[Catalist] SLRC: Australian Teacher Stress and Wellbeing Survey

Thu Apr 20 18:59:15 AEST 2017

Thank you Leon for that thoughtful reply. 

The advantage of retirement is that if I am called in to cover for an absent
teacher through illness I can dictate my own terms and say "If you don't
like it, I won't come". One private school where I did a whole term
replacement restructured what I had to teach to fit my day i.e. all teaching
periods bunched together, rather than 1 period 1 and another period 6. This
would not happen in a non-shortage subject. 

Another school where I taught had a whole Pastoral staff of phys-eders
(maybe they shout louder!)

Economics prevails however - so if you repress the market by considering
teachers of all subjects as equal, then the price for shortage teachers pops
up in the Tutoring business (anyone make a living by tutoring Sports
Science?)

The "treating all in the same way" system had massive repercussions in UK
where I taught initially. I can remember as HOD advertising for a physics
teacher and receiving NO applicants at all! By the same token 3 different
countries have paid for my removal and other expenses to teach physics there
- and they will automatically appoint you HOD just to keep you. So there is
obviously some underlying acknowledgement of different values for different
subjects.

It would be great to be in the same position of say lawyers - you want me to
do duties - OK, how much will you pay me?

Why is there no talk with politicians these days about the Clever Country
that was abundant when  I first arrived in Australia??

Roy

From: Catalist [mailto:catalist-bounces at lists.stawa.net] On Behalf Of Leon
Harris
Sent: Thursday, 20 April 2017 11:05 AM
To: catalist at lists.stawa.net
Subject: Re: [Catalist] SLRC: Australian Teacher Stress and Wellbeing Survey

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 <mailto: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-w
ellbeing-and-student.pdf

URL 3: http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2919
<http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2919&context=ajte>
&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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