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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