Dan (00:00):
Hey everyone. And welcome to the effective teaching podcast. I'm your host, Dan. And today we're gonna be having a look at a book. In fact, today as a book club episode, we're gonna be looking specifically at my book, which is called workless, teach more, how to be an effective teacher and, and live a life. You love almost forgot the last little bit there, but this book, I released it at the end of last year. And it, it came about basically, because at the beginning of that year, I sent out a survey to all the teachers that I had on my email list. And I asked them what the number one issue was for them currently in education. And pretty much all of them replied and said that it was time, right? They all were working too hard. They needed more time to get everything done that they were doing, or they just were struggling and start to begin to feel burnt out.
Dan (00:50):
And when I first got that, I thought, of course, I was gonna get that right. Like that's what every teacher's problem is. But I was hoping for a problem about, you know, how to do programming or how to do behavior management and stuff, stuff I could coach them in and that kind of thing. But I then like, I, I pumped it off for a while, but then it occurred to me a few months later that actually I could do something here. I could do something that was really super helpful for these teachers, because I had actually implemented a lot of stuff and managed to run two businesses while working full time and still have enough time to hang out with my family. So I thought I am gonna do something. And so that is why I wrote this book. Now I'm gonna go through and tell you a lot of the stuff that's in the book.
Dan (01:32):
And if you would like to get yourself a free copy of the book, please hang around to the end. And I will tell you where to go, where you can get yourself a free copy, but to start with the introduction to the book really says very clearly that the book is not about productivity. It's not a book about getting more task done. It's actually a book about effectiveness and effectiveness is actually about getting the right tasks done. So you're actually reducing your workload and your time, not just getting more stuff done in less time, you see teachers are working on average 55 hours a week, and that was pre COVID. Right? So now that's probably, yeah. At least add five more hours. So we're probably looking at 60 hours a week for the average teacher to be working in a classroom. And so the goal of the book is to help teachers to reduce that time, to get control back of their time and to start to be able to do things outside of school, but without jeopardizing the effectiveness of the teacher in the classroom.
Dan (02:33):
And, you know, the things that teachers love, which is, yeah, teachers are all about their students and helping their students to learn, to do well, to prepare them for life, that relationship aspect that you get, you know, that it's something that satisfied me more as a teacher than watching a student go from, you know, year seven or lower sometimes through to year 12 and graduate and see that the changes that happen in that student. That's amazing. And so in this story, I actually a bit of introduction to the book. I share a bit of my story about how I was getting burnt out, how I was working too hard at one point. And I was super excited to be able to resign, to quit my job and to go and look after my son and let my wife do her job. She had an opportunity that was going to take her for six months to do something really exciting for her.
Dan (03:21):
So I was super excited to be able to walk into my deputy my principal's office and to say, I, I resign. I'm not gonna be here in two weeks. And that, that made me really happy at the time. But so I shared a bit of that. And then since then I then started up my first businesses while I took that six months off. And when I went back into teaching, I took a lot of the stuff that I learned through business. So I was learning all this stuff about effectiveness in business, and it is everywhere in business, right? There's so much out there that you can consume about how to be effective in your business. And so I took that and I applied it, not just to my businesses, but I also applied it to my teaching when I went back and it actually gave me amazing results.
Dan (04:03):
I didn't feel burnt out. I felt like I was actually getting more connected with my students, like getting more, having more impact on my students and actually led to me getting a promotion. I actually ended up being deputy principal for a while before I have now left teaching to support teachers in other fashions, like writing books and that kind of stuff. So that, that's just the introduction to the book. We then move on to chapter one. So chapter one, the title of it is it's time to be response able, and that is not a error in my typing or anything like that. It is time to be response able this actually comes from Steven Covey's book about effective people or how, how to be an effective person or something like that. I can't remember the title of it. I should, I should. I really enjoyed the way I've listened to it like a thousand times.
Dan (04:49):
But basically the idea of it is that we are able to choose how we respond to any kind of stimulus. And so that means that we are a product of our decisions and not just a product of people acting upon us. And so the natural flow from that is for us to then start making more effective choices in our workplace, in our home life and all that kind of stuff, because we might feel like we don't have control because, you know, maybe it's your head of department or your principal or your deputy. That's constantly giving you more and more work to do, but actually it's our choice, how we respond to that, whether or not we have this kind of blame victim mentality, or whether we decide that we can take control of the things we can take control of and start to make better choices for ourselves.
Dan (05:35):
And that's what the chapter one is about, setting you up for. What's gonna come throughout the rest of this book. Chapter two then is all about personal effectiveness and personal effectiveness, really centers around this idea of having a P PC balance and PPC. It stands for productivity and personal care. So your PPC balance, you have to have your productivity and your personal care in balance as a teacher so that you can actually function. Right. And I tell a story in here about how I was getting ready for my daughter's birthday and my son's birthday. We were having a party. Their birthdays are two days away, apart from each other. And so we were having this party at our house and I needed to mow the lawn. So I got out my lawn mower. I started mow the lawns and then at some point it stopped.
