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Last year during the school holidays, I did some work for my parents which involved a bunch of manual labour tasks. One of which was clearing gravel off a large shared driveway on an industrial site so that we could plot out a road marking line for some painters.
The difficulty was that the ground was covered in a combination of gravel, mud and rubbish which needed to be cleared off before painting. We started with brushes and dustpans before switching to brooms and a shovel.
The more we swept and the more we dug, the more gravel we loosened and the bigger the job became. But instead of stopping to reassess the situation, we stuck our heads down and continued shovelling and sweeping for another 3 hours. At this stage, it was raining and pools of water had formed in the potholes and we couldn't even tell what ground we had or hadn't cleared.
So why did I keep going? Well, I definitely let out a handful of audible grumbles but that just won me looks of annoyance and disappointment. I was being paid to work, not be a nuisance so I just stuck my head down and kept going with a task I didn't believe in.
A few days later since the painters hadn't been able to make it, we had to return to that area and yet again, sweep up the ground. Only then did I find out about other solutions to clearing the area involving machines and better equipment. Yes there would be a big cost, but the labour of four people continuously sweeping is not cheap either. And definitely not time-efficient.
Bringing this back to teaching, what jobs can you think of that feel akin to shovelling gravel? Ones you know are pointless but you suck it up and do anyway.
Do you...?
Record assessment data in paper form and again in digital form?
Write up your planning online, only to print, trim and glue it into a paper planner?
Spend hours writing feedback in students’ books because you have to, not because the students actually use it?
Give up your break times to run some form of detention but the undesirable student behaviour still continues?
Plan and resource a lesson that you know the teacher next door has already done all the prep for?
Challenging the status quo is a massive ask and we don’t always feel like we’re in the position to do anything other than what has “always been done” because it's “just the way things have always been”.
But. What if you figure out a better way? What if you trial and test and prove that there is a more efficient way of doing something. What if you changed the routine/ system/ method/ approach that gives you grief every day to something that doesn’t. And then the teacher next door adopts it. And another and another.
Can you start a little wave of change?
Make a start today
1). Spend 5 mins ideating how you could remove or change that pointless task to something that actually works.
2). Pick one new approach/system to trial in place of it. Stick to it for the next week.
3). Review in one week’s time.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t find the perfect solution straight away; keep trialling, keep experimenting, and stay hungry for solutions.
Be purposeful teachers
Who are in control
Feel inspired
And know they've done enough.
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