When you have established your TM4T system for sources, you need to make sure that you have the necessary buckets in place to receive work. A bucket is the logical opposite of a source - it is a place that your work goes to, whereas a source is a place work comes from.
Here is a list of acceptable buckets:
1. Your Ticklist and Ten-List
Your Ticklist will be an important Source of work, but it will also act as an important Bucket too. Now that we are starting to look at Buckets, we are starting to deal with the key tools in TM4T. More, much more, on Ticklists here.
2. Your Weekly Plan
When new work appears on the horizon, we don't want to treat it as a disruption, we want to treat it as a project (if these terms don't mean much to you, read about types of work here). This means that we schedule it for one of our pre-planned timeslots. More on Weekly Plans here
3. Your Yearly Plan
Your Yearly Plan is important, because it allows you to schedule tasks outside your current weekly work horizon. More on Yearly Plans here
4. Your list of Rainy Day projects
Teachers' lives are busy and too often tasks or ideas which can't be done immediately get forgotten. You should have a special secret corner of your Notepad where you jot down ideas - no, scribble down ideas - in the frantic rush of term-time. Then, hopefully, in the long haze of summer, you may have time and inclination to look at these again.
5. Your Elves' corner
Wherever possible, a sensible teacher gets students to help adminster their own learning. More on Elves' corner here and here
6. Your filing system
You should have a sensible filing system, which considers both physical and electronic filing - if you have the ability to scan documents, try to store as much teaching material as possible electronically. More here and here...
7. Your Schemes of Work and Lesson Scripts
It is a fundamental principle of FT2T that we try to write things down only once. This means that we don't jot down lesson objectives on a scrap of paper, or type them onto a lesson plan, we start off with the PowerPoint presentation that we are going to use in the lesson - our Lesson Script. In a similar way, anything that needs to be done in a lesson should be added - discreetly - to our Scripts. It is easy to misunderstand how Lesson Scripts can be used as buckets - for an example, click here.
8. Your Post Out tray
Wherever possible you should avoid acting as a post-boy or post-girl for your school. Do not hand-deliver memos to department in-trays; you should even hesitate to use pigeonholes or postboxes, unless there is really no admin support available. For physical post (internal and external) you should seek to have one out-tray which is handled by your school admin team. If this is in the School Office, you should visit there at most once a day.
10. Your e-mail 'Sent' box
E-mail is a wonderful, if much mis-used tool. Electronic communication is by far the most efficient way of getting information to colleagues, but is also the most efficient means of annoying them. For key tips on working efficiently and sympathetically, click here