TM4T Techniques 4.1.2 - Location Awareness - Sources

You need to avoid drifting around the school - and drifting through life - picking up work here and there; and collecting metaphorical apples from wherever your co-workers choose to leave them. You need to identify the physical sources of our work (for example, our staff-room pigeonhole) and decide which of them helps us to work efficiently and effectively. In order to do this, we will look at everything that we do in the same way, using this model:

Some teachers find this kind of model easy to understand, and like the clarity and simplicity involved. Others find these models too abstract, and think that they lack relevance.  An example helps to clarify difficulty; read one here.

The key point here is that we need to consider carefully where our work comes from, where we do it, and where it goes to. In all three cases, there are only two possible answers:  'as few places as possible' and 'the most efficient places available'.

If this sounds picky or trivial to you, then check out the scale of payback which we are looking for.

If you don't recognise this icon, read about the magic formula here.

So, let's start off by looking at sources - where we get our work from - the apples that we put in our basket (if this sounds like gibberish, read about apples here). We really want to reduce the number of sources as much as possible, and the list below summarises the sources you should work with.

In order to reduce the number of sources, we introduce the idea of a collection-point, where work can be gathered and stored ready for processing. But... we're getting kind of technical here, and it's really unnecessary, because TM4T takes care of a lot of the analysis for you, by TELLING you what sources to use. This is a magic and important list. Click here to read it.

Now hopefully you are pretty impressed by this list. Just FOUR sources of work. This means that you can sit down at your time and place of choice and rattle through your administration work.

Of course, when you look at your working life, you are likely to find that you have many more physical sources of work than those described above. You may find your life similar to the teacher described here.