I have blogged a couple of times on how we are constantly adding things, processes, tasks, etc, in order to result in better outcomes. We are also forever looking to be more efficient, so we release some time to allow us to do yet more things. One look at what teaching looked like back in the late 90’s when I qualified (god, am I that old??) compared with now very easily illustrates this. Now a lot of the things we have added have came out of increasing amounts of research showing us what seems to generally work, or they have come out of a response to where something has gone wrong, but they have all involved doing more.
Now no-one wants to do worse, where taking something away, a process, a resource or anything else seems to logically result in a reduction in performance or quality of outcome. We also have loss aversion, a heuristic, to deal with whereby we value what we have, and our current processes, more highly than alternatives, leading to us being reluctant to let go of that which we have.
And all of this means we are forever doing more, and one look at the teacher wellbeing index seems to point to increasing amounts of stress in education, increasing incidences of burnout, etc. Recently I have also found myself looking at increasing email and message volumes with some research pointing to increased stress resulting from increased email traffic. We cannot continue on this trajectory of adding and must at some point step back and reassess education and what really matters. Not an easy ask sadly!
So what can we do? I don’t have an answer to solve this problem as it is such a big problem impacting on wellbeing that it will take a fundamental rethink of what education is all about, and about what matters in schools and colleges. I would suggest one thing we need to do is to reconsider the resiliency and efficiency narratives; Being highly resilient, as Laura Knight recently raised, or highly efficient may be good in the short term but what does it mean in the long term? How long can we be in resiliency mode for before it wears you down? Can you flourish as a human being, enjoying life and contributing to society if your whole focus is on hyper efficiency?
Again I don’t have an answer but I do have a suggestion; It is the need to lighten up and have a little fun. To be social, to have a laugh and remember it isn’t all about resiliency and efficiency. So to address that, a team member recently, with permission, used GPT 4o to convert our staff photos into the muppet versions of ourselves, before posting these to the staff list and onto our Office 365 profiles. It didn’t solve the workload or wellbeing issue, but this random act gave people a laugh and raised a few smiles. And maybe we need a little bit more of that!
Technology and Learning