MAY - TIME SPENT MAPPED AGAINST FEELINGS

Representing the different aspects of English teaching and literacy

“I went for the analogy of a tractor because obviously the literacy is the vehicle, it's the hardworking vehicle that kind of moves through everything that we teach I think. So I tried to think about the elements of a tractor and how that would link to English teaching and literacy teaching. I tried to think about the hours that I spend [...]. I tried to think about where the parts of the tractor are in terms of the importance of the element. So the planning and the resources, making the resources, I thought they were the main bits that keep that vehicle moving so obviously they were my wheels. On average a week I probably spend about three hours planning my English and about two hours making sure I've got the resources, so that's making a smart board, notebooks and all that kind of stuff.”

Time a teacher spends on different literacy-related activities

“So on mine each of the different, I'll call them plants, represents a different thing that I do connected to English and then each line represents 15 minutes spent on that activity. Then I thought about the feelings, so I decided warm colours would be more positive feelings and then cooler colours not so positive, then I thought it's easier if the higher up the plant grows the more positive I felt about it, so sticking sheets in books I have to do. (LAUGHTER.) That's in grey at the bottom because I don't really get much satisfaction from that, however generating ideas with my colleague is really exciting and thinking about where we're going to take them next. So, yeah, that's kind of the representation.”

How a teacher spends their time

“So basically the different colours represent different things that I did with my time so the blue is non-contact time activities excluding planning and marking which I've done a separate colour for and most of them at the time were linked to – we've completely changed our writing assessment this year so a lot of it is linked to writing assessment. The purple is class teaching which there isn't an awful lot of because I had a PGCE student at the time. The green is observing, again, said PGCE student for English and literacy lessons. Red is reading and responding to emails. Orange is planning, and again there's not much because of my PGCE student, she was doing lots of that at the time and marking again and it was very low on that because she was doing most of the marking because at the time she was doing most of the teaching.”

Feelings associated with different activities in which a teacher is involved

“I kept a diary for a week of what I've been up to and how each activity made me feel. So on the little hand are the tasks that I've done and the big hand or the adult hand are how I felt at various times. There's not really a correlation so I've just gone on mostly how I'm feeling. So on the little hand, the main bit of it, the chequered bit, that's actual teaching so most of my time throughout the week looking purely at English was a high proportion of teaching which you'd expect teaching English every day to some degree. ”

Discussing literacy

“This is a layered literacy cake with the literacy candles at the top. These were actually different, basically discussions that I had around literacy in some format and the further it goes up the more pleasant I found the conversation. I wanted it to look like 'The Great British Bake Off' illustrations, but it doesn't. Imagine it does.

So these are just different conversations or inputs that impacted on my writing or writing of the children. So I'll start at the bottom. That was the pupil progress meetings today as it happens with the head teacher and deputy and we discussed the other subjects, but I'll just focus on the writing, writing concerns because I felt I had quite a few who weren't where they should be. So the discussion revolved around why because we do a lot of reading ...”