It’s now almost three months since I last taught a lesson. Although eight weeks working outside the classroom don’t yet outweigh eight years in it, I can no longer claim to be a teacher. Close friends have stopped commenting on how much more relaxed I seem. And I can stop and reflect on what being a teacher readies you for.
It always seemed to make sense that managing the demands of teaching would provide skills useful elsewhere. When a friend left teaching to attend law school, I was unsurprised she reported that it was easy organising herself, given that she’d managed classroom teaching. So I’m not surprised in principle, but I have been astonished that some of the strategies I found most potent in schools are directly applicable outside them.
1) Prioritisation and time management
I learned, a couple of years back, to manage my time effectively, choosing a handful of goals for the week, structuring my time around them, and completing (most of) them. This remains one of the most useful things I’ve ever learned. So, in my new job, I’ve picked out three roles, and each week, given myself just three tasks in each (because I have a little more control over my time, that’s more easily done too).
Why does it work? Because prioritising carefully and saying no to things which aren’t priorities enables us to spend the majority of our time on the things which actually matter.
2) Leverage coaching
Leverage observations are an amazing way to improve teaching. I don’t ‘observe’ the two people I line manage now, but it’s easier to see their ‘output’ on paper on day-to-day. In line management meetings, I use the same principle of leverage coaching, looking back at a single change from the preceding week and identifying a single focus for development for the next one, which they can put into practice.
Why does it work? Small, weekly changes are manageable and, cumulatively, powerful.
3) Practising perfect
Practising new skills and actions works – as I discovered in both teacher training and in leveraging coaching. Outside schools, its power remains: in preparing an interview schedule we needed to ask a number of individuals to use, running through the questions as though we were conducting the interview ‘for real’ gave us a much better understanding of how interviewees might respond.
Why does it work? A dry run – practice – allows us to think through how things will really work, in a way just reading or thinking through it doesn’t.
4) Planning backwards
It took me years to get into the habit of ‘beginning with the end in mind’ when planning lessons – I found it a huge struggle and one I never quite mastered. But, just as planning a lesson from where I wanted students to end up and how I would know works, when looking at something like writing a report, starting from the desired end – who will read the report and what will they do as a result is a very helpful frame to work with.
Why does it work? Planning from what I actually want to achieve, rather than from the activities and resources I have, or how it’s been done before, makes it far more likely the plan will reach my intended aim.
5) Using checklists
Checklists worked wonders for me as a teacher. Although my life is less pressured now (usually), making mistakes could be more costly: rather than sending a student photocopying, if I left any of the gear shown below behind when visiting Manchester, for example, it’s pretty hard to fix.
Thankfully, the humble checklist has got me – touch wood – everywhere I need to go without a (foreseeable) hitch.
Why does it work? It routinises and reminds me what I should be doing… as in teaching, it doesn’t deprofessionalise me – it catches me before I forget something I know I should do.
What if we reverse things?
So it seems that learning to teach readies one well for work outside teaching. Perhaps the value of these techniques shouldn’t surprise me though: many of these ideas have come from other fields (coaching and practice from sport, checklists from airlines and latterly, medicine; time management from – well, I got it from Steven Covey, which is basically self-help).
So, to reverse the question: if schools aren’t so different from other fields of work, how can teachers learn from them?
Great points, Harry. Being one of the few people in the ’06 cohort who’d worked before teaching it never seemed that different to other fields. Teachers seemed insistent on being ‘special’ when really they face the same issues many other people do.
If I remember rightly, you’re not a massive tv watcher. I’m a fan of competitive series based around a skill – like masterchef, project runway, and america’s next top model. (If you don’t think modelling is a skill then you need to watch it).
Watching them it always strikes me how much teachers could learn about feedback and helping people get better by modelling the mistakes of others. One of the fascinating aspects of Tim Gunn’s approach in Project Runway is his catchphrase “make it work”. It sounds like he’s shrugging responsibility, but he only ever says it at a point when he has explained the answer, and the contestant really ought to know what to do, they are just hesitant. It’s like those moments when a student is struggling, and they say they need more help – but mostly they just need to try…. *that’s* the moment to say “make it work”. Somehow it imbues a confidence that it can be done.
Likewise, Australian Masterchef is beloved in Oz – massive audiences, on for weeks at a time – and I swear it mostly comes down to the way the hosts give amazing timely feedback.
Ultimately, I think there are lessons to be learned for teaching from all over the place, and look forward to reading more as you learn about them and share them on your blog 🙂
Don’t tell us that we are not special. The emotional demands of this job are clearly not unique, but place it in a category above so many others …
Hmmm. Teachers are important, and should be valued, but I’m not won over by the idea that it’s any more emotionally demanding than lots of other jobs. There’s a fairly hefty literature on ’emotional labour’ and the number of jobs that require it.
The best teacher I ever saw was a consultant who was attending my mum in hospital. Whilst he was dealing with what were literally life and death decisions he had his pack of student doctors with him. Whilst being incredibly considerate of my mum (and the family) he was prompting the pack to learn, both by modelling how he wanted them to treat patients and by using the best questioning I have ever seen.
Failure to recognise the strengths of other professions and occupations is, IMHO, one of the greatest weaknesses of the teaching profession. Yes, in macro terms, teaching is very different to most other occupations, but not necessarily harder (I will one day write about my dads experience of this). As Harry has described there are many functions at the micro level that are transferable to/from other work spaces and can be learnt from.
Love this! This is similar to what I hear from teachers doing leadership skills audits now, whilst still in the classroom. I’m convinced (but yet to prove) that bringing leadership theory into the classroom will enhance their practice and deepen their impact.