Whether you’ve been a Head of Department for years or recently cinched a crucial promotion, you’re not only taking on the role of mapping out your curriculum for 7 different year groups. You’re also not only in charge of ensuring that students under your care receive the very best education possible; you’re also suddenly a manager for, potentially a very large group of people.
In my first term as Head of History, I was expected to manage 8 other people – some of whom were also technically my seniors (seniority in schools is a weird, hard-to-explain system for the uninitiated). As a result, I had to ensure that my communications were short, snappy and to-the-point. If I dawdled on for pages of written communication, there’s a good chance that my team at best wouldn’t absorb it or, at worst, wouldn’t read it.
Too many emails, too little time.
As a result, I worked hard to craft a two-tier system that kept my team perfectly up-to-date, and continues to do so. While it’s not perfect, using both of these systems in tandem has worked wonders for ensuring that my team knows what’s going on at the start, end, and middle of the week.
Let’s start with Tier 1, and look at how a self-serving system is great for keeping my team well-oiled.
Tier 1: The History Dashboard (self-serving)
Not so long ago, we attended our Trust’s annual conference. Here, all of our schools get together in one place to talk all things pedagogy. It’s a really great day filled with networking and teacher CPD.
One of those great things was the idea of a Dashboard. One central place, filled with all of the links that you could possibly want during your week. The Head of History that preceded me introduced this to our school, but I’d iterated on it when I took over.
The first step to making this system a success is deciding where you want your Dashboard full of links to exist. Is it a Docs file? A spreadsheet? Does your school survive on an internal intranet already – could that be used somehow?
We settled on a Google Slides file.
Then, I carefully considered all of the different categories that my links could fall into and transformed them into their own separate slides.
- Key Stage 3
- Key Stage 4
- Key Stage 5
- Admin
- Other
I’m sure that, at some point, one of my links will fit into some other undetermined category but, if it does, it’ll be dead easy to add this in as a new slide.
On each slide, I’ll write out the text that describes the file – e.g. ‘Year 11 assessments’. Next, I’ll hyperlink each text to the necessary file, ensuring that all links I’ve added are available as ‘view only’ to anyone in my organisation. The last thing that you’d want after setting all of this up is for a rogue actor to edit files without permission!
The reason that this works so well is because it should, in theory, massively reduce the number of questions you receive wondering where such-and-such file is, or where the grade boundaries are, or where the new mark sheets live.
And if I still receive that question?
’On the History Dashboard.’
Tier 2: The Weekly History Bulletin (more involved)
The History Dashboard is great because, nine times out of ten, it serves its purpose really well.
However, when I have pearls of wisdom that I need to update the team on, I’ll add them to my Weekly History Bulletin. This gets mailed to their inboxes at the start of the week – every Monday at 8am – and offers reminders on upcoming assessments, book looks we might be doing soon, actions to take (such as updating our central grade tracker), and so much more.
I’ll keep these updates as to-the-point as possible. When I first started doing them, I’d write them like blog posts, in full prose and everything.
They took me hours.
Now? I’ll include a numbered outline, listing the titles of each update and therefore what they need to read (KS5-only teachers won’t need to read any KS3 updates, for instance). Then, I’ll include bullet points of information for each update, listing what my team need to know, emboldening any deadlines or key info for readability.
What used to take in excess of an hour now takes 20-30 minutes, spread across Thursday to Friday, scheduled for sending before I leave the office.
Now, it’s important to remember that any pressing updates, or things that need doing immediately, still get emailed out immediately. I would never wait till the Bulletin gets sent on Monday if something needs doing by the end of the previous week.
That would just be bad management.
If you need a masterclass in using the Google Suite of apps in your Classroom and beyond, click here for my free, complete guide on everything you could need and more.
And if you’re looking to save time in the classroom, look no further:
- Why the 75/33 Rule will Save you Time in Teaching
- Saying ‘No’ without the Guilt
- How to be the Lazy Teacher
While you’re here, why not try…
- Two tiers to keeping your Team updated as a Head of Department
- A guide to rebuilding your systems for the winter school term
- History through stories: using cold cases in the classroom
- How to run a calm, high-impact registration: setting the tone in the 15 first minutes of the new term.
- How video games made me a more productive teacher
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