Dan (06:18):
And so I, I was trying to start it again. It had petrol had oil. Everything was fine as far as I knew, and I just kept pulling the starter cord. Eventually I pulled the starter cord off. I've been pulling for at least 10 minutes and I didn't start. And the point of the story is actually that I'd never, I can't remember any time when I got that lawn mile service. And if I had of kept getting that lawn ma service, since I bought it, it probably would've started, right. It wouldn't have broken in the way that it did, but because I wasn't looking after it, it brokes. And that applies to, you know, all machinery. If you don't get your car service, it's gonna break down, right. If you never fill your cart with petrol, you're gonna run out. And so this is the same when it comes to us as teachers, we need to be looking after ourselves, okay.
Dan (07:02):
As well as doing the work that we need to get done. And so this chapter's all about helping you to get started on that journey and to focus on your personal effectiveness. So in this chapter, I then talk about where are you spending your time? And so I know many people around the world and I am not exempt from this here. We spend a lot of time on social media. We like to check out emails and that we spend a lot of time in there. We get notifications from our phone, whether it be text messages, phone calls, or social media or emails, anything can interrupt you through notifications from your phone today. And so there's software that you can get. They can actually check where you're spending your time. You can get rescue time. A lot of your phones and computers. Actually these days will have a software built into it that will check where you're actually spending your time, whether it's on productivity and work or whether it's actually on, you know, social media, or if you're browsing around on the internet, looking at chat rooms, I don't know it actually, it monitors what you're doing with your time.
Dan (07:59):
And so in this chapter, I encourage you to actually check, where are you spending time? Are you actually wasting, you know, three hours a day by going onto social media, by checking your emails in a ineffective way, without moving the chapter into an eat, sleep and move section. So, you know, this is just basic looking after your health, make sure you're eating proper, healthy food. Looking after your body, the way you actually get last longer, you gonna function better. Make sure you're getting plenty of sleep because you will function better. You'll actually find if you get at least eight hours of sleep, then you will get more work done in way less time, just cuz your brain capacity is higher. And then the other one is to move, to actually get some exercise or some kind of physical activity into your life. Whether it's just walking around to the park or anything like that, you just need to make sure you're getting something that's good for your body. Some kind of movement. This chapter continues quite a long chapter, this one, but it's really
Dan (08:55):
Important, I think for helping to make sure that you are getting effective, that this one is to clean up. So we're gonna purge things on you, clean up things like your desktop, your desk, get rid of the junk that's cluttering because the stuff that's around you, if it's cluttering, then it actually clutters your brain makes it harder for you to focus, to get good work done. And we will see as we go through the chapters in the book that there's whole sections devoted to how to focus and get, you know, good quality deep work done. And the last section in this chapter is for you to start to think about creating routines and rituals. And so yeah, if your routine is to show up to work and start chatting to people, that's the routine you're in and that's gonna be very ineffective. But if your routine is to actually arrive at school, go and be somewhere by yourself, get your, your highest priority task done first and then move on to other things.
Dan (09:43):
You're gonna be, find yourself being way more effective. And so creating routines and rituals can be really helpful as you go forward in your teaching career. Now chapter three, chapter three is really the, where we start to do this deep dive into you personally. And chapter three is titled what really matters. And the whole chapter here, a lot of it's devoted to you creating a personal mission statement and it kind of sounds a bit wishy washy, but the, the idea of it is be to really focus in on what, what do you actually want to achieve in your life? You know, who do you wanna be as a person? What do you wanna actually contribute to the world around you? And how do you wanna go about doing this? Because those three things, if you can answer those three questions really well, and there's further detail in the book about how to go about answering those questions really well.
Dan (10:31):
You can then guide yourself going forward to then setting up, you know, real goals that you care about that are aligned with your mission statement, with the things that matter to you most. And you can start to create deadlines and times for you to review how you're going in relation to your mission statements and, and in terms of achieving your goals. And so this chapter is really very central. It's gonna impact a lot of the rest of the work throughout the book. So chapter three, it's all about making sure you actually work out what really matters to you in your life and then looking at your teaching, where does that fit into that? Because there are more important things in life than just teaching. I know that might shock some of you, but there are, you know, your family, your friends, and maybe your, your church.
