  Don't have any assessment material? Then add 'Prepare assessment material' four weeks before the school deadline, add 'Do Year 11 Assessment' three weeks before the deadline and add 'Mark Year 11 Assessment' two weeks before the deadline. Of course, these dates and tasks might  not be appropriate - they will vary from teacher to teacher. And hopefully, there are some school deadlines which just won't apply to you.

When the efficient teacher has done this (whew....) they can do two things:
- firstly, they can see when their REALLY busy weeks are. For example, they may find that they need to prepare assessment material for Year 8 in the same week as they are marking Year 10 tests and getting ready for Open Evening and giving oral exams to Year 11. Better not invite guests round that week, and maybe start looking for some Year 8 assessment material right now.

- secondly, they are NOT going to be caught by surprise. In the example below, some generous soul has put two assessment deadlines immediately after the Christmas vacation. How many teachers will cruise back to school, look at the notice board and think 'Holy Shit and Happy New Year to You Too'. The efficient teacher, though, has given her student the assessments before Christmas, and marked 'em already.

Oh NO - We've Planned Something !!

In the example we've just looked at, a deadline saying 'Year 11 Assessments Complete' is likely to be a school-wide deadline which will be used by the administration staff to produce reports for the school leadership. THIS IS NOT A TEACHER'S DEADLINE. The efficient teacher needs to ask what the department policy is for these assessments, and assuming the answer is 'We would like all teachers to give a written assessment to their Year 11 classes and translate the results into an approximate GCSE Grade', the efficient teacher needs to ADD THE REAL DEADLINES to the calendar.  The revised calendar shows an example, with the key dates tastefully highlighted in puce.

The efficient teacher plans to start this work FOUR WEEKS before the published date (11 October) and identifies how long she needs to design the assessment activity, allows a week for the students to take the test, and gives herself a week (and two weekends) to mark it.  This planning, I emphasize, should be done in September, ideally before the kids even arrive back at school. 

Back to the Gardening Calendar

Now let's start some longer-term planning: something that teacher's are often reluctant to do. We'll use the Department Calendar for this - a COPY of the calendar that our cunning efficient teacher has snaffled for their own purposes.  Let's focus on one inscrutable entry against Thursday 11 October - see it?  It says 'Year 11 Assessment 1 Complete'.  In order to plan effectively, it is really important that a teacher understands what deadlines like this MEAN.  Not 'what it means for the student' or 'what it means to the department' but 'what it means for the individual teacher concerned'.  This question should be asked right at the beginning of the school year, and the efficient teacher should know roughly how much discretion they have, and be able to figure out how much commitment is involved, for every event on the calendar.

Course Content

In order to plan lessons efficiently, a teacher really needs to have LOTS of resources stockpiled in advance.  One helpful - though time-consuming - technique is the MegaPrez.  This ugly word describes a long sequence of presentation slides which represents an entire unit, or in some cases an entire course. These mighty beasts may contain over a hundred slides of text and graphics.

The focus here is on content. Obviously if other aspects are available (assessment, exercises, extension work) they can be included, but the focus is on the raw material of the course - the need-to-know factual stuff.

At the risk of stating the obvious: this material is NOT suitable for feeding to students.  However it IS suitable to raid in order to prepare your student presentations. When you are doing your REAL lesson planning, you really shouldn't have to worry about presenting the basic factual material. This should be pre-prepared in a legible, intelligible, well-layed-out form.

Well, yeah - WHAT about lesson plans??

Don't get me wrong - I absolutely support this holistic business of lesson planning. I believe that:

- efficient teachers should practice this activity daily, either planning the lessons for the current day, or the following day;

- efficient teachers should base their 'lesson planning' on intensive preparation which needs to take place weeks, possibly months before the lesson. This, in most, contexts, would be called 'planning', but we will call it 'lesson scripting' to avoid confusion.

- efficient teachers should focus this 'lesson planning' on purely pedagogic aspects, tailoring their activities, their style and their delivery to each particular class. This should be skilled, challenging and interesting work, and it needs to be done pretty much at the last minute (so you can take the previous lesson's experience into account). The duller, more process-focused aspects of lesson preparation - lesson scripting - should be done well in advance, removed from time-pressure, in a stress free environment....

... AND here's the thing: I am going to say nothing more about this wonderful business of lesson planning, which I hold in such high regard.  There are shed-fulls of excellent books and resources to tell you how to do it.  What I am going to tell you is how to do the preparatory work - so your lesson planning can be done in the time available; and how to tackle the 'other stuff', which gets in the way of good lesson planning.

But what about Lesson Plans?

I'm sure that lots of teachers looked at my list of plans and said: "what about lesson plans?".  Well, the fact is that the stuff we teachers call lesson planning is so broadly-focused that it doesn't really qualify as proper planning at all. It is a holistic activity which we carry out in preparing to teach. It involves not only what the teacher is going to do, but also the individual needs of each specific class, the teacher's own experience and development, as well as the strategies, policies and initiatives of the school.

This is fine, but there are two big problems: firstly, it all takes too long to do properly, and secondly there are far too many other things to do in the short time allowed for planning and preparation.

Once in a lifetime...

