TM4T - The Problem 3 - A Teacher's Training

Teaching involves a lot of office work, but teachers usually receive no training, or very little training, in good office practice. 

Frequently, role models adopt a lofty position which implicitly disdains administrative work, which lacks the gravitas and purpose of academia in general, and pedagogy in particular.

As a consequence new teachers frequently develop bad habits early in their career which simply cannot cope with high workloads. Using TM4T, you can learn how to do things the right way, and concentrate your efforts on teaching, not bureaucracy. You can claw back your life ten-minutes-at-a-time and find yourself the time to teach well.

Many of the basic tools of time-management are familiar to teachers: sometimes taught to them in schools under the heading of exam technique, often covered in university under study skills, sometimes even revisited in teacher training.

Unfortunately, teachers frequently learn very basic theories, which are not flexible enough for their busy, complicated and sometimes stressful lives.

Time Management is a complex, multi-faceted topic, and there is a huge range of techniques and tricks to choose from. TM4T selects the best of these and tailors them to offer exactly what a busy teacher needs

Teachers &Time Management

I am sometimes asked: 'why do so few teachers use time-management techniques?'

The answer lies in abstraction. Teachers like to work with ideas - it's in their training, sometimes in their genes. Teachers tend to strip away the physical veneer of what is happening and look at the underlying, higher-level constructs (technically, something shouldn't be underlying and higher-level at the same time, but I think you know what I mean). When a teacher is sitting there, marking, in their heads they are 'assessing learning' or 'providing formative feedback'. When a teacher replies to a memo, they might be 'addressing a parental concern' or 'providing curriculum insight'.

Now, a lot of the techniques on this website work in exactly the opposite way: a kind of abstraction in reverse. This means stripping away the ideas, the underlying concepts and the higher-level thinking, and just looking at the physical basis of an event. A teacher, sitting there, marking? They should be sitting correctly. They're writing on a bit of paper, then writing a number next to a name.

'Addressing a parental concern'? This is taking a piece of paper from a pigeonhole, writing on it, and putting it back in another pigeonhole.

Now, you can understand why teachers are reluctant to think like this. It lacks nobility, doesn't it? However, if we occasionally stop, strip away some layers of meaning, and look at what we're actually doing we frequently find that we are being horribly inefficient, and even inviting stress by our reactive way of working.

Navigation:

To continue to read the pages in training-course-order, click here

To go back to TM4T home, click here

To return to where you've just been, click the 'Back' button in your browser and continue reading at this reference number: