Author Archives: Alice Leung

What I would like from school development day

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Like many of my colleagues working in NSW public schools, Term 3 is about to begin. For many of us this means school development day (SDD). SDD is a day where teachers, staff and parents engage in professional learning to further enhance student learning. SDD occurs at the start of Term 1, 2 and 3 and then on the last two days of Term 4. I value SDDs because it is a day where I can solely focus on my learning in order to better teach my students. Students do not come to school on SDDs so teachers can focus all of their efforts on learning. There are no relief work to set, no guilt over not being able to teach your classes due to attending professional learning and no classroom issues to follow-up from a day of being absent from your classes.

I greatly value the effort and commitment from the teachers who put together SDDs. It is a tough gig. I know so because I have coordinated SDDs in the past. It is extremely challenging to put together over 5 hours of professional learning that is relevant and engaging to ALL teachers. However, I have always felt something is missing from SDDs.

I guess I have always been an active learner in my professional learning. I don’t like to wait for someone to tell me what I should know. I am constantly reviewing what I need to learn and when a learning need arises, I seek out that learning almost immediately. This does mean a lot of hours spent searching and seeking help from my professional learning networks in my own time. This in turn also means I have explored a lot of things that are presented in SDD. For example, my school’s SDD last term was on literacy. I was presented with ideas and resources that I have known and used for several years. While many teachers at the school found the SDD useful, I was left feeling I wasted 5 hours of my time. I don’t want this to make me sound unappreciative. The SDD coordinators did and always do an awesome job.

What I would like from SDD is a more personalised experience. In NSW public schools, there are five SDDs in a year. It would be so awesome if just one of those SDDs allowed teachers to propose a professional learning experience that they would like to do. This could be visiting other schools, other educational institutions, collaborating with other teachers, reading educational literature, the list is endless. I visited the University of NSW during the school holidays to connect with university academics that I know can contribute to the learning of students at my school. I visited the Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences and learnt so many new practical activities that I can do with my students. These site visits are perfect examples of personalised professional learning activities for SDD. I recently learnt about a book called “Independent science challenges: fascinating science projects to challenge and extend able students“. I would love to spend a SDD reading parts of the book and putting together a plan together to implement the strategies in the book.

Some people might say that all schools have professional learning funds to release teachers to do personalised professional learning like attending subject-specific conferences, etc. However, this is during teaching time and many teachers do not like to miss out on teaching time. SDD is different. It is a time where every teacher is learning. There are no students. Your learning is not distracted by a casual teacher calling you to help with your class. I might be the only teacher who feels this way, but it seems that if teachers can differentiate and create personalised learning experiences for students, why can’t teachers themselves have personalised professional learning experiences. Just one SDD.

Are teachers stretched to the limit?

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Note: I love my school and all staff and students who work at my school. This post isn’t about how my school works. It’s about teaching in general.

I read a post tititled, How far can you stretch a piece of elastic before it snaps, this week and it really resonated with me. The post highlighted how the increasing workload demands on teachers are affecting their wellbeing. When I first started my current position, an older, more experienced teacher told me to watch myself because schools are blood suckers. They will keep drawing your blood unless you set the limits. It doesn’t matter how much blood you give, they will find a way to draw more until you are sucked dry.

This is a rather gruesome analogy that I don’t believe in 100%. I do believe that my school and the people who work in it all respect each other’s wellbeing and look after each other. But the post with the elastic band strategy and the blood sucking analogy highlights something that is rarely spoken about in schools – the effects of workload on teacher health and wellbeing.

One of the reasons I think many teachers feel they are stretched to the limit is the sheer amount of work involved in teaching. The following is a list of some thing steachers do:

  • Plan lessons & create resources
  • Marking and providing feedback to students
  • Work with colleagues to plan cross curricular lessons like project based learning
  • Teach classes
  • Admin and paper work – registers, recording student achievement data, entering professional learning hours onto a database, etc
  • Organising and running excursions, incursions and other extra-curricular activities like training sporting teams
  • Meetings – faculty meetings, staff meetings, committee meetings, parent meetings (there are many more types)
  • Observing other teachers’ lessons & providing feedback to them
  • Following up on student learning issues with a range of people including parents, counsellors, other teachers, etc
  • Follow up on emails – many, many emails
  • Create and monitor budgets for the area you are responsible for – faculty, sport, special programs

This is not an exhaustive list. I have probably forgotten to list a dozen more things teachers do on a regular basis. My question is can these things be done within work hours? I’m not talking about a 9-3 school day. I’m talking about a 8-5 work day that most other people in society work. My feeling is teachers cannot do what they need to do in a 9 hour working day and this is 9 hours straight. Many teachers do not eat, drink or even go to the bathroom at work because that is just not enough time.

