the primary head's blog

I’m the guy who does their job. You must be the other guy.

Det. Sgt. Dignam [The Departed]

 

Teachers work long hours: a survey conducted in 2013 claimed that primary school teachers worked, on average, 59.3 hours a week. Now, I’m sure non-teachers at this point, will start banging on about our long holidays, but we can quickly counterpoint that with tales of lost evenings and weekends. Whichever way you cut it, teachers work long hours.

But do teachers work well? The majority of teachers I have known over my career work hard (not just long) but fewer have worked well. In terms of worker productivity, research has suggested that working over 40 hours a week is actually counter-productive in terms of job effectiveness. Studies have shown that though a 60 hour week may provide a short term ‘boost’ in productivity, over time, this productivity declines. Interestingly, this decline in effectiveness, even when felt by the individual, does not often result in them reducing their work hours. This is likely due to a perceived logic that if they work less they will achieve less. They have become painfully unaware of what is really holding them back.

In my experience, within education, I would say that the teachers who miss the most deadlines, do not complete tasks well, fall behind in their day to day duties, are often those teachers who work the longest. They are often not however, the teachers who work well. They are teachers who give all their energy to their school and yet they deliver ever diminishing returns.

They are not necessarily bad teachers but they have become victims of their own chaos. To see them in action is to witness a whirlwind of stress desperately trying to run up a downward travelling escalator.

Who is to blame?

Firstly, you would be right to question the school’s leadership. It is the duty of school leaders to enable teachers to be effective. Part of this is in managing teacher workload. To do this well, leaders must get their scales out and make sure that there is a respectable balance between national and school expectations. You can’t expect teachers to thrive if you’re suffocating them with an overloaded workflow. I am not advocating thoughtless cuts to whatever initiatives you’ve got going or ignoring national policy just to curry favour with the staff. Instead I am suggesting some critical thinking, at a senior level, around ensuring realistic expectations within the working week.

Leaders should also ensure that teachers have an appropriate level of autonomy with regards to their workload. To teach is simple: teach, assess, plan. To be a teacher is anything but. Every week there will be something that prevents a teacher from just teaching. Therefore, teachers need to be in control of their workload so that they can deal with the ‘here and now’ priorities, whilst not losing sight, or control, of the big picture: helping children achieve. More importantly, they need to manage their workload without fear of repercussions. Leaders, more than anyone else in the school because they’ve been there before, should understand the subtleties that are required for a teacher to do their job. Leaders should know that a brief absence of marking in the books is likely to occur for a multitude of perfectly understandable reasons and is not proof that a teacher is in need of some managerial support.

But what about the teacher who can’t manage their workload? Well, they need to take a good look around. If everyone around them is also drowning in a sea of half-finished tasks, unmarked books and missed deadlines, well, read the above paragraphs; better still, print them off and hand them in to your SLT. If you’re the only one however…if you’re the only teacher who is always the last to arrive in staff meetings, never visits the staff room, has a pile of unmarked books permanently in the boot of your car, is the last person to find out about school initiatives, regularly requires extensions on deadlines, loses emails, fails to keep a tidy classroom, leaves displays up until the colours fade and eats their lunch on the toilet because that’s the only spare minute you have…well, then you’re the one who needs to change.

Chances are you’re in education for the right reason. Chances are you can’t think of another job you’d rather do. Chances are you assume you have to work this way in order to be good. Well, let me be blunt: you’re not that good. Nobody is. Nobody can do all the jobs of a teacher all of the time. If they try, they end up burning out. To be good you’ve got to be effective and being effective means taking your foot off the gas once in a while. Effective teachers know how to prioritise in order to meet the demands of the day whilst keeping the big picture in plain view. Effective teachers can ease off on a particular ‘expectation’ one week, in order to fulfil some other demand, safe in the knowledge that they have the capacity to pick it up again, before any harm is done. Effective teachers optimise their workload so the hours they do spend in the classroom are worth their weight in gold stickers.

So, whether you’re a teacher or a leader, when it comes to workload: make sure you’re the guy who does their job, and not the other guy.

 

Lesson observations are like mirrors. The observer holds up the looking glass allowing the teacher to see their reflected image. In doing so, the teacher is given the opportunity to make adjustments, so that the idealised image they imagine, is akin to their true likeness. Now, we all know that when you look into a mirror, the image staring back at you will be either good, bad, or just plain ugly. Of course, all teachers are more than capable of photoshopping their teaching during an observation, and any observer can choose to see exactly what they like. In fact, if we have learnt anything over the years in education, it’s that when it comes to lesson observations, and as far as teachers and observers are concerned, there are some good, some bad, and some downright, well, I think you get the point.

The effectiveness, of an observation to hold up a mirror that is as kind as it is true, will depend largely on the attitude, experience and educational capacity of both teacher and observer. But how do you work out, whether you’re observing or being observed, if the next observation is going to be worth the feedback form it’s printed on?

