July 2020 – Happy Schools

6 Simple Strategies For Saving Your Sanity

July 30, 2020

Working in schools is busy. There is always too much to do and not enough time to do it. One of the many challenges is that the work can be never ending. There is always MORE that can be done. MORE preparation, MORE marking and feedback, MORE researching options, MORE skills to develop, MORE technology to investigate, MORE emails to answer, MORE tasks on your TO DO list! Working in schools can be a never ending job. You could work 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. You have to choose NOT to. 1 Get Organised and Declutter Your work space should be organised and ideally CLEAR. If your desk is piled with work that you are ‘going to…

BIG Black Holes: Where does the time go?

July 23, 2020

Stevef

Efficiency

At times, working in schools can be overwhelming. You have students and parents to help, lessons to plan, student work to mark, meetings to attend, reports to write, budgets to submit, emails to respond to and, if there is any time left—students to teach. There is so much to do, and only a limited amount of time in which to accomplish it. Time management for staff in schools is far more complicated than for staff in other industries. We face unique challenges: Much of the day is already scheduled. There is very limited leeway so staff in schools must work very efficiently with the very limited time that is flexible. An important component of working in schools is to assist…

7 Strategies For Student Engagement

July 16, 2020

Stevef

Engagement

1 They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care We have all heard this saying before but it’s true. Our work in schools is ALL about relationships. Do your students know you care? How well do you know your students? Smiling makes a difference – smiling lets your students know that you are happy to have them in the classroom – it makes them feel special and wanted. A teacher who smiles at every student every day is saying, “I’m happy you’re here, I’m happy to be teaching you and this is a safe environment”. Students who believe that you are genuinely happy to see them each day are much more likely to “buy”…

Difficult People Are Sent To Teach Us Something

July 9, 2020

Stevef

Communication

A great way to turn situations or people that we might find frustrating or annoying into opportunities for improving ourselves is to develop the habit of seeing every person that we meet as somebody who has been sent to teach us something. Rather than thinking that cranky, hard-to-please parent has been sent to make our life difficult, it is helpful to try to see them as someone who has been sent to help us to develop more clarity in our communication (because what we said was misconstrued), to refine our listening skills (because they aren’t going to stop until they have said the speech that they have rehearsed) or to overcome complacency and get even better at our job (when…

6 Strategies For Reducing Email Load

July 2, 2020

Stevef

Efficiency

Working in schools, we need to protect our professional time vigilantly. Email can eagerly devour our preparation time, infringe on our time outside of school and can distance us from the important tasks. If we are disciplined though, email doesn’t have to be a burden – we can use it as a weapon of efficiency, making us more frequent communicators with parents and administrators, more effective record keepers and more focused in our growth. Here are six strategies for reducing the flood of messages we receive and becoming more pragmatic with our replies, freeing time for more important endeavours. 1. Unsubscribe Ruthlessly According to the email service provider Mail Chimp, only 18.6 percent of education newsletter emails are opened, and…