Teacher and Student Well-being:
Teacher Well-being is an increasingly important aspect of school life.
Research shows that there is a positive correlation between teacher Well-being and measures of school performance.
A Head reports having this quote on the wall of his office: “Teachers know that the inflection of their voice, the movement of an eyebrow and their attitude every minute of the day when they are with children, affect those children’s ability to learn. And they are with children a lot. So teachers get exhausted when the rest of us simply tire.” (Brighouse & Woods)
Of course there are many factors of school life that affect teacher Well-being, including constructive feedback & appreciation by senior staff, unnecessary admin, lack of appropriate CPD, etc. There are few things more damaging to morale than an impending inspection. Or looking forward to a non-teaching period and then being told that you have to 'cover' a class instead.
But some aspects of teacher Well-being are affected by the timetable and it is surely a Timetabler's responsibility to consider these carefully.
In TimeTabler, you can have these aspects of the timetable listed for you by going to:
3 Check & Tidy -> Well-being -> Teacher Well-being
This will quickly give you a report showing items like:
If you see an imperfection here and want to look for a solution then you can select the problem activity and use the 'Move' button (on the Class Timetable Screen). This calls the FIT feature and lists possible moves that would solve the problem for you. You can select and apply one of the solutions in the usual way.
You can also see the report at: 3 Check & Tidy -> Quality Optimiser -> Quality Report -> Staff
There is also the Well-being Centre at Dashboard -> Well-being where you can can access various reports which are useful when looking at Teacher Well-being.
Student Well-being :
You can also look at things from the Students' perspective, by going to:
3 Check & Tidy -> Well-being -> Student Experience
This will give you a report showing how your timetable fares against 8 parameters for students:
As before, Move (and FIT) will allow you to look for improvements where you think they are necessary.
There's more at: 3 Check & Tidy -> Quality Optimiser -> Quality Report -> Students.
There is also the Well-being Centre at Dashboard -> Well-being where you can can access various reports which are useful when looking at Student Well-being.
For Part-timers:
For more about the Well-being of Part-time Teachers, see the free Booklet at:
Timetabling & Employing part-timers
Ways of improving a 2-week cycle for Part-timers are discussed on page 5.
Split-teaching, Job-Shares, Part-timers in Blocks, Trapped Time, etc are discussed on other pages.
Further reading:
See also our page on staff Well-being & the student experience.
And the article on the Student Experience.
And scheduling to get a Quality timetable.
And Auto-assigning PPA (Preparation time).
And Research into the effects of timetabling.
And sections F24, H52, H53 in your printed Manual.
By the TimeTabler Team