Dan (11:17):
There's lots of things that will be more important to people than their job, right? And in the end, you're teaching as though it's a calling for most of us, it's a passion, but it is also a job. And we need to make sure that we have a balance between it and everything else that we are doing. So what really matters to you finding out where teaching fits into that, and then even what you're doing in teaching, you can just do a mission statement for your teaching and go, you know, who do I wanna be as a teacher? What do I wanna contribute to teaching, you know, to my school, to the students, et cetera, and how will you then go about doing that? What, what kind of approach do you wanna have to achieving these things? And so it really is a good start for getting you really focused.
Dan (11:56):
The next chapter flows on from what really matters to focusing on what matters, right? So it's one thing to come up with this kind of idea of what matters most to you. But what we tend to do as people is we forget to continue to focus on that in our day to day, day to day activities. And so we start off in this chapter by talking about the 80 20 rule, which is a super important rule. Basically, it's the idea that 20% of anything contributes 80% of other things. So in business that's offered applied, you know, 20% of your customers will produce 80% of your income or 20% of your customers would comp would give you 80% of your complaints. 20% would take up 80% of your time. They're not always the same 20%, right? But 20% cause that. And so in teaching, we then look at it, well, 20% of our tasks actually create 80% of our impact, right?
Dan (12:46):
So 20% of what you do in your classroom is causing 80% of, you know, the effectiveness of your classroom or 20% of what your students do in your classroom is causing 80% of their learning. And so it's really important for us to work out what the 20% are cause it will help us to then focus on the things that are gonna have the largest impact. And those 20% things should relate to, you know, your mission statement to your goals. I then explain a thing called Eisenhower's matrix. This is the urgent slash important matrix. And so we have four quadrants. You have things that are urgent and important. Things that are urgent are not important. Things that are not urgent and important and things that are not urgent or important. And we start to categorize a lot of the tasks that we do as teachers into the four quadrants.
Dan (13:30):
And then I help you to basically work out what to do with what's in each of those quadrants. So, you know, for example, if something is in the non-urgent and not important, Chuck it out, don't do it, right. That's something that's essentially wasting your time. And so making sure we go through and identify these things is really important for us. You can do that by identifying it just in your teaching, but identifying it across your whole life is super important. You'll find that you probably spend a lot of time doing things that aren't either, probably the thing that takes up most of your time and things that are urgent, but not important. And that's the one that we really need to refine and help you to reduce because you don't wanna be spending lots of time doing things that are not important. So we move on in this chapter talking about the idea of single tasking, doing one thing at a time, you know, there's myths about multitasking, even girls, you can't do that.
Dan (14:19):
I mean, challenge or encourage you really to challenge assumptions. So you actually find that within teaching, there's lots that you're doing that just have always been done that way or that you don't actually need to do, but no one's ever checked. You know, maybe you used to have to do it 10 years ago. And so it's just been implemented and then no, one's checked to see that that's actually been changed or updated or maybe, you know, just a simpler, easier way to get something done. And so you can challenge the way things are done. You can challenge things you're being asked to do to work out whether or not you really need to do them. And if you do need to do them, do you have to do them that way? Or is there an easier way to get that done next is to stop doing things that are not effective, right?
Dan (14:59):
So you you're coming up with this whole thing. You stop doing the things that fall into that 80% of fluff, right? That 80% of the things that we are doing, aren't producing the results. Okay. That's what you wanna start reducing as much as you can. And you're not gonna be able to get rid of all of that. There's definitely gonna be some of that that you have to do. You know, there are legal things that you have to do as a teacher, which are administrative tasks, which are not gonna have great impact on anything, but they are things that mean that you, you know, don't get fired as a teacher and that kind of stuff. So you are not talking about ditching those types of things. And the last bit of this chapter, which I think is one of the most important bits is talking about deep work and shallow work.
Dan (15:36):
And so there's lots of work that's been put into this concept, but basically deep work is work that you have to do. It requires your kind of training. It requires your brain, your whole brain's gonna stretch you in terms of your mental capacities and you can't, you can't do it distracted, deep work, right? And this is the important thing as a teacher, often you're 20% tasks are gonna fall into deep work. You know, it's things like creating your units, creating your lesson plans and thinking through behavior issues, reflecting on your practice, they're the 20% things are gonna have bigger impact on what you're doing as a teacher and your shallow work. They're the things that don't require your brain as much. Martin, you still use a little bit, but these shallow works. You can, you can kind of do on autopilot. So this could be stuff like checking emails, marking a role.
Dan (16:25):
You know, that kind of stuff is at shallow work. You can probably mark a role while you have a conversation with someone. You know, it's, even though it's, you know, multitasking is not exactly what you're doing, but you're doing something similar and it's not actually gonna be a problem. You know, shallow work is stuff that you could do, why you're kind of being social. And so working out when to do what work, knowing that you can only do four hours of deep work in a day, you can't really stretch yourself much beyond that. And then building in where you're gonna so really prioritizing the deep work and reducing the amount of shallow work that you're doing, or at least scheduling when you're going to do that. Shallow work can be super important. And that's where we start to go. As we move forward in the book.
