Dealing With Eleventh Hour Deadlines – How Do You React?
When a display bombshell blows your week’s schedule to smithereens, will you ready the troops for a regimented plan of attack or shoulder the load in a gutsy last stand?
- by Paul Dix
You’re busy enough without tick-list micromanagement, yet here’s another demand on your schedule that you don’t have time for. The leadership, in full-on ‘the school next door did it and got an Outstanding from Ofsted’ panic mode, has decided that every teacher must have new sets of classroom displays. There is a checklist of required standards and even a birds-eye view of your classroom with the areas where the displays have to be positioned.
As you ruminate on just how long it took someone to prepare this bureaucracy, and how it would have been easier to simply have a conversation about displays, you notice the obligatory, unrealistic deadline – THIS FRIDAY! Before you can register even the slightest protest about family life, priorities for the pupils or 85-hour weeks, the madness begins.
Store cupboards are stripped of their resources, laminators and guillotines are MIA and curvy ridged border rolls are being traded on the black market at the back of the staffroom. And on top of all that, this week is busy at home too, where the promises and plans you’ve made now seem foolish.
What will you do next…?
A Solo mission Cancel family life, stay at work until after dark and get the job done.
B Regimented approach Don’t sweat it, get the class to overhaul the displays in a 60-minute makeover.
C The Displ-A Team Quickly train and deploy a crack unit of design specialists
Your choice
A Major workload Even though you carefully pick your moments to drop the news, the fact that you are not going to honour any of your planned evening activities goes down like a lead balloon. Friends, family and your own mental health are the inevitable collateral damage.
Of course, the bad feeling doesn’t last too long and you resolve to redouble your efforts to address your work-life ‘balance’. For four nights you stay late until the site manager threatens to lock you in. You know you shouldn’t, but for ease you take a Sunday visit to the Church of Stationary (AKA Staples) on Sunday. You throw a few quid at your displays to make them stand out and pretend to yourself that you’ll find some way of claiming that money back.
When it’s all done on Thursday night, standing back you’re really pleased with the results. The colours are vibrant (you maybe went a bit nuts with the fluorescent stars), there is a double-glitter border, phonics mobiles hanging from the ceiling, working walls, a behaviour board, a values statement and a SPAG tree. With little room for anything else, you sadly move the photographs of the children at the activity centre into the cupboard.
The class love the displays. Their appreciation is welcome. However, the vibrant palette is not working for all of them. Some are struggling with the overstimulation and their behaviour is degenerating rapidly. There are intense colours everywhere and various dangly spinny things. The day is then capped off by the fact that you’ve worked so hard you can feel a tickle in the back of your throat that, by the weekend, you know will be full-blown illness. Oh, and the news from your impressed colleague who says: “You do know they’ve all got to be redone every half term?”
Talking behaviour: • What can you do if unrealistic deadlines are imposed? • Does more display = better display ? • How can you help the children who are distracted and overstimulated?
B General chaos You run the class though the plan like you’re in a scene from The Great Escape, detailing the exit route and marking out the precise course of action with a wooden stick and blackboard for good measure. The children are excited at being let loose on the resources, and everyone has brought something from home to use for decorating the displays. Some have done this well. Others less so. Nelson’s washing-up liquid and toilet roll combo was one of the less well-received ‘decorative’ items.
But the class are keen to get on and you worry some of your criteria for success may have been missed. This is clear from the off. There are instant brawls over glue sticks and near misses with the stapler. By the time you realise just how bad an idea this was, you’re in too deep. Old displays have been eviscerated and you need to hold your nerve to see it through – but it doesn’t end well.
While the class are very pleased with their efforts, you struggle to congratulate them. The room looks like someone has emptied a recycling bin into a washing machine, added glue – lots and lots of glue – and set it to spin. You have just made your week a lot longer and way more complicated. As you try to figure out how best to explain to the children that you will have to remove their ‘carefully crafted’ displays, you realise you may also need to explain to Joel’s parents why he’s glittery; and he is very, very glittery.
Talking behaviour: • How could you have delivered the instructions so the children would have a chance of remembering them? • Does the quality of display matter? • How are you going to explain to Joel’s parents why he looks like he’s been swimming in a vat of glitter?
C Squadron leaders The children are perfectly capable of creating beautiful displays to the standards required. Well, some of them are. You decide to delegate, selecting a team of five and putting them through intensive boot-camp training on pleated edging, ink stamping, and multi-framing techniques.
You consult with the other children on tones and textures, and they opt for the natural hessian backing (that is surprisingly calming) with autumnal colours.
The display group works together brilliantly and gradually the classroom begins to change in both look and feel. It takes a week of lunchtimes and a few hours at the end of the day for them to complete the task. There are some decisions that you wouldn’t necessarily have made, but it’s good enough to pass muster.
They are ecstatic about their new ‘Display Team’ badges and you catch a colleague trying to ‘book them in’ for her class on the quiet. The spin-off is that the children seem more respectful of the displays, more eager to have their work up on the show and even more eager to be part of the Display Team.
Talking behaviour: • How can you bring in other children to be involved in the Display Team? • What other jobs could children take responsibility for that you currently do? • Why might the natural colours and textures create a calmer atmosphere?
Your style
A Soldier on Sacrificing your personal life on the alter of someone’s unrealistic priorities is never going to end well for you. Take your time to work out how to delegate tasks that the children could, and should be responsible for.
B Explosion of colour Glue-sticks, scissors and the laminating machine do strange things to people. Even fully grown adults. Information and resource overload probably happens somewhere between the forth instruction and the glitter pot.
C Pulling rank Expert delegation! What could they do tomorrow that you are in charge of today?
Paul Dix podcasts at pivotalpodcast.com and tweets at @PivotalPaul. The Pivotal Curriculum is a licensed trainer scheme that allows every school to deliver Pivotal Behaviour and Safeguarding Training.