My next question is is this what we expect teachers to do. Is teaching a job where to do everything you need to do, you have to put in 9 hours straight with no breaks at school, then work another 3 hours at home and then work 8 hours over the weekend?

People who know me may say that this post is just me adjusting to working full time after the birth of my baby. It isn’t. I have felt like this for a long time.  Many other teachers with or without kids feel this way. Many don’t want to say anything because sharing these thoughts may result in getting labeled as unproductive, ineffective, or uncommitted to your students. The last one is the worst assumption.

Are you a teacher? Do you think a teacher’s work can be done in work hours with minimal impact on personal wellbeing? Are teachers stretched to the limit?

Managing impacts of staffing on your workload

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As any leader of a curriculum area would know, when teachers you supervise call in sick, it can be an absolute nightmare on your workload. It can also cause a lot of stress during the day, particularly when multiple teachers take sick leave at the same time, which often happens during winter. I had such a day today when I had two teachers call in sick, both with a large number of lessons on their timetables. It took me over an hour to plan their lessons , organise all the printing and rolls for their relieving teachers. This meant starting the work at home at 6am. It is not a teacher’s fault when they call in sick. When you are sick, you are sick and there’s nothing you can do, but the impact on other teachers can be significant. I’ve spoken to some curriculum leaders for advice on how to better manage this impact on my workload as I don’t want it to impact my time with my baby. Before baby, I can go to school at 7am when multiple teachers call in sick. But now I can’t as my baby needs to be dropped off at daycare first and I don’t want to because I don’t want to sacrifice time I spend with baby in the morning. She shouldn’t miss out on time with her parent because others has called in sick. So here are some strategie I’ve been told:

(1) Unless a teacher is so sick they are in an emergency ward, they have to set their own relief work

I know this is a strategy in some schools but I don’t like it for several reasons. It encourages sick teachers to come to school because coming to school when you are too sick is easier than setting the relief work. This facilitates the spread of the illness and the next thing you know, more teachers are sick. I also think when you are sick, you should be resting and recovering, not setting relief work.

(2) A buddy system

Some have suggested that each teacher should be buddies with another teacher so that when one teacher is sick, the buddy has to set the relief work. I haven’t tried this but I think it’s a bit of a cop out from the curriculum leader. It’s almost like palming off your role to your staff. I personally will not implement this system by choice.

(3) Programming with relief work already in place

This is the strategy I like so far and would like to put in place from next term. Programs for units of work have one-off, relief teacher friendly work for each lesson. Teachers have to complete their registers day by day and leave them on their desks so that anyone can see where they are up to at any time. This strategy takes a lot of work to set up but will minimise stress and workload increase.
So how do you deal with the workload that comes with teachers taking sick leave?

How schools and teachers can use Periscope

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Periscope is a recently-released app from Twitter that allows you to live broadcast. What’s different about it in comparison to other digital tools for live broadcasting is that it lets you have a conversation with others viewing the live broadcast via ‘tweets’ (I don’t know the official name but when you watch a live broadcast on Periscope, you can type text in the ‘say something’ box and the text appears over the broadcast).

I’m currently playing around with Periscope for personal and professional use. Periscope has so many opportunities for schools. Here are some ideas:

Live broadcast major school events

Schools can live broadcast events like awards and carnivals. Parents, families and the community can watch these events live wherever they are.

Professional learning

This is where I think it’s the most exciting potential for Periscope for education. Learning from observing other teachers is one of the most valuable professional learning for teachers. However, a lot of the times it is restricted to observing colleagues at your own school. With Periscope, lessons can be live broadcasted. Multiple teachers can observe live online and ‘chat’ about the lesson via the text conversation feature of the app. The teacher being observed can then watch the saved video of this with the text conversation as feedback. This can also be used for pre-service teachers at university. They can watch a number of lessons back-to-back and have online conversations that is overlayed on the video.

There’s so much potential for Periscope in education. I can’t wait to see how teachers and schools use it. How are you and your school using Periscope?

Note: If you’re a teacher, please consult your Principal or education authority before using Periscope

A humbling experience 

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Today at the bank a lady approached me and asked some questions to confirm who I was. She then told me she thought it was me and she followed my blog. I was in utter shock as I never knew my ramblings would result in being recognised in public. The lady walked away quickly as I think she was busy. But I was in such a surprise I was lost for words. Hopefully I didn’t seem rude. So if you are that lady, I’d like to say thank you for reading my blog. If we bump into each other again, I hope we will have more time to chat 🙂

Breastfeeding and being a teacher – how to make it work

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Term 1 is over. I have survived 10 weeks of full time work while continuing to breastfeed my baby, who was 6 months old when I returned to work. In my last post, I shared my challenges to continue providing my baby with breastmilk while working full time. Since that post was published I have received many comments on this blog and from Facebook and Twitter from mothers-to-be and mothers soon returning to work on how the post has given them an insight into how they can continue to breastfeed their children when they return to work.