Dan (17:05):
So chapter five is all about planning and executing. So we've worked on what matters and how we're gonna stick to what matters. And now we're planning and executing. And so there's this story in the book that I wanna share. So I got up one morning and I started work. I was writing my book at the time. And so I was getting up early at like four 30 probably and writing the book until my kids woke up normally. And then I would go and spend time with them and do whatever. And I might come back to it another time, but this day I didn't have kids. And so I got up early four 30, I was working on my book, getting stuff done, but I felt like my brain was starting to go fuzzy. I was struggling to focus really well on the page. And I was starting to feel like I was gonna get a headache.
Dan (17:47):
And so I couldn't really get done. My wife, I got a phone call actually. My wife had been telling me to go and feed our goats and our animals at our block at the time. And I got a phone call from the mechanic saying, you know, are you bringing your car in today? I was like, oh, I completely forgot. And so, you know, I got up quickly, got in the car, went and dropped the car off. They did the quick, whatever they're doing, they're doing a radio check or something for me. So I didn't have to wait long. And then I went and fed the animals, hung out at my block for a little while. You know, I was patting my goats, just checking out the garden, enjoying some time outside. And when I came back to my work, suddenly I was focused again, you know, I'd already tried, like I'd tried eating something.
Dan (18:31):
I tried having a coffee even which I don't normally do, but it didn't fix my mental fog. But this time out in the garden with my animals, it did fix that fog. And so I used that story to emphasize the fact. So my fog came in at around nearly midday or no, it wasn't even, it was probably 10 30. It was early. It was still in the morning. And so what I did, I went back and I worked. I'd already done my four hours of deep work. I I'd been focused for that. And I was now struggling to stay focused, but by having that green break, I actually could come back and refocus and do more. And that was really fantastic for me. And so, as we are thinking about planning and executing our day re remembering that we can really do four hours of deep work.
Dan (19:13):
And yeah. Remember that for your students too, right? They're in classes. That's why those last couple of periods of the day, always the hardest cuz they're done, right. They've done their deep work. They haven't had the same kind of refreshing brain break. You know, recesses and lunch are not refreshing brain breaks for kids. That's, you know, juggling social lives and navigating all the rest of things that are going on for teenagers or for younger kids at schools. Yeah. That's not a brain break. Their brain's still very active in that sense. But using those four hours process for yourself as a teacher, then look at scheduling your week and thinking, yeah, what am I gonna do each day of the week? And kind of creating a bit of a schedule for your work and for your home life and stuff for your week. And then I talk about how to plan your days.
Dan (19:56):
And so maybe the night before you plan the next day, or I'll even encourage you actually plan your next day while you're at work. But you're part of your work routine. You're shutting down routine. But you wanna plan your next day, make sure you know what you're doing when you're doing it. And know that that schedule for the next day is flexible. So if something comes up that you decide is a higher priority, then what, whatever else you've got booked in that day, then you can change that schedule. Basically the point of the whole idea of scheduling is not that you are fixed into this routine. It's actually that you are being purposeful with your time. So the idea of it is that you are going to refocus and go, like, if I'm you meant to be working eight hours a week or whatever, like eight hours, eight hours a day, not a week, but I wanna make sure that that's, that's how much I'm working.
Dan (20:46):
I don't wanna be working lots more than that. And so you schedule that time and then if someone else wants to interrupt that time, you wanna make sure that you are being purposeful with it and going okay, is this thing that wants to interrupt more important than what I already have planned. And so that's gonna lead us to being able to say no, a lot easier, but it's really important that we have this kind of schedule and know that it's a bit flexible. The next thing in this chapter is about rituals. So that I start, I mentioned the ending the day type ritual, where you might check your emails, make a plan for the next day. And then you might say something to yourself or whatever, but it's just about having this ritual that shuts down. I'm no longer working things like leaving your laptop at school and going home here.
Dan (21:28):
Things that a lot of teachers think are impossible, but I actually, I did very consistently. Yeah. I would work for certain amount of time go home and I wouldn't need to take my laptop with me cuz I could leave my work at home. And if I did take my laptop, yeah, I wasn't opening it again at home, unless there, I know when I was a deputy, I would need to check it for things like, you know, teachers being absent or something. But other than that, I didn't check it. And so I had a very easy system to shut my brain down and I no longer need to worry about work while I'm not there. And then we do the same at the start of the day. So at the start of the day, you wanna set up some kind of ritual that starts it. So maybe when you get it to school, I don't know if you drink coffee or not, or maybe you have a tea or maybe you're just gonna get a big glass of water.
