[Catalist] SLRC: Australian Teacher Stress and Wellbeing Survey

Thu Apr 20 13:05:11 AEST 2017

You raise an interesting point Roy, but one that is unlikely to have legs.

1) There is an over-representation of ex PE teachers at management level 
in schools. This is because they have spare capacity relative to the 
rest of the teaching workforce and can be asked to stand in /cover for 
sick, LSL, or otherwise absent deputies etc. This means that come the 
time to appoint to management, PE has a massive advantage in the 
selection criterion "Have you any experience at this kind of work".

2) All people tend to over rate the amount of work they do with respect 
to others. ex PE teachers in management are likely to underestimate the 
workload of others, and over-estimate what they did. It is human nature, 
that is all, not a reflection on the people involved, but nevertheless, 
inevitable.

3) A lot of our assessment development is invisible. So management 
doesn't see the impact of the average of 12-16h necessary to produce an 
assessment instrument (test) properly aligned against a new courses' 
elaborations, proofed, moderated and with a worked marking key. Of 
course, if there is only one of you, you may just grab a test from a 
friend at another school, but at the end of the day, someone needs to 
sit down and write those, and they eat your family life and "spare time" 
(defined here as the gap between the 37.5h week you are paid for and the 
60-70h week you actually work).

4) Exacerbating point 2 is the relentless change in the system that we 
have seen since at least the mid 2000s. Teachers make pretty great 
footsoldiers - we might grumble a bit but we are fixers and system 
builders. We make it work, or die trying. So the implication is that 
just because we have survived and made two poorly thought out and 
massively underfunded curriculum shifts work (the 2ab/3ab changes of 
2008, and the new Australian curriculum-aligned changes to the senior 
school subjects that started from 2015), that this means we will suck up 
the next one that comes down the pipeline. Some of the mutterings about 
change to the new WACE courses that seem to be foreshadowed fall into 
this category. Someone has to ask the question, do we have the capacity 
to cope with this change without degrading the quality of our lives and 
our student outcomes?

5) There is currently a once-in-a-generation supply of physical 
scientists, largely from mining and engineering. It is possible (though 
not wise) to churn through some of those "crusty old bastards" from 
physics that always resist everything :)
Here management might be tempted to say if you don't like it, get lost. 
This solves the short term issue for them, although will lead to 
increasing decline in educational standards down the line. That type of 
consequence is easily evadable though - it will take 5 years to show 
through the noise, by which time the said manager can be promoted or 
move school. (Why 5 years. well: new grad teacher: 1st year-uses 
programs already there or borrowed from HOLAs mates, grades take a dip 
but they do for every new teacher to a class. 2nd Year: limited change 
to program, running on old form, student grades improve but not as much 
as they would for an experienced teacher. 3rd year: a bit of noise in 
the system - maybe a particularly good cohort or a poor cohort - not 
possible to see overall trend. 4th year - some curriculum changes. the 
old teacher would have seen all this before and have resources from 
1995, the new one has to learn- result lower grades.)  The point about 
the stuff in parentheses is that it is easy to hide the consequences of 
a poor decision - student data is very noisy!

6) The union view is that all teachers should be treated the same. There 
is massive resistance to spit pay scales, and there is some 
justification to this. Workload is hard to document, especially when you 
are comparing multiple choice versus fractional allocation of marks for 
partly correct multi-step physics or chem problems. This means that 
there isn't a unified push to change, so it wont happen.

I think my school is doing something good about this. They have 
introduced a program to allocate time for any teacher to "shadow" parts 
of management in student services. This is to allow exposure to those 
roles which lead on to management positions. I have never seen that done 
before, and I am impressed - I hope it is leading to some attempt to 
address the imbalance of disciplines at school at management level. I 
don't know of any of my colleagues in science who have had the time to 
take it up, but it is a good start.

I also see our top management trying to deflect some of the onerous 
requirements that come out of east perth so that they don't disrupt the 
classroom teachers workflow too much. I have not seen this at other 
schools that I have worked for, and the reports I am getting from 
colleagues at other places suggest that school management is largely not 
competent in managing teacher workload in a reasonable and productive 
manner. I doubt that there will be any kind of push back though - 
economic recession coupled with a highly protected marketplace make a 
very good carpet under which to sweep management mistakes!

Have a great retirement Roy, I envy you!

Cheers,
Leon

On 20/04/2017 9:17 AM, Roy Skinner wrote:
>
> Hi Mike,
>
> I think it also needs to be acknowledged that some subjects involve 
> more work and thought than others, Science being one of them. This is 
> difficult to quantify I know, but compare a subject where no marking 
> of exams is required (e.g. PE) and physics, say. I know PE teachers 
> have outside-school commitments but these are not mentally exhausting. 
> Hence, it is more difficult to get physics teachers. I remember 
> discussing this with the head of my school to be shrugged off. What I 
> did was to outline all the tasks I needed to do over the year and the 
> time allocations which I think came to over 80 hours a wweek.
>
> Regards,
>
> Roy Skinner (retired and loving it)
>
> *From:*Catalist [mailto:catalist-bounces at lists.stawa.net] *On Behalf 
> Of *Michael McGarry
> *Sent:* Sunday, 9 April 2017 10:02 PM
> *To:* catalist at lists.stawa.net
> *Subject:* [Catalist] SLRC: Australian Teacher Stress and Wellbeing Survey
>
> Greetings Science Colleagues,
>
> I officially retired on March 21, 2016 from secondary science teaching 
> and administration as Science Head of Department concluding an about 
> 47year career with the WA DoE.
>
> Today, I was informed by a secondary-science teaching colleague of the 
> unreasonable workload imposed on teachers by the school administration 
> at a large metropolitan senior secondary top-performing academic 
> school in Perth WA. [NOT my colleague’s School.]
>
> The unreasonable workload includes the demand on teachers to produce 
> new and original tests for every subject. Given that the production of 
> a new original major academic test and its associated accurate 
> marking-key consumes up to about 8 weeks of work *outside school 
> hours*, such a workload demand by the school administration is 
> unreasonable.
>
> Also the way that the school administration demands that teachers 
> implement the AITSL professional standards for teachers is unwieldy, 
> confusing, and very time-consuming. AITSL URL: 
> http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers.
>
> The symptoms of such unreasonable teacher workload manifest in 
> abnormally high teaching-staff turnover, and a number of experienced 
> teaching-staff being hospitalised with mental and physical health 
> problems.
>
> When teachers apply for sick leave, many wise teachers do not include 
> the word *stress* on their sick-leave applications. My GP always 
> issued my medical certificates with the words *unfit for work*. A 
> medical certificate is confidential between a doctor and his patient. 
> Such practice results in the under-reporting of work-stress leave.
>
> *These URL’s inform teacher stress and wellbeing*.
>
> URL 1: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-04/why-do-teachers-leave/8234054
>
> URL 2: 
> http://www.research.uwa.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2633590/teacher-wellbeing-and-student.pdf
>
> URL 3: http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2919&context=ajte
>
> URL 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b055g8zh
>
> I ask science colleagues to share *URL 5* with teaching colleagues at 
> their School.
>
> *URL 
> 5:*https://www.slrc.org.au/australian-teacher-stress-wellbeing-survey/
>
> I ask all science colleagues and their teaching colleagues at their 
> respective Schools to complete the online SLRC: Australian Teacher 
> Stress and Wellbeing Survey.
>
> Many Thanks and Best Wishes,
>
> Michael John McGarry
>
>
>
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