How to Survive the Factory: for teachers in public sector organizations...

 

How to Survive the Factory...

 

 

Colleagues,

Whilst our Trade Unions engage in negotiations over pay and conditions on our behalf, I wonder if we might consider some short term personal and collective strategies to make our working conditions a little better for ourselves.

To that end, I offer you ‘How to Survive the Factory’: a brief collection of simple techniques, designed to preserve your energy and well-being during the transition from collegiate, professional pedagogy to Fordist mass-production (the exam factory).
Please send me your own labour-saving, person friendly, factory system techniques, so that, between us, we can improve our working conditions.

Mutual aid. Self-help. A set of companion strategies to formal representative Trade Union/Labour Movement consultation, negotiation, and, in the last instance, collective industrial action.

Pete Keogh April 2013

 

 

 How to Survive the Factory

 

Work in accordance with the principle of mutual aid. We are not individual, professional pedagogues. We are factory workers, who need to organise to act collectively, not only in dispute, but as a matter of day to day survival.

 

Work in accordance with the principle of recycling; economy, no waste of energy, efficient use of resources – especially our own bodies and minds. Treasure these human resources. Look after them. Make the ones you have last as long as you can – we can’t tolerate a throw away and cheaply replace policy where our own bodies, minds, and human relationships are concerned.

 

It isn’t a matter of doing more things. It is a matter of doing things differently!

 

Do everything you can to get yourself from the centre to the periphery of every classroom activity.

1. Reorganize the timing, pacing, and selection of teaching and learning activities inside and outside the classroom

• We need a new way of working for a new way of organizing the teaching and learning day.
• It is clearly not possible to work in your usual way when the organization of teaching and learning has been so radically transformed.
• It is clearly not possible to work in your usual way – as an individual professional teacher – under new, more formally directed work patterns.
• There are serious implications here for what we often represent as goodwill, or professional responsibility.
• If more of your time is directed, you must find ways of doing less when you are not directed.
• Think seriously about how much work you take home. Factory workers do not take any of their work home. If you must prepare or mark in the evenings or at weekends, try to do less, try to be more selective, prioritise what you judge will help students to improve a particular skill. Don’t mark as thoroughly as you usually do. Don’t mark as personally. You probably have larger classes now, as well as more contact hours. You must reconsider what is humanly possible in the time you have outside work. You must reconsider what is reasonable in terms of a healthy work/life balance. Surely our health and happiness, our homes, our families and friends must always come first? However much we might experience work as self-fulfilment, as public service, as career, in the last instance, it is a way of earning a living. This must surely be an opportunity for all of us to reconsider the meaning and value of our work, to reconsider what we can reasonably be expected to do to maintain ourselves and our families, without causing undue suffering to ourselves and others.
• I’m sure we can work more effectively and more efficiently. I’m sure we can improve the grades for our students. I’m sure we can do all of this simply by re-examining and reorganizing how we engage in our teaching and learning.

It isn’t a matter of doing more things. It is a matter of doing things differently.

 

2. Use all available Electronic and Paper Resources rather than your own physical and mental energy and your own precious family and leisure time

• Use yourself – your own teaching performance – sparingly. It’s a finite human resource, which cannot be exploited for more than a few minutes at a time without causing permanent physical and mental damage.

• Rely as much as you can on text book and internet derived exercises.
• Search the net for teacher resources.
• Get the students doing activities individually (in silence, for calm and rest for you), in pairs, and in groups, while you have a rest, and/or while you do casual, lo-energy, lo-impact ‘learning walks’ around the classroom, checking progress.
• Share resources with colleagues, using Moodle, or e-mail stuff to each other.
• Maintain and develop an open door policy; pop in and out of each other’s classrooms, offering resources, advice and support wherever possible, so that no-one feels isolated and vulnerable to senior management monitoring.
• Maybe, even, cross-faculty pop-ins for sharing of resources, advice, and support. We can develop a friendly, supportive culture of collective, personal and professional relationships and collective, mutual action as a challenge to the culture of fear associated with official learning walks and observations.
• While the students are busy with their activities (pleasant whirring of machines), we can pop in and out for a chat, to relieve the pressure and maintain our human relationships. Formal observations focus on ‘learning’, what’s in student files, what they actually do to learn – not on individual teacher performances – even though we (are encouraged/compelled to) experience the lesson grade as our personal teacher grade! As a union, we need to address the relationship between performance management and lesson observation to get this clarified. It’s the lesson, as an out-there, objective phenomenon, which is being monitored during an observation, not the individual teacher. This needs to be formally embedded in our working practices and procedures.
• Don’t operate as an individual pedagogue, jealously guarding your horde of teaching resources. Work in accordance with the principle of mutual aid. We are factory workers, who need to organise to act collectively, not only in dispute, but as a matter of day to day survival.

3. Use all available Electronic Technologies (when they are working)

• Search Youtube for relevant clips. A five minute clip from Youtube saves research and preparation. And students respond well to visuals.
• Don’t repeat the same introduction to a lesson 4 or 5 times. Say it once into a webcam and play it back for repeated lessons. It’s fun, and catches the students' attention!
• Exploit any opportunity for dvds, audio, tv,  internet resources (exam board web-pages, individual online teacher resources, British Library, BBC)
• Anything to get yourself from the centre to the periphery of the classroom activity

 

4. Use whole institution data collection as the only formal test of progress

• The rest of the time, set short exercises and tests which can be self-assessed, peer assessed, or marked in class by means of teacher ‘learning walks’ (tick in mark book for work done satisfactorily).
• Try alternative ways of marking (mass-production methods), which give students a quick snapshot indication of progress and how to improve. I’m trying out a traffic light system – underline good points in green, need to improve points in orange, and ‘very poor stuff’ in red! Then put a coloured blob at the top of the first sheet. No personalized comments in writing. Comments can be oral, face to face comments during teacher ‘learning walks’, while students do 10 minute tasks. Maybe supplement with a list of typical improvements on power-point saved from previous years. I did one last year called ‘How to improve your text analysis’, and it will do for this year and years to come.
• Principle of recycling; economical, no waste of energy, efficient use of resources – including my own body and mind!

5. Never stand and talk at the front of class for more than 10 minutes.

 

• Standing up and talking at the front (from the dais) is exhausting when you have to do it time and time again.
• Use a stopwatch or timer to set 10 minute (maximum) tasks.
• Use a text book or internet resource rather than make up the tasks yourself.
• Set little 10 minute exercises which you can sit down and discuss/mark with the class on completion (when the alarm goes off).
• These are work routines which the students get used to and come to expect. They seem secure with the routine.
• These are mass production work routines which save your energy and throw the responsibility for production onto the students.
• This kind of time and activity organization and quick, varied, routine pacing has been commended during the observation process.

Please send me your own thoughts and ideas. Please send me your critical comments. Let’s maintain a reasonable dialogue and find a reasonable way forward to our mutual benefit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not much, I know. It's something I wrote when I was under a lot of pressure myself, and could see my colleagues being routinely crushed under the wheels of the Machine.

 

Pete Keogh April 2013