TM4T Background 1.3.5 - Task Analysis Techniques - Vertical Grouping

This page looks at an example of how to re-engineer the way you work. Let's base it on the DFD we showed on an earlier page. This represents the steps an MFL teacher - let's call her Mary - goes through to plan each lesson.

This is a is, of course, a very simple example but it highlights some of the key issues which teachers face in task analysis. These involve the decisions we routinely make about how we group your tasks together. To illustrate this, let's consider how our fictional MFL teacher - Mary - plans her lessons. The table below shows what is involved.

In this diagram, the rows (Y6 French etc) represent the courses Mary has to teach. The columns (Review Previous Lesson etc) show the steps she goes through in planning each lesson. In real life, teachers rarely follow exactly the same steps in planning each lesson, but we'll assume that Mary is particularly thorough - she has 63 lesson planning tasks to plan and do in a typical week.

The big question - the big decision for Mary - is: how should she group these tasks in order to work efficiently?

If Mary is a typical teacher, she will instinctively understand the concepts we have discused above, creating 'activities' as groups of similar tasks. She is likely to group most of her work based on the horizontal rows in the example above; for example a row of tasks might be grouped into an activity of 'Lesson Preparation for Y6 French. The tasks would be done in order, pretty well soup-to-nuts.

Mary is also likely instinctively implement the ideas we have talked about to minimise switching costs, mentally deciding 'while I'm doing French I might as well plan KS3 French for tomorrow'.

The alternative - vertical - approach would involve structuing tasks of a similar type together, based on whether the work requires the same particular mental focus. Mary, like any sensible teacher, will identify obvious economies of scalle - 'Photocopying', for example, would be done as a single activity for all courses.

Now, let's look at Mary's plannning method in a bit more detail.

Mary plans her lessons in a fairly standard, fairly thorough, way (I know, I know, there are things she could do better). She works at her desk in her classroom, and starts by reviewing the students work to remind herself what happened in the previous lesson; she then has a quick look at the scheme of work to position herself in the overall term's objectives. At this point she writes down her lesson objectives, comes up with specific ideas for the next lesson and sketches out a plan. Sometimes, this involves no more than 'follow the activities in the next chapter of the textbook but Mary does try to vary her lessons. When she's happy, Mary prepares the meat of the lesson: she collects lesson resources, prepares an assessment, produces a PowerPoint presentation, photocopies worksheets etc.

The key point here is that this way of working does not really lend itself to much vertical structuring at all. Mary could, of course, review ALL her previous lessons in one great big retrospective, then peruse ALL her schemes of work one after another, but by the time she is ready to brainstorm ideas, she will probably have forgotten about the previous lessons. This just wouldn't work. It is therefore understandable that most teachers adopt a horizontal approach to structuring this kind of work - though of course they will apply common sense to tasks like photocopying. As a general rule, if a task requires creativity or professional judgement, it is unlikely to benefit from economies of scale. Mary's way of working requires a little bit of creativity and professional skill at just about every stage - except photocopying. 

This leads us to an important conclusion: if you want to structure your work in a way that is more efficient, you will most likely have to change the way you work.

What Mary needs to do is to re-engineer her way of working to cram the creative and skilled work into as few steps as possible, to enable the other, unskilled tasks to be grouped together and done more efficiently. Here is an example of a revised DFD, showing a different approach based on Mary's planning method.

This approach is in fact based on a lesson planning method called magpieplanning which focuses on minimising unnecessary effort. You might find the following features useful:

• instead of producing a presentation at the end of her planning, Mary produces a blank, or skeleton presentation as a first step. She adds points she has learnt from the previous lesson, and lesson objectives from the scheme of work, to her presentation as she goes. This means she is not carrying ideas round in her head unnecessarily.

• Mary uses to-do lists to identify any work which is needed on lesson resources or textbook materials. She does any 'thinking' as part of her outline planning and then follows that thinking through mechanically later. This effectively 'de-skills' some tasks. She can therefore gain economies of scale by tackling her to-do list en bloc for several courses.

Grouping tasks together with insufficient thought , in an automatic and simplistic way, results in inefficiency and can lead to stress. Some activities – 'writing student reports', for example - consist of a combination of tasks requiring widely different levels of creativity, energy, rigour, and effort - which should be done separately. Do your creative work at a time when you are feeling creative, then leave the more mechanical aspects for a later time.