Well, in order to get inside the mind-set of a teacher or an observer, use this handy flow-diagram to navigate your way through the complicated maze of attitudes, assumptions and practices of all those who observe and are observed.

The teacher

The observer

So there you have it. An opportunity to peer through the looking glass and see for yourself what could be facing you during the next observation. It’s a bit like looking into a hand-mirror before you go full-frontal. You may feel unable to do anything to change the reflections of those around you, but one thing’s for sure, you definitely won’t reach your potential if, when you do look into the mirror, you don’t like what’s staring you in the face.

Do you miss levels? I bet you do. I bet you miss the way they allowed you to carve up learning into bite-size chunks of certainty. Not to mention the ease by which they helped you measure progress, and we’re not talking about the kind of progress you see in books, goodness me no, we’re talking about progress along a made up scale. Yep, levels sure were helpful. But now they’re gone.

What are we going to do?

That’s a really good question and one that we’re really happy to answer.

Firstly, don’t worry. Because at ‘Targeted Innovation Tracking Systems’ (TITS) we’ve done the hard work for you. Let us explain how you can use our friendly and easy to understand system of assessments to become the teacher you never knew you couldn’t be.

First we took the national curriculum and cut up each subject into easy to understand categories that we call ‘learning themes’. Each learning theme has then been divided up into bite-size and manageable learning points that we call ‘outcome goals’. Each learning theme contains around 36 outcome goals and these have been carefully differentiated or ‘layered’ across every year group to make it easier. In total there are approximately 275 outcome goals per subject and to make things even easier we have broken them up into levels of importance: these are your ‘test likely’ outcome goals and we recommend you focus on these first.

But how do I actually know if a child has achieved an outcome goal?

That’s a really good question and one that we’re really happy to answer.

We believe that TITS should be user friendly. So we’ve created a brand new, and not like levels, system of assessment. For each outcome goal there are four stages of understanding that a child will go through from novice to master (we are fully mastery curriculum accredited):

A. Missed the net – the child cannot do this at all, the ball is too heavy and the goal is too small and far away.

B. Kicked it – the child has tried and their learning ball is starting to move in the right direction.

C. Back of the net – the child has scored, brilliant learning.

D. Instant replay – the child has reviewed their learning in slow motion and is now a premiership learner.

We believe that this simple 4 step system appeals to children because it is based on playing games. Incidentally TITS also provide pupil goal cards, stickers, wall charts, fridge magnets and hanging mobiles and it is possible to use the school’s sports premium money to pay for the subscription.

Each outcome goal step has also been sub-divided into three categories that allow for additional fine tuning by the teacher. This is a deeper level of teacher assessment that is easy to understand and use:

1. A.1 Cold A.2 Tepid A.3 Hot
2. B.1 Cold B.2 Tepid B.3 Hot
3. C.1 Cold C.2 Tepid C.3 Hot
4. D.1 Cold D.2 Tepid D.3 Hot

This deeper level allows for greater teacher autonomy when assessing children. It should be used daily in order to inform your planning.

This all sounds really easy and sensible but how do I actually assess?

That’s a really good question and one that we’re really happy to answer.

The best TITS are electronic and our TITS are no exception. Once you log on to your class each of your pupils will be displayed. Simply click on their name and click on all the correct outcome goal steps. This will then provide you with a best fit assessment indicator. For example, in reading the assessment indicator will be prefaced by the letter R followed by the learning theme followed by the outcome goal followed by the outcome step followed by the deep level teacher assessment: R-comp-25-C-2. This, as you can probably tell, means that in comprehension, the child has achieved, to some degree, some knowledge and understanding appropriate for their age.

Once all the outcome goals have been assessed TITS will provide you with an overall score for that child. The overall score system amalgamates all the precise data inputted by the teacher and gives a best-fit assessment based on the child’s age. In Year 3 for example, a child can score anywhere between 7 and 8 up to two decimal places because that’s how old and how good a Year 3 child can be. At the end of Year 3, a child with a score of 7.11 is not achieving whereas a child with a score of 8.89 is achieving really well. It’s so simple and easy to use and works all the way through the school.

How do I start?

That’s a really good question and one that we’re really happy to answer.

Even though levels have gone and have no place within the new curriculum, we still think it’s important to implant your old levels data into the new system to help get you started. A TITS implant is a simple one click procedure that will provide you with an estimated new assessment. Below are some key conversions to help you get started.

Old    TITS

2B    7.5

4B    11.5

From this you can see a simple progress measure that we call our ‘expected upwards trajectory aim’. This expected upwards trajectory aim allows you to set targets and review progress in a way that is meaningful and easy to understand. TITS will also automatically light up if a child is not making their expected trajectory allowing teachers to target key pupils through the outcome goal section tool.

As you can see, levels may be dead, but there’s definitely life after levels. We hope that you agree and more importantly, we hope you like our TITS.