Dan (22:10):
You're gonna go to your room or to your desk. You're gonna think about where you're gonna go, what you're gonna do for that first chunk of time when you're go into school super important for getting yourself off to a great start to the day. And the last meeting in this chapter is about being intractable. And this is really about identifying the things that distract you. So there's this element of, you know, if your phone goes off, that's distracting you, but there's also element of when we distract ourselves. And this comes, you know, I find that I do this when my kids are difficult at the time, like if they're fighting and stuff, I might pick up my phone rather than going and dealing with what's happening. I'll go and pick up my phone and go, oh, what's happening on Facebook or whatever at the moment.
Dan (22:49):
And I might even have a look at my business pages or whatever and say, oh, what's going on here? Where, what groups, you know, might jump in and start chain to someone, but I'm actually going there to get away from something that's hard. That's in front of me. And by identifying the things that trigger you to then be distracted and then you can set up systems for avoiding that. So you see the trigger, you recognize it and you go, okay, well rather now being distracted onto my phone or distracted onto something else, I can do that. If I want to in 10 minutes first, I need to make sure I'm focused for 10 minutes and try and do the hard thing. That's actually in front of me that I'm trying to run away from. And that helps us as we're going forward. As teachers, you can be happening in your classroom, you can know that something's gonna be difficult.
Dan (23:28):
And so you avoid it and go into something else that's less effective. And it's really important for us to identify things and yeah, focus into that chapter six then in the book we over halfway here is about effective frameworks. Now this is really just about how to save yourself a bit of time. And by using things here, I'm about framework scaffolds and stuff. Use these things for your unit planning, for your lesson designs, for your mark books and stuff, using these templates and these frameworks that are based on research. Okay. It will save you time and also make sure that your lessons are effective. So I like things like understanding by design that has a really cool three step framework that you can use to create really great units of work or something like a hyper doctor, your lesson plans and stuff like that. So yeah, those kinds of things that exist, or you create your own ones, if you like for lessons, you could do something like the whole part, whole method where you're teaching you show kids the whole picture, you then break it down into little parts and then put it back together for them.
Dan (24:25):
Yeah. Having kind of basic processes that you use for specific things really saves your time to think about how am I gonna do it, go about the process of teaching this it's it's laid out, you're just walking through the steps and it saves you a lot of time. And then templates templates you can do not just for unit designs and lessons, but I actually love to use templates for almost everything. So I love to use Google apps and stuff. I'm actually, I'm a Google trainer, a Google innovator. I love a lot of things, Google. And so I use Google docs and I set up templates in Google docs so that whenever I'm creating, you know, a new risk assessment, I can use the template there. If I'm creating the new letter home, there's a template to write that letter, that's going home. But one of my favorites is probably Gmail in Gmail.
Dan (25:06):
I can save templates for emails that I send out. And so if I'm constantly getting questions from te from parents about an excursion that's coming up, I can just create a template. And then I can reply by using that template and just fill in a couple of blank bits and click sand. That saves me a lot of time by utilizing those kinds of things. And the last thing in effective frameworks is making sure you're using a diary. That's actually an effective diary. So I used to just get given, you know, teacher planners all the time as a teacher and I used to use them. I'd rewrite my lesson plans into them from my units of work and stuff. What a waste of time that was my unit of work was pretty much written with lesson plans. You, I could have just taken that and taught from it and looked at that before I went into class or whatever.
Dan (25:51):
Instead I was writing it into this daily planner and it was, it was pointless and I didn't find it very effective at all. I've since found, I love there's a diary you can buy, you can buy on Amazon or something. It's called a full focus planner. It is a fantastic diary that helps you to make sure you're tracking your goals, that you're achieving your goals. You're identifying the yeah. The most important things for you to do that day. And you're getting them done. It's it's really good diary for making sure you're being effective. And so using that framework, yeah, that diary is a framework. It's a, it's a template and it really is very effective. Chapter seven is a whole chapter. That's just about helping teachers to say no, right? Because it's something that we struggle a lot with, particularly whether it's something that we think will impact our students.
Dan (26:34):
And so I wanna encourage you to say no. And the way that you say no, is that because we now have schedules, right? Because we now have goals and we have mission statements. We're now gonna use those to determine whether or not we say yes to things. And so whenever anyone asks me to do anything, my default is no, but normally what I'll actually ask is give me a day to think about it. And so then I, I know that I have a chance to actually think through it properly. I can check to see you. If I'm saying yes to something here, what am I gonna be saying no to somewhere else? You know, if I'm saying yes to helping out in a musical, it means, I'm saying no to time at home with my family. And so I wanna check, you know, what things are more important to me and by having a schedule so I can say, no, I can't, I I'm busy at that time.
