Teachers at elementary schools experience a very high workload. Often this leads to high burn-out rates.
Many strikes have been organized to demand for solutions from the government (higher salary, less administration, etc.).
At the moment I am investigating the high workload that a lot of teachers experience in the Netherlands.
Together with some experienced teachers and directors I’m working on a solution to make life “more bearable” for teachers.
Possible solutions
1. Kan-Ban for teams and focusing on “value”
The problem with handling too many tasks/overwork sounded familiar to me as webmaster in the past. Then I discovered KanBan (visualizing work/cards).
A key element in KanBan is the Work In Progress (WIP) limit. This reduces multi-tasking and makes you get more things done in a shorter period of time. Lots of teachers are multi-tasking:
- talking to parents
- preparing class/lessons
- sending newsletters/app mesages
- communicating with colleagues/ meetings
- taking notes of pupils
- etc.
2. One SMART (user) interface to handle all digital work
- Why do teachers need to learn to work with different tools, while they lack time to learn them (often heard complaints)
- Why do they have to log in each time they use another tool?
- What information is necessary to record?
What if teachers don’t have to learn a new tool, but are able to “talk” or communicate to a “smart assistant”? This virtual assistant understands what you mean and you can give it the commands to execute
3. Collaboration, finding information, knowledgemanagement
- Where is that plan a colleague (who’s not working here anymore) wrote last year?
- Is this the right document that we need to share with the “onderwijsinspectie”?
- why do I need to write another document/plan from scratch, someone has done that before right?
…To be continued