Ticked Off

Checklists for teachers, students, school leaders

Harry Fletcher-Wood

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781785830105
• eBook ISBN: 9781785830648
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ticked Off by Harry Fletcher-Wood introduces teachers to the checklist, but not as they've seen it before. Discover the rationale for using checklists, the key design principles behind them and the effect they can have. Checklists are already used in medicine, aeronautics and construction and they can help teachers too. Learn a deceptively simple way of completing critical actions well, particularly when under pressure. Ticked Off contains checklists which offer teachers and leaders a calmer, more organised life and a healthy approach to workload and well-being. These checklists can be adopted or adapted: they are ready to use, but offer guidance, examples and suggestions so teachers can personalise them for their needs. Free downloadable versions make this easy for busy teachers. Checklists: free us to devote our time, energy and attention to focusing on the tasks that matter most; improve communication with colleagues and students; remind us of important steps which even highly skilled professionals may miss; offer us reassurance that, when going home at the end of the day, we've done everything that matters and can relax; and can make you a better and a happier teacher. There are checklists to simplify procedural tasks for students, including essay planning, setting up experiments and quality checking work, which will free up teacher time. There are checklists for teaching including: planning lessons, time management, giving feedback and assessing student needs and exam readiness. Checklists for teachers include: processes for reading research, preparing for job interviews, having productive meetings with parents, protecting well-being, and managing the daily and weekly demands of the role. Checklists for leaders cover: inducting middle leaders, making meetings work, designing effective CPD, using data and giving feedback. Additional checklists for living include: making decisions, what to do if you've made a mistake and making each school day a good one. Many things prevent teachers from achieving all that they would like, but most come down to a single cause: while students' needs are infinite, our time and resources are not. Some teachers seem intimidatingly organised in all they do. This book is for everyone else. Whether you're a teacher, teacher-trainer or school leader, everyone can benefit from the checklist approach.

Section iv

Checklists for leaders

Just like teachers, school leaders are under pressure to make difficult decisions with limited time. The biggest difference is that the impact of a leader’s decision is more far wide-ranging and (depending on the school) more likely to face immediate and determined opposition.

In the same way that the distinction between checklists for teachers and leaders is open to debate, so this section contains a number of checklists which teachers as well as leaders may find useful – leading a trip and creating a scheme of work are two obvious ones. They are collected here, however, because these checklists address actions which demand leadership, such as requiring collaboration from fellow teachers and leading other adults.

30. Have I been inducted properly as a middle leader?

30. Have I been inducted properly as a middle leader?

* Meetings:

* What is the agenda?

* Who chairs them?

* What is the follow-up?

* Finance:

* What resources do we have and need?

* How do we order things?

* How do we follow up on those orders?

* Schemes of work:

* Where and how do we plan schemes of work?

* How do we use them as a department and as individuals?

* When and how do we review them?

* Exams:

* Who is responsible for exam entries and how?

* Who performs the results analysis?

* Who deals with exam returns?

* Interventions:

* What interventions do we run?

* Who attends?

* What’s the follow-up for individuals and for analysis?

* Department plan:

* How is the department plan developed each year?

* How is the plan used?

* When and how is the plan reviewed?

* Culture:

* How do we do things around here?

* What’s special about the department and the team?

* What do we not do?

Handovers between outgoing and incoming leaders may take many forms – it may be rushed or even non-existent if your predecessor has already left. Moreover, when new to a post you often don’t know what questions to ask until you’re confronted by a particular situation, by which time your predecessor may have moved on.

This excellent checklist, suggested by Andy Day, is designed to ensure that a middle leader has been inducted properly. He developed it because he was concerned that schools often make a new appointment and then effectively throw the appointee in at the deep end. The school leadership is then disappointed when they struggle.

Andy argues that an effective induction programme should be the result of widespread discussion, a clarification of the key skills the role entails, an assessment of the level of competence required and assigning an experienced ‘buddy’ or mentor to ensure the plane lands with its undercarriage down and the wheels spinning.

Pause point

Check/do – during an induction conversation, or do/check at the end of it.

My first induction to take over a new role within a school was with a colleague who was leaving teaching at the end of the summer term. I wrote down everything he said in slightly rushed note form. By the time I was in post in September, I was sure he (or, more likely, I) had missed some key points but by then he was in a new job elsewhere.

How else could this be used?

An equivalent induction checklist could be designed for new teachers by departments or pastoral teams.

31. What does a unit of work need?

31. What does a unit of work need?

* Knowledge: What is the substantive knowledge the students should remember from this unit?

* Threshold concepts: What deep developments in understanding (i.e. irreversible changes in the way the students see the world) might this unit lead the students in to?

* Assessment: How will we know if the students have learned what we hope they will learn?

* Vocabulary: What words must the students know to make sense of this unit?

* Links to prior knowledge: What previous topics and existing understanding does this build upon? How can we revisit them for the students who have missed out on it?

* Links to the curriculum: What is this unit preparing the students for?

* Links to other subjects and to life: How does this unit help the students to understand other subjects and the world?

Although we tend to focus our concerns on short-term issues before we consider long-term issues, effective planning works the other way round. Individual schools and departments often have their own preferred ways of planning units, but this checklist is designed to focus attention on the aspects which are most critical to a scheme of work.

Pause point

Check/do – while planning, or do/check once the scheme of work is completed.

Example

The example to the right is an early draft (the assessment is summarised in a separate document) for part of a Year 8 history curriculum.

Unit guiding question: why d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Foreword by Sir Tim Brighouse
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• i: Checklists for students
• ii: Checklists for teaching
• iii: Checklists for teachers
• iv: Checklists for leaders
• v: Checklists for living
• vi: Design your own checklist
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Copyright