Teaching Well: Administrative Tasks

If you read my blog, you know that I hit a real challenge this week with administrative tasks. In part, I was spoiled last year by having an assistant who took over a large part of the administrative duties so I was a bit rusty. I also had not put aside time daily to follow-up with and complete administrative forms and collections. Further, I did not fully understand some of the systems and I had not acted with sufficient lead time. Thus confusion, worry, stress, upset, and conflict.

Rather than bury the problem and let it happen again and again, I looked deeply at my role related to administrative tasks and have come up with the following efforts to remedy the situation.

• Outline procedures on the TeamFive website for all teachers and others to understand and follow.
• Plan to spend 30 minutes a day at school on administrative tasks to stay up to date with this work. At the start of the school year next year, I'll devote several hours each day on my own and with students to complete and collect the needed paperwork. I'll reach out during the first prep days to learn what paperwork will be needed and include that in our early year teaching/learning and parent meeting schedules. Materials such as parent surveys, student/parent handbooks, emergency forms, and more will be accessed at that time. We'll mention CORI form requirements too, and advise parents to get those done earlier in the year than later.  I want to track the time this takes as there is a lot of curriculum pacing pressure on teachers, but there is little time-on-task given for the paperwork/administrative work required, and due to administrative/organization schedules, much of this work has to be done during the typical 8-4 school hours. 
• Plan to complete forms and paperwork daily, and bring to the office during the hours that the administrative staff is there. I found out the parameters for this and have decided that I will focus on doing this work either during my lunch or planning periods when needed.
• Create a good parent email list from early year surveys. I should have done that at the start of the year, but I was relying on a system I thought sufficed, but have since learned that I have to do that leg work so I will.
• Compete paperwork online with DocHub (awesome document completion app) and send via email whenever possible. 
• Get as much information early on from field trip/expert visitor organizations and place that information immediately on permission slips and learning experience materials so it's ready when the special event occurs. 
• Create good files online and off for these materials to streamline the efforts for the future.
• When new forms and paperwork are shared, immediately place it in the online or offline files for easy reference.

I don't know why I haven't thought out this aspect of my teaching job with greater detail in the past, but the past week's struggle with this arena has pushed me to understand the expectations and efforts better. Hopefully this will spell smooth sailing with special events and administrative tasks in the future. It's amazing to recognize that with every year of teaching, there's more to learn and master. Onward.