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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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.
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Praise for Ticked Off
It goes without saying that teachers are incredibly busy and, in the midst of all this activity, it’s all too easy for even the most accomplished teacher to overlook vital information, misplace crucial resources and forget the very thing they have promised they will remember. Harry Fletcher-Wood’s timely and useful book draws on examples from the safety-critical industries like healthcare and aviation to recommend one simple, straightforward and easy-to-implement addition to ensure the best laid plans of overworked teachers do not go awry.
Interesting, practical and accessible, this little book and its one big idea could transform the way you work. Highly recommended.
David Didau, author of What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong?
Harry has created a book for those of us who lose worksheets, misplace pens and don’t have a calm, organised person upstairs. But instead of making teachers feel bad for disorganisation he offers a solution: a simple, effective, thought-provoking aid for getting through each and every situation the classroom (and its chaos) has on offer. When I was in the classroom, I constantly wondered what the best way to organise myself was. This book does the hard-work thinking for you, but still encourages you to think some more!
Laura McInerney, editor, Schools Week
I am admittedly a fan of checklists and I am now also a fan of Ticked Off. In a world stuffed full of busyness, a checklist can help bring clarity and calm. Harry Fletcher-Wood takes a systematic approach to creating usable checklists for pretty much every aspect of school life. This book is a pleasure to read and helped me think more clearly about the complexity of our daily work as teachers.
Is Harry’s book on checklists immensely valuable and worth your precious time? Tick! Is it an easy read that proves practical and useful? Tick! Should busy teachers invest in this book? Tick!
Alex Quigley, teacher, Huntington School, author of Teach Now! English
Harry’s book acts as an empathetic guide to support efficiency, balancing the complexities of education as a whole and the role of being a teacher. This is not necessarily a how-to style book; it shares Harry’s reflections on what works for him and the understandings he has, offering measured and balanced reflections for improving as students, teachers, leaders; and within teaching itself. In sharing his perceptions of his practice, and how he has subsequently developed, the reader cannot help but consider their own practice and embark upon a journey in which their own styles are audited.
I love that this book is not written by a stereotypically organised person. For the rest of us who struggle at this, Harry isn’t condescending or judgemental and has an approachable, comfortable tone; it’s as if you’re sat in the staffroom chatting with him!
Kieran Dhunna Halliwell (Ezzy_Moon), researcher and consultant
Ticked Off takes its approach from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto, which demonstrates how checklists help to improve standards and avoid errors. Following examples from the fields of science and medicine, Harry Fletcher-Wood shows how aspects of teaching and organisation can be managed more easily by using checklists.
Irrespective of the ultimate complexity of the task on hand, a checklist simplifies the task by breaking it down into manageable entities. The real beauty of this book is that the checklists are easy to use and can be adapted for all aspects of teaching and working within education, from nursery and primary school levels through to higher education. All education practitioners will find practical resources to improve their own practice, to lead and train others, to introduce and implement sustainable changes, to deal with difficult conversations, to lead meetings effectively, to gauge student voice and feedback and to involve students by making them responsible for their own learning.
Ticked Off is a great book, offering an interesting and practical approach to time management. Having read this book I am now implementing checklists in my own work. If you only have time to read one education book this year, make sure it is this one because this is a fantastic resource.
Nicole Brown, lecturer in education and secondary teacher education programme leader
Anyone familiar with Harry’s writing will know very well how thorough, thoughtful and subtly profound he is. He takes the ordinary and makes us look at it sideways, upside-down and inside-out. Harry challenges us to revisit the everyday to ensure that our bread and butter is the best it can be. Harry’s admiration for Atul Gawande has led him to create a book about teaching and learning, and what a treasure trove it is. In Ticked Off, Harry approaches the oft ignored parts of our day with precision and vigour to try to help us be incrementally better through effective planning and use of the simple checklist: how can students best know if they’re ready for exams, or if their essays are excellent? How might teachers help their students master vocabulary, or ensure that that poor lesson never repeats itself? What about being ready for trips, observations and giving feedback?
This is a book for everyone: student, teacher, middle leader and leader. But it’s also personable, honest, thorough and important. It’s Harry Fletcher-Wood all over, and every school needs a copy.
Toby French (@MrHistoire), history teacher
For my parents.
Foreword by Sir Tim Brighouse
Like the author, I am not a natural fan of checklists.
The roots of my dislike can probably be traced to having an excellent memory when I was young and being a bit over-pleased with myself for that good fortune, which for a long time I assumed was connected with our view at that time about what it was to be intelligent. My attitude is best illustrated by anecdote. As a very young deputy at Chepstow Community College in the mid-1960s I worked with a head towards the end of his career whose working practice included summoning me each morning for a briefing. I recall thinking him rather pathetic for having a ‘list’ in his hand as he ran through what needed to be done that day and I remember his puzzlement that I didn’t take any notes of the many tasks he required of me. I had no difficulty in recall. Now of course, I not only need lists but often find I can’t remember where I have put them!
But my prejudice against lists had two further aspects. First, I thought checklists the enemy of creativity, especially in teaching, which I saw as more of an art than a science, and therefore ‘lists’ were to be avoided at all costs. Second, when I later deployed weekly ‘to do’ lists drawn up on a Sunday evening for the following week, I became depressed at my inability to tick any of them off as the crises of the days that followed displaced them and the urgent overtook the important. I even considered the temptation recounted to me by a Scottish educator of adding things on a Friday that had already been done simply to gain the pleasure of ticking them off.