Dan (27:16):
Even if I've booked in time to go and relax, you know, that is time I've scheduled in. It is important time. Right? Relaxing looking after yourself, these are the important, not urgent things that we don't get done, but we need to prioritize into our schedules and not allow anything else to take over. Cause they are the most important things for us. And so I that's what I, I go, oh, I'm, I'm busy at that time. I can't. And I might propose another time maybe next week when I redo my schedule next week and I can schedule it in. And that works for me. Or perhaps I'm just gonna say, do you know what? This does not align with what I'm trying to achieve. Even as a teacher. I can. Yeah. If I'm being asked to be involved in what else in like sports coaching, for example, now I'm a PE teacher.
Dan (27:59):
So normally I would go, yeah, that's great. Because I see sports coaching as my way of developing rapport with my students and all that kind of stuff. But for other teachers it's not right. You might not want to do sports coaching when you're asked for it because you actually have chosen to prioritize something else as your way for connecting with students for your way to develop those relationships for your way to make sure you've got balance in everything. And so you might decide, well, that's not actually important enough for me to do no matter what. Like I'm just not gonna give that time to it. And you can say, you can say, look, this doesn't align with what I'm trying to achieve. As a teacher, you can then tell the person, this is what I'm trying to achieve. And this doesn't fit into this. I'm gonna actually prioritize my time and do something else instead.
Dan (28:42):
And so you could choose, you know, I know some schools have in your contracts and say, you have to contribute so many extra curricular activities or something, but you can come up with those. You can plan those. You can choose what you get, you know, into you don't have to let someone else dictate what you do and in terms of your extracurricular stuff. And so that is really important. I think to actually work out ways that you can say no to lots of stuff. And so I delay things, I just go ask me for time. I'm gonna check over things. I come back. I can't, I can't commit to that. I don't have the time. It's not my, my schedule's full, whatever you, whatever you need to. Right. So I actually create a yes checklist and I'd used to go, I just go, if it ticks a box, I'm like, okay, I'm gonna say yes to this one because it actually matches up with my goals, et cetera.
Dan (29:24):
Sometimes the person's not gonna accept you. No, if it's your deputy or if it's your principal and they say, no, no, I'm not asking, I want you to do this. You may then need to do some persuading with them. And I've had to do this before, had a principal who really wanted me to enter all the data into our state data system. And, and I didn't wanna do that. Right. I saw that as it was gonna take up a lot of my time, it was admin work. It was data. And it wasn't what I like. I wanna enter kids' marks and check that their addresses are correct. And that kind of stuff. That's not what a deputy principal I think should be getting paid to do. Cuz deputy principal should be getting paid more than your admin staff and you should pay your admin staff to do that.
Dan (30:04):
And so I went about persuading her. I said, look, I'll, I'll do it. But can I propose that we trained someone else to do it. I'm happy to devote my time to train them and all that kind of stuff. And so over the course of a year actually convinced her, I trained up one of our admin staff to take over that role that admin staff did a better job. Did it in less time, cost her less and allowed me to be free to do things more effective cuz she knew I sat down and I like, yeah, these are the things that we know are more, more important for me to be doing than entering data. And she knew that now every principal knows what a deputy should be doing. My mentoring teachers, making sure that, you know, behavior things might be needing to be addressed, but making sure that there's good support and professional development for our, for the staff at the school, all that kind of stuff should was my kind of thing.
Dan (30:47):
And that was what I was devoting my time to and to take me away from that and helping teachers to entering data, I, I convinced it was the right step to do. And so there's things like that. You might need to persuade someone to accept your no, as you go forward as well. And we getting onto the last two chapters we did last two chapters I think are probably the, the chapters with the most just practical tips to do, right? So if you just want quick wins chapter eight and nine, that's where you wanna go. So chapter eight is called four teachers and you know, just bringing the whole book together and going, here's a whole bunch of ways that you as a teacher can apply this, just saving you time and get putting this into practice. Right? So helping teachers that choose not to overwork, right.
Dan (31:29):
Actually deciding no that's too much time. I'm not working beyond this many hours a week and just making that your rule. Right. And then you'll actually find that you'll prioritize things a lot better when you decide I'm only working 40 hours a week, I'm not working anymore hours than that. You can then prioritize things really well to do that. The other thing in here, I encourage teachers, you know, don't be a perfectionist, it's gonna eat up a lot of your time and we actually dunno. You can think that something's perfect as a teacher, but then when you go and deliver it, it can fail miserably. Right? And so we need to be welcoming of failures and not get stuck up in getting something perfect. Right. That's gonna take a lot of time, get it good. Right. Get it good enough. And then go and fail.
