TM4T Techniques 1.1.1.1 Task Analysis - Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in what you do.  For a company like BP, stakeholders might include customers, shareholders, employees, governments, and environmental groups.

For a teacher, the stakeholders might be - oh heck, you're smart enough to work that out.

Now, many teachers find that their non-teaching time is largely taken up by urgent, but relatively unimportant tasks. If you are going to overcome this problem, you must understand why this is the case.

It is because the people who are responsible for this work are typically either (i) students or (ii) the teacher's immediate superiors. These are both immensely important stakeholders in a teacher's working life - their wishes cannot be easily ignored. You may feel that a task is relatively unimportant (perhaps a student wants you to clarify a minor comment you wrote on his essay, or perhaps your head of department wants you to show them how to log in to an educational website) but if the most important people in your life think that they are important, you have a problem.

An efficient teacher needs to develop two techniques to protect their 'free' periods. Firstly they need to develop polite, assertive personal skills: 'Don't worry about that comment; remind me to explain what I meant next lesson'; 'Let me show you how to log-on to that website after school, it'll only take five minutes, but I'm in the middle of something right now'.

Secondly, teachers need to find places to do important work where the likelihood of interruption is small - read about location awareness here.

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