Achieving a work/life balance as a Primary School teacher (1)

Isn’t that a relaxing picture to start the article and don’t you wish you were on that beach !

I am going to extend my last article post to now include achieving a work / life balance for Primary teachers. So many colleagues have asked about this and lets be honest its a vital necessity that we need to achieve.

I am going to work my way through what I consider are the elements in achieving this and lets see where it takes us. You’ll notice that I have put a 1 after the title because I think the detail needed will require 2 or maybe even 3 posts!

Ok so lets get started – Achieving a work/life balance seems completely unachievable for many teachers as we drown under the mass of paperwork and accountability requirements that seem to foul up the education system at the moment. So we’re going to look at what they are and how we can deal with them in a more relaxed and sensible fashion in order to smooth our path in day to day  teaching and also in our life at home.

As an initial observation – our lives must have some sort of balance in whatever we do. Without it we will find that whatever is dominating our time and attention will detrimentally affect all other aspects of our life and in turn this will boomerang back to affect this dominating factor also.

Without lapsing into the philosophical lets put it in context. If your teaching (and its influence) is affecting your home life detrimentally then this will in turn boomerang back to affect the quality of your teaching and your time in school

We all know how great we feel when we have been involved in some activity with the family or friends – something that’s exciting, fun or adventurous or maybe just the happiness of family life. This gives our lives a fantastic lift and we feel rejuvenated and enthusiastic and this is shown in all we do. Of course we bring this back into the classroom with us and our teaching seems to sparkle more and everything seems more fun and enjoyable. Even those difficult children seem more mischievous than their usual pain in the backside!

We can reverse this and apply it to a great day in school where everything has gone well – its been fun and the class has succeeded in whatever you have taught. You will take this feeling back into your home life and feel bubbly and lifted.

But only if there is a balance between the 2 sides

Unfortunately teaching is a career that has the potential to swamp teachers with all its demands and requirements (Headteachers face an even bigger challenge to resist this!). What we need to do as teachers is to actively look at these demands and work out just what is important and what is accompanying and unnecessary rubbish that we can dispense with.

At this point I am going to have to disappoint our ECT colleagues by telling you that your workload for the first 2 years is going to be high. There is no way around this – however I have said high but not stupidly high. The reasons for this are simple – you have just started on a new career and you are on the steepest of learning curves. Everything you approach and implement is new and will take you longer to research, plan and prepare. You will have to adapt to new schemes and systems which initially will seem totally unfathomable and unnavigable.

But in going through this process you are building up your experience and knowledge and as you gain this you will find that the time taken to complete tasks will reduce. However this is the reason that I have said DON’T buy or borrow term plans, lesson plans or computer lessons – you need to personally go through the processes of research, planning and teaching to gain this foundation of knowledge and experience and its this foundation that will enable you to approach things more efficiently in the future.

Right lets look at specifics and the elements that start to drag things down in our teaching lives.

Here’s a list

• Marking
• Feedback on work
• Planning
• Assessments
• General paperwork
• Overall organisation and management of the school
• Computerisation

What we’re going to do is to look at each in turn – assess what each requires and strip it down to the bare necessities (sounds like a song coming in here!)

Marking

Marking is the basic requirement of teaching and not something we can dispense with – it gives us as teachers feedback on how the children have understood our taught concepts and also gives us feedback on how to move forward. The simple truth is that you need to keep up with the marking and that means in most cases you are marking every day.

However it is the amount of time taken on marking that can be vicious! There is a trend at the moment to incorporate a vast amount of marking criteria into every piece we deal with and coupled with this ridiculous depth of marking that is expected. Take an example of VCOPS – multi coloured pens and ticks, stars , asterisks everywhere….total waste of time and unnecessary. What we need to be doing is marking to the learning objective/intention and that’s all. So if the children have written a story where the learning intention was to produce a great blockbuster finish – then that’s what we are marking on…nothing else. You’ll skim read the rest, maybe pick up on one or two spellings and then mark it. You don’t even need to make a comment apart from a “great finish” or “needs more blood!”. Then give it a grade….even a mark out of 10 is fine. This mark should then be recorded in your mark book.

Now many of you will be shouting about detailed feedback etc – the ongoing teacher / pupil conversation etc. Irrelevant and unnecessary and to be honest the children are not bothered and neither should you be. Take a look at another article I have written about marking – the government and OFSTED view is that all the extra twaddle is unnecessary. so don’t do it.

Marking – a government view

Keep all your marking directly to the L.O – comments to a minimum and use a grade. If you have the opportunity to mark work as you move around the class do so….if the pupils can exchange books and mark each others do it and if you are able to call out children to your desk as work is being done then mark it then also.

A good ploy is to try not to take marking home with you – use your shopping trolley for food instead! In any other job you would work to 5.00. So perhaps stay behind after school and get your marking done then ….make sure you’re out of the building by 5.00 and all marking done.

Well that’s a good stopping point for this first article before it becomes too long – I will continue tomorrow with the next sections in work/life balance.

Hope this has helped – keep smiling

Charles