TM4T Setting Up Your System 2.1.11 - Understanding your Students (Elves)

You can view your students from many different perspectives: as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge, as raw creatures whose behaviour must be trained, as little adults to be treated with respect.  In this step of setting up your time management system, however, they are just Elves. You should review your timetable, and review your classes with a single minded perspective: your students' sole function - during this piece of analysis - is to work for you and to carry out routine adminstrative tasks.

The keyword here is creativity, and you should be as imaginative and determined as possible in removing real work from your schedule and substituting a supervisory role. Here are the key points in using your dear students as virtual slave-labour.

1. Identify your co-operative classes and co-operative students early, and look for work that they can do routinely. 'Routinely' means that after a few weeks you don't have to tell them to do it,it just happens. Take particular care with your Year 7 classes, to inculcate good habits, and think hard about the last class of the day. Whatever you have to do straight after school ends, try to get them to do it instead.

2. Get into the habit of giving constant, intemperate, sincere praise. If you have it in your power to give rewards, give them generously. Aim to be reprimanded by some Head of Year because of your generosity in giving house-points, credits, well-done cards, or whatever mechanism your school uses.

3. Don't just have 'prefects' or special friends in the classroom, rotate duties, and seek to involve everyone. Use competition between classes and groups to motivate. Encourage the belief that a culture of co-operative effort is kind-of-normal.

4. Think - really stop and think - about what work you are doing immediately after school and immediately before school. Could any of it, or all of it, be done by elves? Could you change the way you work so it COULD be done by elves?

5. Challenge yourself. In the ideal world you should not be doing any carrying, lifting, bagging, checking, sorting, tidying, or counting.  Are you? If you are, fix it.

6. Never carry anything round the school or to the staffroom, or to your car. This means that you should pack materials securely in crates, bags etc so they are light enough to be carried by your weediest Year 7 pupil. Your mental image should not be some hulky Year 11 hefting a crate of marking; think of a small procession of Year 7 students each carrying a small portion of your marking.