Reducing Demands on the Job
Understanding Demands
A demand is any physical, psychological, social or organizational element that depletes the energy of a teacher. We use three categories to help schools analyze these demands. Demands usually come from the personal area, classroom, or school as a workplace (read more in this blog post). In our experience, there is usually not just one category that pushes a teacher toward the increased stress or reduced energy path, but a combination of all three that in tandem combine exponentially to create excess stress and possible burnout.
For school leaders, our experience also suggests that you start with working on the demands of the workplace first. Very few teachers point to themselves first or their classrooms as having unreasonable demands but often point to the conditions in the workplace as the primary culprit for stress. Even though it may not be easy to see at first, schools are like a geological rock formation with layer after layer of ideas, reforms, and expectations stacked upon each other year after year until the real expectations are buried. Schools are also experts at not getting rid of things that have shown no benefit for the students or adults. Some expectation set by two principals ago is still in place with no specific purpose; yet nobody mentions it, and it remains part of the layers of sediment adding to the already burdened teacher.
So one great strategy in dealing with demands is to work not just on implementation of new things, but also on de-implementation which requires a deep dive into all of the required work processes and requirements that have been placed upon teachers in your building (Hamilton, Hattie & William, 2023). This requires a four-step process:
Discover: this is where you gather a list from all staff about what they perceive as the things they are required to do during a day and week that don’t pertain to their core function of teaching students. These include everything from taking lunch count, to getting students ready for recess, to duties, to turning in assessment results and so on. Sometimes these lists can get rather long as you might imagine.
Decide: once you have this list you can use a process to decide what might be removed. The overarching questions here are does it impact student learning or safety and will it save teachers’ time and effort? Once you have narrowed the list down, you can decide if you want to remove it completely or stop doing it, reduce it say from weekly to two times a month, reengineer it to make it work better, or replace it entirely.
De-implement: this is actually a very hard step in that we are creatures of habit so school leaders have to be very clear on what does not have to be done any more.
Re-decide: after a while, determine if the de-implementation has had an impact on student learning and teacher’s energy. If it has impacted student learning you need to determine why and if the process needs reimagined or started again. If it has not impacted teacher energy, you may have to de-implement some more.
As an example, we worked with a school taking them through this process. Things like attendance, lunch count, and dismissal time were listed as potential excess demands but had to continue due to organizational needs and safety issues. However, weekly reporting of assessment data was discussed in-depth as not helping to impact student learning as much as first thought. In this school, the expectation was created so that teachers were forced to assess their students more frequently, but no proof could be shown that the time involved was beneficial to students and it took a lot of time from teachers. Therefore, it was de-implemented and over time was shown not to hamper student learning while giving teachers time back for instruction and not having to fill out a report.
Conclusion
Using a de-implementation process is a simple yet effective strategy to reduce demands in a school if used properly. School leaders are often prone to add things as they see problems that need immediate solving. However, as we connect back to our analogy of the battery on your phone, we know the more apps you load and the more screens you have open and running, the quicker your battery runs down. Similarly, the more work processes we add, the more teachers have to do, reducing their focus and energy.
The ongoing and essential question that leaders need to ask themselves is one, “What is imperative for my teachers to do and do well?”, and two, “What demands are taking them away from those few imperative things?” Answer those together and see how the batteries start to charge!