Blog

So many of my training sessions, have resulted in a few common statements on the same theme from the teachers attending: 

- 'It would be great if we could all do this'

- 'This is great, but the policy does not allow it'

These statements are not showing resistance from teachers to implement their new skills, but realisation that unless school leaders also participated then in reality there would be no improved efficiency.    By this, I mean, it is all very well having teachers be good with technology and improving their Workspace tools, but if leadership or admin still  expect work to be submitted in a particular way then you quickly end up with teachers ever doubling up the task or using inefficient methods.  For example, when I first started teaching there was a physical mark book that was handed up with each class, I found using a spreadsheet a much better system. However, I had to print out the spreadsheet a couple of times a year when leadership wanted to check these mark books.   Eventually, I had shared my spreadsheet with so many other teachers that leadership created their own standardised version for all teachers and the physical book was shortly scraped altogether. 

A few more recent examples:

• Using Google Classroom for pupils to submit and share their work.  Without leadership updating policies, teachers were still printing out that work to stick into books. This took a great deal of time and put off teachers from doing entirely online projects. 

• Google Spaces - teachers became aware of this as a great way to coordinate team meetings and assign planning etc. However, there was already a standardised document for teams to fill out each meeting which leadership would then later review.  As no leadership was in this training sessions, teachers were unsure if they were able to update the meeting requirements to include using Google Spaces. 

• Admin staff  and leadership sending staff uneditable files by email, resulting in each individual teacher creating their own work around to turn these files into something editable, resulting in a jumble of methods used and unnecessary extra work for both staff and admin. When ever a form or template would have been much more efficient. 

While some of these may seem easy to fix it is unrealistic to expect individual staff members to approach leadership or admin and say in a hopefully less blunt way, 'You are doing it wrong, here is a better way.'    Especially, as is often the case with technology if it is the youngest, newest members of staff who are most savvy and therefore do not yet have the rapport with leadership.   Some of these examples, may also seem unbelievably obvious to some of you,  however I have found ( and apologies, this is a huge generalisation) teachers to be remarkably poor at using technology. I don't know whether it is that some schools still relying on that old Windows XP desktop in the corner, or if classroom, human interaction skills so greatly triumph. 

Knowing how to fix the printer has long been a work place joke, that you have to keep that skill quiet or else you will always be called upon to fix it.  Every school, I have visited has had someone who is known as the 'techie' one,  I do wonder how often that person is in leadership or has a formal position to advice others on good 'technological practice'.   It is difficult to go up to leadership and tell them, 'You are doing it wrong',   I would know as that it what I did in my old school.  Luckily, it was towards the end of a slow campaign by me to make the head teacher aware that there was a gap in their staff training and she was incredibly open to my ideas.  However, after a year of leading training sessions and promoting tech skills across the school, leaderships haphazard involvement meant that, apart from a few exemptions, leadership was most often the weakest link when it came to using technology to carry out non-teaching tasks. Of course, they are incredibly busy and often unable to attend teacher CPD, however, I do think leadership and admin should be expected to receive technology training.   With advance warning, to ensure content is differentiated appropriately, having admin staff and leadership attend CPD is wonderful to not only support more people with their technology skills, but also to allow for meaningful discussions during the session about uses of different tools and whether or not practices could change.   Without leadership in the room, those statements at the top of the page are left unanswered and people can be left unaware that the current practices could be improved upon as everyone just learns to carryout the task in the mandated way.