You might wonder what qualifies me to write about cultural change in an
organisation. Well, I’ve done it several times, and I thought I’d set myself the
challenge of trying to describe some of the success stories I’ve enjoyed in 250
words or fewer.
My main motivation in writing these vignettes is that I keep meeting
depressed people: people who are in such a dire situation that they have started
to believe that they will never be able to change it.
So what I should like to do is provide very brief case studies comprising the
before and after, but not the during: my aim is to uplift, rather than instruct,
in these stories. That's why I aim to publish them on a Friday: so you can go
home full of hope rather than despondency!
This week's vignette concerns being timetabled for two hour lessons, with some
pretty challenging (behaviour-wise) kids.
Imagine a situation in which you are obliged to teach a class of uninterested
and unruly students aged 14 to 15, twice a week, for -- wait for it -- two hours
at a time. In a master stroke of timetabling, the person in charge of it all,
someone who had no reason to hate me, set up this situation. In fact, it was
worse than you might think: one of the marathon lessons was just before
Wednesday lunchtime, and the other one was last thing on a Friday
afternoon!
Nightmare? I thought it might be. Yet within two weeks I had the
opposite problem to the one you'd expect: how to prise them out of the room. On
Wednesdays, I had to almost beg them to leave so that I could get some lunch (I
had a no eating or drinking rule for the computer labs), whilst on Fridays I had
to make sure they had their parents' permission to stay on after school.
The
point is this: it is easier to adopt a defeatist attitude to such situations,
but that is a very short-term, not to say short-sighted, approach. The better
option is to work with the situation and see what you can make of it. In this
case, I was so pleased with the results of my approach that the following year I
asked for all my lessons to be two hours long.
Masochist? Nah. For me, it
made work even more enjoyable.
Much of my work is in helping to
bring about transformation in the use and management of educational
technology in schools and other institutions. To find out more about
the sort of work I do, and how I could work with you, look here.
You may find it useful to scroll down the left hand side and click on
the page about the assignments I've undertaken as an independent
education consultant.
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