In international schools the notion that ‘going above and beyond’ is the norm is, in most cases, the norm. It’s even baked into teacher contracts with nebulous clauses such as ‘and any additional duties as directed by the senior leadership team’. While this can and does often happen in schools within the British school system in the UK, the trade-off is the support of a union and more pushback on working to rule.
International schools are not bound by union rules.
Pragmatic leadership teams realise quickly that dumping too many extraneous activities on teachers means that lesson quality and delivery suffers; teachers burnout or are spread too thinly across too many projects. The aim then is to reach some sort of equilibrium whereby the more productive, ‘happier’ or ‘balanced’ schools are those where the teaching body aren’t creaking at the seams with last minute admin deadlines, data drops or intervention expectations.
‘De-implementation’, where schools phase out inefficient processes where they simply no longer hold value, provides a framework in which to identify the timesinks caused by excessive workload. By addressing these, the primary focus of teacher time shifts back toward planning and delivering higher quality lessons. At least, that’s the idea.
What could de-implementation look like in an English department?
Within our current context, we’ve identified several processes that are ripe for change. These are:
Homework at KS3: How do we organise this so that teachers are able to provide feedback, ensure students are completing tasks and that it’s completed in a way that does not mean AI does the lifting (produce the content)?
Intervention at Year 11: How can we respond more deliberately to support smaller groups of students?
KS3 baseline tests: What purpose do they serve when we regularly mark student work and have an indication of their ability and progress from classwork? Data is collected and the subsequent action of delivering content would have happened anyway.
Solutions
1. Let’s start with homework. The Education Endowment Fund’s work on homework efficacy is well-documented. Quality of the homework tasks and their connection to class content are just some of the areas in which homework has the most impact. Our assignments usually combine aspects of interleaving (non-fiction pieces that are connected to the text being studied in class), smaller extract analysis and comprehension tasks.
Teacher monitoring and feedback is the time sink here. Using AI works to a point, in the sense that it can reduce marking time if the answers are concise. In a knowledge-heavy subject such as English, AI has difficulty discerning higher quality content. It’s more efficient at checking grammar and syntactical errors.
We decided this year to focus on building reading time and habits at home, primarily at KS3. An increasing reliance on devices has scuppered the concentration of some.
2. Y11 intervention. This starts, more proactively, in Y10 instead. Small groups meet once a week rather than waiting for the traditional, post Y11-Mock panic.
3. Baselines assessments. Long overdue. We cut them out.
Another avenue we’re exploring in the English and Media Faculty is building websites that act as revision aids. These operate separately from the lesson material posted on Google Classroom and instead contain extension resources and reading from external sources. For example, our year 9 Gothic Literature unit would contain links to reading from the New York Public Library or The British Library. We have also linked articles on Victorian Criminology and Darwinism.
Handwriting in Year 7 is also currently a focus. The cohort has study skills lessons once a week which has, until now, been a missed opportunity to provide dedicated handwriting opportunities for our students to build hand-eye coordination and stamina.
Reading
https://snacks.pepsmccrea.com/p/de-implementation
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/making-room-for-impact/book284976
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit/homework
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