Dan (32:12):
Right? If it's, cuz it might fail anyway or it might turn out to be amazing without putting in all the extra work and just go and try it out. And then you'll find that actually the process of reflecting and adapting is way better at creating, you know, those perfect kind of lessons than you coming up with your ideas that you think are perfect. Next is in this chapter, it talks about outsourcing some of your tasks. So a lot of your shallow tasks that you can actually pass on someone else and there's shallow tasks at home. You know, if you, your laundry, your lawn mowing your garden work possibly your cooking, your shopping, all kinds of stuff. Just talk something about ways that you can outsource some of that. You don't have to outsource all of it. Some of it you'll love some of it you'll see as your free time, you know, if you're gonna go and garden, maybe you love gardening.
Dan (32:58):
And so that's kind of your green time and that's great. Don't outsource that. But if you hate cooking, right, then maybe find someone in your family who does like cooking or find a way to to get food. That's, you know, half prepared for you. I don't wanna encourage you to go and buy like frozen meals. I want you to buy stuff that's fresh, that's healthy. And that's easy to prepare to prepare that comes with you really clear instructions, all that kind of stuff that just makes the task easier, gets it done faster. You have to stress about thinking about what you're gonna cook or whatever, you know, all the things that are taken away to make it more effective time for you. And so that's the kind we're talking about doing that. And the last bit in this chapter is about teachers actually not feeling guilty that they need help and actually, you know, waving your hand is what I say in the book.
Dan (33:47):
So this is, you know, a surf life saving type thing. You know, I worked as a lifesaver lifeguard for a while and I was always amazed. People didn't wave their hand. They were always too busy, struggling and to keep themselves afloat, right. They don't stop to drown and wave their hand. And so I think as teachers, we are often struggling and we're keeping, trying to keep ourselves up, but if we just wave our hand, we'll get the attention and we can get that help. And I think it's really important for us as teachers to not look down on people who are asking for help, but to actually do it ourselves, be willing to ask for help when we're in that busy time. Cuz you know, when reports come and all that kind of stuff, your assessments are being marked. Particularly if you're an English teacher, you know, you're marketing assessments is a lot more in more time consuming for you than it is for a lot of other departments.
Dan (34:31):
So I really wanna encourage you to wave your hand when you need it. And the last chapter is chapter nine. It is for school leaders. So this is like your heads of departments. And up, I start by talking about a thing called Krai, which is a Japanese term. It's a word that's used to refer to death from overwork. And so that that's a big problem in Japan. They have the definitely the highest rate of overwork in the world. And so I wanna just flag that with the, with the school leaders and go, if we keep working our teachers this hard, we're actually going to, to lead them towards, you know, sickness that can lead to death and that kind of stuff. And so we need to avoid these kind of burnout things. And so the rest of this chapter is about how school leaders can really put things in place to help teachers and to help themselves.
Dan (35:14):
And one of those things is a school mission statement. So there's a personal mission statement, but there's also school mission statements and school mission statements. It's if the school I be lots of schools where they just tend to be all over the place, like they don't actually, they haven't got a really clear plan for where they're going and how they're gonna get there and that kind of stuff. And I think it's important for schools to have that. I think it's important for them to evolve as many, you know, teachers and stuff and other stakeholders in that process. And it has a really great outcome if you do it well. So there's stuff in, there's some tips in this chapter about how to do that. Well, and even some, yeah, I recommend a few other resources to use to do that really well. It's something that I think schools need to do to make sure that they're focused when they're focused, it then helps you to be targeted in the professional development.
Dan (35:58):
You provide teachers and make sure that it's actually beneficial for them to provide the support they need to implement it, all that kind of stuff. You start to really, you know, as a school, you wanna be effective as well in terms of achieving those kinds of things. And so to be an effective school, you also wanna be effective with your money. And so in this chapter, I'm gonna, I talked a lot about the idea of actually allocating tasks based on a person's training and skill set, not just based on their role. You know, I think probably my, my most hated role example of this is I teach P in, you know, new south Wales and Australia. This is teaching health teaching how to look after your body personal development. And then we also teach physical education. And often from our PDP teachers, we get promoted to a sports coordinator, a sports coordinator's job is to organize all the sport at the school.
Dan (36:53):
So schools play against other schools and all that kind of stuff, sports carnivals coming up. They're the ones who organize that. They organize the trials, et cetera. And some of that, yeah, great PE teacher needs to do, but so much of this job is just admin work. So they are filling in spreadsheets, chasing up kids to fill in morph forms and stuff. They're chasing up buses and booking buses and booking venues and, you know, liaising with other schools about organizing times and schedules. And it would be way more effective as a school if you're gonna promote someone to a sports coordinator, right? Give them a little bit of time off and yeah. Their money promotion or whatever, to be the person who oversees the coordination of sport. But I think a lot of the work that gets allocated to them can actually get allocated to an, you know, an admin person and you can make them their part-time assistant for sports coordinating.
