Sometimes, of course, more than one role is required in an activity: for example, producing student reports. This is where our task analysis techniques are useul. As far as possible you should break the task down in order to separate your roles, and tackle each step with a different mindset. Here is an example for writing student reports.
- decide when to do what: XA
- figure out what to write: teacher vs analyst
- put the words in a spreadsheet: OA
- mail-merge: OA
- revise and improve: teacher vs XA
- relax: ODT
You will notice that more than one role is still sometimes involved in a task - typically the teacher and one other. This implies that the teacher's conscientious and academic instincts need to be tempered by different perspectives. For example, the analyst may insist that generalised comments are perfectly adequate in some sections of a student report when the teacher wishes to individualise everything; the XA may insist that the reports are perfectly adequate when the teacher really wants to polish them till they are perfect.
So: In order to be efficient stress-free office workers, we teachers may need to change the way we work. Ideally, we also need to change the way we think. We need to stop being so conscientious and pupil-focused all the time, we need to briefly stop caring about learning. We need to be able to switch hats and tackle routine administration work as a process to be done in one standardised and wonderful, efficient, stress-free way.
We need to accept that the attributes which make us good teachers (striving for excellence, being patient, inspirational, compassionate, dedicated, challenging) do not make us good office workers (being brisk, organised, punctual, co-operative, adaptable, tolerant of repetition, and able to switch-off).
In fact, when we decide to 'do office work' we are actually choosing to behave in one of two different ways, to play one of two very different roles - the roles we called XA (Executive Assistant) and OA (Office Administrator) above. It is worth being absolutely clear how these roles are different. Let's sketch out the ideal candidate for each roles based on the kind of work we will be doing in our imaginary office:
In our non teaching work, therefore, we want the XA to work daily for 10-20 minutes on diary-management and task prioritisation. The XA deals with any tick-list item or e-mail which can be done in less than a minute and requires a well-equipped office environment. The OA does any repetitive or routine work at specific times, batched up into chunks of up to 20 minutes, for periods of up to two hours, in a comfortable relaxed environment.
This last sentence - describing what an OA does - embodies several key aspects of TM4T. First of all, in deciding what jobs are to be done with an OA mindset, you will be effectively defining what 'administration' actually means to you (this can and does vary from teacher to teacher). You are deciding that you are going to tackle some of your work without worrying about pedagogic or pastoral issues. For example, you will enter a predicted grade of 'D' into a spreadsheet without worrying about how to improve it; concentrating on completing the spreadsheet quickly and accurately without being distracted. You will also ensure that this 'no worries' mindset is applicable to specific times of the day, and specific locations of your school and home. You will, of course, still worry about your students, but not all of the time.