June 05 2024 at 02:56AM
Event Highlight: Teach the Teacher: Planning and prioritizing
Helping teachers under pressure
Teachers experience a lot of demand on their time from regular school tasks, dealing with issues, and additional work required by the government to improve school processes or for special events. The Segbroek College in Den Haag reached out to the PMI Netherlands team for help with how to start organizing work and getting things done. This resulted in an afternoon Planning and Prioritisation workshop for the VWO 4/5/6 teachers at the school led by Ralf van Haastregt and Gail Bertrand.
A cautious group of teachers arrived in the room. After an introduction, they played an enthusiastic version of the Tower Game with marshmallows and spaghetti, resulting in much discussion about assumptions, expectations, and boundaries (the rules of the game as a project definition) and how to deal with changes to these during the activity (change management). In the second round of the game, they demonstrated improvements in a more structured approach to teamwork, task assignments, and solution design planning to work together to increase the height of their tower and avoid penalties for unused materials (yes, they ate the excess marshmallows).
Following this Icebreaker, the atmosphere was set, and the teachers keenly followed the explanation about Prioritization and carried out an exercise to list and rank their workload. This resulted in conversations about "what is work?" and how often priorities should be reviewed.
The topic then turned to how to carry out Planning, considering their key limited resource (the teachers' own time), and another exercise to break down their activities into manageable parts using a Work Breakdown Structure. Discussions were triggered on how to define a task, what resources are required, dependencies, and assignments.
The feedback provided by the school VWO 4/5/6 team lead, Kristien Verhoeven, was that the teachers experienced a clear and enjoyable session, which prompted further thoughts and discussions. In an ideal world, we could have used a little more time for more discussion and a more current/real-life school-related project example to work through, but the door is open to following up with some additional sessions next school year.
Do you have any school or NGO contacts who may benefit from a similar session? If so, please contact the PMI Outreach team. They have a template workshop available and can provide assistance in preparing and delivering a session.