Dan (37:47):
And that then becomes an admin person that the, the sports person, the person who's training sport then talks to this admin person to organize and coordinate everything. So they'll say, you know, we need to book six venues and 10 buses to go, you know, there's this many kids, cetera, you know, and the admin person can actually look after a lot of the work so that the teacher who's a trained teacher can actually spend more time in class. Don't need as much time to be relieved from work from the work in the classroom. That is the work they love. Right. I don't really know too many teachers that love organizing buses and chasing kids up to fill in another form because they didn't fill in, they didn't choose what they're gonna do for sport or something. It's it's yeah. So that's what I'm talking about, right.
Dan (38:27):
I'm talking about in this section, allocating things by task, right? So this person is trained in administrative tasks, give them the administrative roles. You know, if someone's gonna mark a role every day, you know, get it to be someone who's not a trained teacher, waste their time doing that. If someone needs to enter marks, right? If I, if the teacher is marked the whole exam, for example, most schools have teachers marking exams, pass those exams onto an admin person who then enters all that data into the system, right? There'll be some kind of learning management system or something in the school, get an admin person to spend that time, entering that data, save the teacher that kind of time to be more effective with what they're doing. They also talking here about a traffic lights, light system, which is all about checking in with your teachers about whether or not they're green, where things are cruisy, they're enjoying life, they're orange, where they're, they're kind of at their max in terms of how much work that's good balance maybe.
Dan (39:23):
And then red is, you know, I need help. So every now and then sending out an email and just asking your teachers, are you red, orange or green? And getting them to say, yeah, I'm this. Then you can find teachers, you know, if you find lots of green teachers, you can help a red teacher out, right? Because suddenly there's lots of green teachers who actually have seen, I've got a bit of time at the moment. I'm, I'm free to help people. So using that is great. Sometimes you'll know why the teachers are read, might be report writing season, but yeah, it's checking in making sure that people where people are at and how you can best support them to be effective. You, you wanna have most of your teachers in that orange. The other thing in here that I think is really important for schools, schools need to think about how they create spaces and make sure they actually creating spaces where teachers can get deep work done.
Dan (40:11):
So often our, our staff rooms are big, massive open spaces with lots of teachers in there. And we all just end up chatting and being interrupted. And it's just a constant, like it's noisy in there. Teachers need somewhere. They can go, that's quiet where they can sit down and get work and no one's gonna interrupt them. Yeah. It can even just be setting up faces in terms of your policies and how you set up your processes. And it's going, you know, if you receive an email as a teacher, you've got a week to reply, you don't have to respond within 24 hours. You know, if you need that fast to response, you'll get a text message or you'll actually have someone come and knock on your door to that kind of stuff. So you can create safe spaces in terms of your physical spaces for getting deep work done, but you can also do it with just the general space.
Dan (40:51):
You know, the, the technological space, the ethos, the or the school super important if you're tying deep work and setting out systems and policies that support that I think is really man really, really important. The last thing is chapter that I talking about is that if you are in a position of leadership at a school and you are managing people, I mean, even a teacher is managing people that when you're managing adults and stuff, you really should look into reading and learning and discovering more about how to manage people. I think it's super important. So please make sure you get into some kind of learning about managing people and make sure you do a really good job. I recommend a couple of resources in there. Like the one minute manager, for example, a great resource or Brene brown stuff is fantastic in this area.
Dan (41:42):
So really getting into leadership and doing it well. And don't ever try and rush people. You know, it's the worst thing that you can do as someone who's managing people, cuz you know, to, to rush, to get through people effectively like to save yourself time. You've actually gotta devote time and listen to start with otherwise, you're gonna actually create more issues going forward down the road. Well, that's it that's this is a very long version of my podcast today, but we are going, we are deep dive there into my book, which is work less, teach more how to be an effective teacher and live a life you love it came out last year and we're now at the end of the podcast, we're gonna tell you where to go in order to get your free copy. So if you head to teacherspd.net/free and then WLTM.
Dan (42:32):
So for work less teach more. So teacherspd.net/freewltm you'll land on the page where you can order yourself a free copy of this book. I just ask you to cover postage and handling and I send it out for free because I want teachers to benefit from this. I want you to reduce your work at school. I want you to be effective still in what you're doing at school, but I want you to enjoy life. I want you to have a life that you love in every aspect. And I believe this book will really help you to do that. If you enjoy this episode, I would love for you to leave me a review. Let me know what you liked about this episode and maybe what else you would like me to talk to you about. And of course, make sure you hit the subscribe button, come back and join me again next week. As we continue to look at things that will help you as a teacher to become effective. Thanks very much.
