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We think words are important here at TM4T Towers, and we mull quite a bit over meaning. Not 'meaning' in the dictionary sense, but 'what does this word mean to teachers?'.
If you got 100 teachers to talk about what 'prioritisation' meant to them, there are likely to be two components to their discussion. One component would be essentially logical - they would talk about doing things in a sensible order, and deciding how much time to spend on things.
The other aspect of their discussion, though, would be more emotional, discussing what things are important to them individually, and where their own personal priorities lie. It is this aspect of prioritisation which dabbles a teacher's toes in the cesspool of stress. Apart from anything else, prioritisation can be complicated. One common mistake is to prioritise by category - this means that you put everything into little pre-labelled piles, which have pre-defined priorities. You might for example, have a pile labelled 'child protection' and another labelled 'lost property'. The former would obviously take precedence over the latter. Or would it? There are a lot of bureaucratic missives to be read about child protection, while an e-mail about how Jason has lost his grandad's World War II medal which he brought in for Holocaust Memorial Day might be pretty darned important.
The question is this: do we really want to agonise over our moral and ethical standpoint every time we skim our ticklists? I don't think so. In TM4T we try to avoid the p-word altogether, though obviously we do need to make decisions about how and when we do things. The key words in our method are decision, estimation and sequencing.
We first of all make a decision, when each piece of work looms over the horizon and lands in our trembling hands: are we going to do this or not? That's the extent of our prioritisation. If the answer is 'yes' (in teaching, it tends to be) then we estimate: 'how long is this going to take?'. Then, using our pre-defined time-slots (ticks-and-twos, tens, X-time, and rainy day projects) we schedule it. We do need to be aware of deadlines of course, but we approach those using logic, not emotion. This means we avoid them, doing work well in advance of any stress-zone.
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