... well a bit more often than that, really.  Certainly once at the start of your career, and then every year or so, you should turn each Bread and Butter Lesson (BBL1) into a Lesson Plan Template, using your chosen presentation software (eg MS-PowerPoint).   If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I started off by saying that there were SIX essential planning documents for an efficient teacher. Well this one makes it EIGHT. Here's an example, which is too big to fit neatly...

A Bread and Butter Lesson

                 

We talked about Plans a bit, but I never explained what a Plan is.  A Plan says what you are going to do. Simples. It doesn't have to deal with resources, or techniques, or anything clever. You can add them on later. So in order to make a Plan, you just have to be absolutely clear about what you are going to do and in what order. Here is an example.  This is what I call a Bread-and-Butter lesson. Nothing fancy here - have a read .....                                                       

A Good Scheme of Work

A good Scheme of Work is really simple, like the example shown in the last post. It should be cross-referenced to:

1. The Gardening Calendar, which lists the Resources needed and the timing of presentation;
2. The Lesson Content Source (usually a textbook) which explains what those cryptic Lesson Content phrases actually mean; 
3. The Lesson Plans, which explain in detail what the outcomes, learning objectives, and activities are for each lesson.

If you look closely, you can figure out that the Scheme of Work really comprises two Plans dovetailed together. These are:

1. The Teaching Plan

2. The Assessment Plan

The Scheme of Work is valuable because it summarises in advance

- when assessment takes place

- what homework is intended

- how lessons are to be grouped together.

This last bit is important. It is shown by the vertical lines in the middle of the Scheme of Work. Nearly missed those, didn't you?  In the example, it shows that Weeks 1-4 and Weeks 5-8 are grouped together. This is important for lesson planning. As we shall see (can you feel the suspense building up?)

Schemes of Work - aren't they, like, really complicated?

The Thing to Remember...

The thing to remember is that Lesson Planning is Easy and Fun.

Unfortunately, the fun parts aren't easy, and the easy parts aren't fun.

This is a Department Calendar, dodo...

Now, here's a thing. I've just said that there were SIX kinds of planning document that every efficient teacher needs, and now I'm hitting you with number SEVEN. This is a document - ideally a single big spreadsheet-worksheet - which the school and/or the department should provide for the teacher. It should show all school and department actvities, events and deadlines in one easy-to-read form.

The great news is that if  you can lay your grubby little teacher-hands on a copy of this document, you can just delete the bits you don't care about (Concert by School Choir? No Thanks) and add in any dates which are important or specific to YOU, for example which days you supervise detentions, or when you have your Performance Review. It is really helpful if you can get ALL the key dates on one calendar, and this is the best way for an efficient teacher to do it. Just add in a new column to the right of the existing columns, and away you go...

Don't lose this post - I am going to rant on quite a bit about the column headed Reporting and Assessment Cycle

What the **** is a Department Calendar?

This is a Gardening Calendar, dummy...

An efficient teacher creates a Gardening Calendar for every course she is going to teach, each academic year.  It contains only the most basic information, but it gives a kind-of-map which shows what is going to get taught in each term. Of course, unless there is a miracle, no-one actually keeps exactly to the schedule they draw up at the beginning of the year, but it has three really big advantages:

1. It helps you to be aware if you get a little bit (or even a lot) behind plan
2. It lets you plan important dates (eg trips, moderator appointments) way in advance
3. It allows you to specify what resources you need - like text books - just once, instead of repeating the same stuff on every scheme of work or lesson plan.
4. It makes you find out important stuff, like how many weeks there are in each term.

I know, that's four.

What the **** is a Gardening Calendar?

The Thing about Planning...

Teachers need to make six different types of plan, just to stay ahead of the game. These come under two headings - some of them are specifically to do with Lesson Planning, but the others are exactly the same kind of planning that every professional manager or administrator needs to do.  Teachers get very confused about these two different types of plans.

Eh? What? No, not you, obviously. You don't get confused - you're really smart. It's the other teachers I'm talking about.

Here's the thing about planning....

What this blog is actually about

The theme of the blog is time management. The underlying philosophy of the blog is that teacher's stress results from two main causes - both starting with the letter B. 

1. Behaviour.  There's lots of help out there on the web to support you with this aspect of your work
2. Bureaucracy.  Not so much.  Till now.

There is of course a big difference between the two B's. The first of them is entirely logical - sharing a room with 20-30 maladjusted teenagers is likely to cause stress for any sane adult, but bureaucracy?  Really?   I mean who gets stressed over a few spreadsheets and a crumby boss?  Aren't targets and deadlines just a routine of everyday life, tolerated and handled by every cashier and call-centre minion?  Why is it such a big deal for teachers?  

Do not worry, dear reader. I will not make you work too hard. All of the above questions are rhetorical and I shall answer them all for you over the next few weeks.

Shock Horror

This is the first post of my blog for busy teachers. OK, sit down and make yourself comfortable. Try to relax. This blog may come as a bit of a shock to you. This blog is not - I repeat not - about children's learning. This, of course, means that it is different to pretty much every other Teacher's blog you have ever read. It is not intended to help your students, it is about YOU. We will barely touch on the kids, their learning styles, their educational needs or their behaviour. This is ALL about you.