Continue to breastfeed while working full time is challenging for anyone. However, being a teacher is particularly challenging. A non-breastfeeding teacher will tell you how little time there is during the school day. Most teachers, without need to express breastmilk, are already so busy they do not have time to use the bathroom. Many teachers don’t even have time to eat.

So after completing a term of school, I’d like to share again my experience at breastfeeding my baby while working as a full time teacher. The main purpose of this post is like my previous post – to share my experience and hopefully someone else can benefit from it. It is also to get breastfeeding ‘out there’, as breastfeeding is often an issue that is hidden and not spoken about. This I believe is the main challenge of breastfeeding. The community knows almost nothing about it and the more everyone knows the more they can support breastfeeding mums returning to work.

As a teacher, these are the things to consider and talk with your school leaders before returning to work:

  • Where to express – Negotiate a place to express that is private, can be locked, has electricity and close to a fridge and freezer. The place preferably will have a sink with an area where you can leave your expressing equipment to air dry. Staff should know that this room is for mothers to express. I express in my classroom as it is not being used much this year for timetabled classes. I can leave my equipment there to air dry and it is extremely close to my staffroom where I use the fridge and freezer to store expressed breastmilk.
  • Let the relevant colleagues know that your availability is limited at recess and lunch (even if you are expressing at times outside of recess and lunch, you need these breaks to eat and drink). I told my faculty that I will be expressing twice a day. None of my students have asked about expressing yet. If they did, I would tell them like it is. This of course is a personal choice. It also means negotiating around recess and lunch staff meetings.
  • Let coordinators of whole day events like swimming carnivals of your expressing requirements. At my school’s  swimming carnival, I was able to use the pool’s freezer. I was assigned carnival duties that enabled me to leave and express twice. I had to express in my car in the pool car park but that’s ok for a one off event.
  • Be aware that whole day excursions will be extremely difficult. I let my school’s leaders know that I will not be able to go on excursions until my baby turns 1 year old.
  • Work out how you are going to handle student issues that are usually handled at recess and lunch. For example, recess and lunch detentions cannot be part of your classroom management plan if you are expressing during these times.

If you are a public school teacher in NSW, there is a breastfeeding policy. Ask for it from your principal. NSW DEC is very supportive of breastfeeding.

I am hoping that this post will make it easier to other mothers to continue breastfeeding when they return to work, particularly teachers. I’m also hoping that this post will raise awareness amongst all educators so they know what they can do to support their colleagues who are breastfeeding. Support from colleagues and the school is vital to making breastfeeding work when a mother returns to work, which is why I like to thank my wonderful colleagues and school for making my transition back to work such a positive experience.

What I wished I knew about returning to work from maternity leave

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My baby at 7 months old. I returned to full time work when she was 6 months old.

My baby at 7 months old. I returned to full time work when she was 6 months old.

In my previous post I shared my concerns about how to balance taking care of a young baby and the demands of being a head teacher in a high school. It has now been five weeks since I have returned to work full time after maternity leave. My baby is now 7 months old. So I thought it was timely to share how I have found the juggle act between family and work so far.

To my surprise, I have not found the balancing act between workload and baby duty the most challenging. This is challenging but not the most challenging. The most challenging is expressing during school hours. For those who are not familiar with the needs of taking care of a baby under one year old, here’s a brief summary of what expressing means. Breast milk is the main source of nutrition for a baby up to one year of age. (A baby can be given formula, but I choose to continue to breastfeed my baby.) To work full time, you need to express breast milk so that your baby can be fed the breast milk via a bottle or cup by their carer when you’re at work. When you are away from your baby, it is optimal to express at times when you would be breast feeding. This is not just about making sure your baby has a sufficient amount of milk but it is also prevent you from getting mastitis.

So this means I have to express twice at school. Luckily the NSW Department of Education and Communities has a very supportive breastfeeding policy and mothers returning to work have the right to two thirty-minute breaks during school hours for expressing. My school is also extremely supportive. But it is still VERY CHALLENGING because it restricts the amount of time I’m available to support my faculty during class. Expressing needs to be done at certain time periods and it restricts you from doing anything else. This means for one hour a day I am unavailable to support my faculty. It is not like teaching a class or having a meeting where you can drop what you are doing and help another teacher. I’m lucky that being head teacher I have a reduced number of face-to-face classes, which makes it easier to fit in two expressing sessions. For classroom teachers, it would be extremely hard. I don’t even want to think about how challenging it would be for primary school teachers, who don’t have ‘free’ periods each day.

What I find surprising is that I didn’t know about these challenges of expressing until I have to go through it myself. It is just not spoken about. I wish I knew about the challenges of expressing at work. Not for my sake but for others who will also go through this.

