THE 'B WORD': QUESTIONING TIME AND OUR HABITS OF PRACTICE

A number of years ago I worked at a school where the Principal at the time had encouraged the teaching staff to stop using the word 'busy' in reference to their work. I remember how annoyed the team was initially by what appeared to be such a trivial request, but it didn't take long for us to realise how often we used 'the b word' in conversation, especially about our daily tasks and experiences. We also quickly realised that 'busy', for our team at least, was a loaded word. 

In some instances it was used to justify our lack of progress or action, in other conversations it became a way to seek common understanding and generate empathy amongst the team and, in some moments, I realised, being 'busy' had come to represent some kind of bizarre and competitive level of over-achievement. I remember jovial conversations where we would almost try to out-do each other's busy-ness. It wasn't until many years later, reading the work of Brené Brown in her book Daring Greatly,  I re-confronted this term and its pervasive influence on our lives. In fact, messages about time are everywhere around us, when we are attuned to them they seem to just appear. 

 (this message was spotted in my local sushi shop)

In our last post Anne wrote 'If we view time as a value, then we need to think very carefully about how we choose to spend our time and make decisions about our time that support our pedagogical practices and beliefs'. So, this idea about seeing time as a value has set further thoughts in motion for me this week. 

It makes me wonder...

When do we stop and think about the time we have, 

the decisions we make and the pedagogical habits we build? 

It is really interesting to think that across a teaching day, week, month or year we are all granted a very similar 'budget of time'. The allocation of time is a constant and essential ingredient in our practice, one that we cannot change. Yet, within this time, we participate in many 'taken for granted' practices, protocols and routines: things that we do because we have always done them. Once they are entrenched as pedagogical norms these practices become hard to see and even harder to shift.

The way we approach documentation can easily slip into these habits of practice, over time we can fall into recurrent patterns, maybe even developing 'recipes', scaffolds or checklists for our approach to documentation along the way.

Organisation, developing the system-ness of our approach, is an essential strategy of cohesive pedagogical teams, but I wonder if the routines we build are preventing us from thinking deeply about the important iterative process of learning and teaching? Possibly, the ones we might need to develop include routines of questioning, of thinking, of dialogue and conversation; routines that actively disrupt our habits and dig deeper in a shared search for meaning.

Perhaps then, in order to liberate time for deeper learning through pedagogical documentation we could be asking:

What are the things that we always do 'because we have always done them'? 

What are the things that we do without questioning their effectiveness and impact on our work?

Is time your friend or foe when building strong habits of pedagogical documentation? 

At the end of the day, I think everyone benefits if we take the time to stop and reconsider the way we use our time and the ‘habits of practice’ that absorb our time. 

The pressure of time adds enormous weight to our roles and impacts our ability to encounter learning with depth and rigour. Perhaps the greatest risk here is that without this important time and attention, pedagogical documentation might continue to sit on the outer edges of our work rather than at the heart of our practice.

It leaves us with lots to think about… will you take the time?

Fiona