So like Harry Fletcher-Wood, I approached Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto with some scepticism. But like all good books it caused me to think. Of course I had long realised that good management and administration is about ‘doing things right’ to complement the strategic imperative of doing the ‘right things’. For schools, this was best expressed by the Victorian Head of Uppingham who once said, ‘I take my stand on detail’. So I accepted, in the administration and management of schools, checklists had their place. Of course this book will show you how the checklist has an essential role in good and effective lessons and learning. Perhaps the primary practitioner has always known that: certainly the widespread practice of giving pupils regular tasks – the classroom monitor syndrome – relies on the checklist approach. This book takes our thinking so much further with an abundance of practical examples.
As schools wrestle with the conundrum of what are the ‘non-negotiables’ in their teaching and learning policy and practice, and as they seek to strike a balance between ‘singing from the same song sheet’, yet not doing so to the extent that they hem the individual teacher in with so many ‘must dos’ that they stifle creativity, they’ll find this book more than useful – in practice an invaluable aid to discussion in whole school, departmental and phase meetings.
In a primary classroom the other day, I had a glimpse of practice which I thought reflected the surgical practice outlined in The Checklist Manifesto where Gawande explains how consultants were initially resistant to the checklist approach and were only won over by the nurse taking the role of running through the checklist in the operating theatre since for the consultant to do so was an affront to dignity. In the classroom I caught sight of two year 6 pupils at the start of the session who were running through the requirements of the teacher’s lesson plan as she smilingly looked on, nodding as it came to issues affecting her; the rest of the class also checked as it came to issues that would involve them playing their part in what was to unfold.
So I commend this book as a stimulus to improving practice in schools and classrooms across the country. It will lead to better learning for pupils and, as I saw the other day, perhaps their involvement in the checklist process.
Sir Tim Brighouse, former London Schools Commissioner and Chief Education Officer for Birmingham and Oxfordshire
Acknowledgements
Louisa King helped inspire me to begin work on the book; Bodil Isaksen, Tim Brighouse and David Didau offered insightful comments on early drafts and Doug Lemov provided much needed encouragement at a critical stage. Andy Day, David Didau and @ImSporticus generously allowed me to use their work. Inasmuch as the checklists contain good ideas, they reflect the actions and ideas of everyone I’ve ever worked alongside, been trained by or been fortunate enough to see teach – thank you.
Contents
Introduction
Why checklists?
Two years ago, I would have dismissed the thought of writing a book promoting checklists to fellow teachers: I saw the impersonal routine they implied as stifling. In any case, my own organisation was too haphazard to venture advice to anyone else. Both my views and my efficiency have since changed: this book seeks to share the process and the result.
As teachers, many things prevent us from achieving all that we would like, but most come down to a single cause: while students’ needs are infinite, our time and resources are not. Were we to itemise everything we would like to do for every student in all our classes for a single day – marking books, planning lessons, having supportive individual conversations and so on – and then add up the time these tasks demand, I suspect we would reach a total in excess of a reasonable week’s work. Additional external and unsought factors add to this pressure – moving classrooms, evidencing our work for Ofsted, specification changes – but they are simply a bitter icing; the cake is unpalatable because students’ needs are so extensive. Our time will never suffice for all we hope to do, so it pays to be as efficient as possible.
Some teachers seem intimidatingly organised in all they do. Neat stacks of paper, appropriately labelled and organised, set out everything their students may need each day; by the afternoon, worksheets have been completed diligently, resources filed carefully, work marked constructively and all is ready for tomorrow. This book is not designed for such paragons.
This book is for everyone else. We manage most of the time, with occasional heart-stopping moments as we realise, or fear, that we’ve committed a gigantic oversight. If you’ve ever started a lesson and realised you haven’t printed enough copies of an essential worksheet, this book is for you. If you’ve struggled with the number of students who need help completing a simple task which you’re sure you’ve explained clearly, this book is for you. If you’ve ever crawled to colleagues or managers to apologise that the data, seating plans or replies they expected have slipped your mind, this book is for you.
We’re not bad people or bad teachers. We manage our mistakes. We reprint lesson resources and send students to collect the worksheets, anxiously filling the intervening time. We run around the classroom trying to help every student, not quite managing, and ending with a dull sense that the lesson didn’t quite work out – a sense quickly overwhelmed by the rush of the next class’s arrival. We make our apologies to colleagues and struggle on to our next lapse. We chalk up our mistakes and omissions as an inevitable part of the everyday struggle that is being a teacher, and assume that it’s meant to be this way.
This book offers something different. Checklists can free us to devote our time, energy and attention to focusing on the tasks that matter most.
Who uses checklists?
This book takes its inspiration from Atul Gawande’s fascinating book, The Checklist Manifesto.* Gawande describes a process of research, seeking to understand how checklists are used in flying and construction, and his subsequent attempts to build on these insights by developing equivalents in his own field, surgery.
Gawande highlights the importance of checklists to pilots. He gives examples of crashes in which, by fixating on individual problems – like restarting an engine – pilots have overlooked basic procedures – like monitoring the aeroplane’s height. Gawande shows how the airline industry prevents such events by refining rigorous checklists for every eventuality, then swiftly distributing them worldwide. His examples demonstrate their effectiveness: after investigating an engine failure in January 2008, Boeing developed a checklist which gave a counterintuitive instruction to pilots who found their fuel lines blocked by ice; instead of demanding more power, they should idle the engines for a few seconds to melt the ice. The checklist was issued in September; in November, a Boeing 777 with 247 people on board suffered the same problem, an ‘uncommanded rollback’ of the engine. By following the checklist, however, danger was rapidly averted. ‘It went so smoothly,’ he says, ‘the passengers didn’t even notice’ (p. 135). Gawande shows us that checklists are a critical tool if we want to get things right under pressure.