Last year I had one teacher in my faculty who returned to work full time when her baby was 5 months old. Like me, she was also expressing so that her baby can continue to breast feed when she was at work. But because I was ignorant and didn’t even give a second thought to this, I don’t think I provided her with the support I should have. Doing things like scheduling meetings at lunch times probably did not make things easier for her. If I had known last year what I know now, I would’ve excused her from meetings at recess or lunch or negotiating a better time. I would’ve also offered to deal with any student issues from classes right before recess and lunch, and to start classes after recess and lunch if necessary.

Teaching is a very female-dominated profession and sometime in the future I’m sure I will be working with and/or leading a colleague who is returning to work from maternity leave when their baby is under one year old. At least next time I will know what kinds of support to offer.

Babies and school – how to find balance

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I haven’t posted a lot lately because I have had my first baby in July. She is definitely the best thing that has ever happened to me. However she is also the biggest challenge I have faced. It is more than the challenge of taking care of a tiny little person who is totally dependent on you round the clock. For me the biggest challenge has been adjusting to how I define myself and how I will find a work life balance.

I have always identified myself through my work, especially my work ethic. I pride myself in being able to dedicate 500% of myself to my students. This has meant long hours of work after school and on weekends to create the best learning opportunities and resources for my students. I pride myself in being able to juggle multiple roles. In addition to my roles at school, I also worked with UTS, UNSW and Microsoft. I rarely said no to any opportunities that came before me. Even before the baby arrived other teachers have said I was going to have a nervous breakdown because I was working so much.

And now the baby has arrived, I have realised I can’t continue doing what I did. I now need to say no. So far I have said no to working on the national assessment program for science literacy with UNSW, the summer school program with UTS and presenting in Singapore because I was either physically unable to or doing so will mean I will not be sleeping for months on end. Not saying no will no longer just impact on me, it will now impact on a little person as well. This is something I am really struggling with at the moment. It feels like I’ve lost a part of who I am.

However, the biggest challenge for me will be next year when I return to work full time. Baby will be 6 months. I am already thinking of how I’ll balance work commitments from school, my baby’s needs and my own wellbeing. Some things I have asked myself are:
-When should I do school work? Should I stay at school and finish everything at school? This would mean picking up baby from daycare late and by the time we get home, it will be time to put her to bed. If I pick up baby straight after school, I’ll get more time to spend with her but will I then be doing school work till the early hours of the morning and affecting my own health and wellbeing?
-Will I be able to dedicate myself to my students & my faculty as much as I used to?

I’d like to hear from other teachers who are parents and are already on this journey. What are your advice & tips? How do you balance your passion for teaching with your family’s needs, and your own needs?

Project Mars – learning science by being real scientists

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My Year9 class has just completed Project Mars, a project based learning unit in conjunction with the Powerhouse Museum where they get to take on the role as NASA space scientists and find out whether Mars can support life. This is done by remotely controlling a Mars rover on a recreated Mars surface, just like NASA scientists remotely control their Mars rover, Curiosity, on Mars.

The project involved Year 9s coming up with their own research questions and hypotheses for the driving question “Can Mars support life?” Some examples of the Year 9s’ research questions were: “Is there carbon on Mars?”, “Is there nitrogen on Mars?”, “Are there copper and cobalt on Mars?” And “Are there signs of water on Mars?”. All questions were based on what students already know about what is needed to support life. Eg. Life we know are all carbon based; nitrogen is needed to build DNA and amino acids; and copper and cobalt are needed to generate electricity, which is vital if Mars is to support human life.

Students worked in teams over a term on this project. They had to learn how to control the Mars Rover so that it will safely navigate the Mars surface (crashing it will waste the millions of dollars spent on getting the rover to Mars). They had to learn how the Mars Rover took samples of the Mars surface (through photos and lasers which generate data for spectrographs). They also had to learn the science content on how the Mars Rover gathered data and how to interpret the data, which involved learning about atomic structure, atoms, the wave theory and spectrographs.

Students and a mission day where they used laptops to remotely control the Mars Rover to gather the necessary data from places which they had previously determined from maps. The unit concluded with students presenting to, and received feedback, from the Powerhouse Museum, an astrobiologist from the University of NSW and their parents. We also had a Project Mars cake to celebrate the students’ achievements.

Overall this was a very challenging project, and year 9s rose up to the challenge and did a fantastic job. Also, this project would not be this successful if it wasn’t for Smriti Mediratta, who took over the last part of the project as I went on maternity leave. This project allowed students to experience what it’s like to work as a space scientist and enables them to participate in authentic science that engages them more than any textbook or whiz-bang experiments on atoms and waves could.

For more information on Project Mars, visit The Mars Lab.

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