The Kitchen Conundrum
Right now we have a circuit out in our kitchen. It is super annoying and I am waiting for the sparky to come and figure out why this particular circuit keeps shorting. I’ve had to run an extension cord to the kitchen so that I can run one appliance at a time - and the process of plugging one thing in at the sacrifice of another ‘job’ has been enlightening (as well as frustrating!) - as I juggle plugging in appliances one at a time, I'm struck by a thought - isn't this eerily similar to how we manage our energy as educators?
The Goldfish Dilemma and Teacher Circuitry
Our goldfish live in a big tank on the kitchen bench and they need both an air stone and a large filter/pump for the tank to be optimally operational. There is a sense of pressure - if I don’t prioritise it then our fishies might suffer. If I unplug it to make coffee with the coffee machine, for example, I need to remember to plug it back in again. Similarly, the dishwasher might sacrifice the health of the fish and the washing machine might sacrifice the use of, say, the oven or the dishwasher… and suddenly I am needing to carefully prioritise where the energy needs to flow. With only one additional power bank to draw from - I need to plan how I am spending energy. If I focus on keeping one thing alive (with two plugs for the fish), the other jobs might be stalled or forgotten. And there is the epiphany. As educators, we are expected to run all things at once like a multi-circuit kitchen and we are expected to have enough power in our tank for all things to be functioning optimally at all time. If we need to priorities one thing - then it is often at the expense of others.
The Subtraction Solution
An Edutopia article flashed across my feed this morning about adopting a ‘subtraction mindset’. That is, that we need to take things away in order to be able to properly focus on the things that we deem important. Like my kitchen currently not operating particularly efficiently at all because it is one circuit down, we need to put power into the things that matter - and perhaps feel justified to drop some of the rest.
Mapping the Energy Flow
As a visual thinker and lover of all things diagrammatic, I turned to radar charts to map my thinking.
Radar charts (also called spidergrams) are a useful way to turn any likert scale into a visual feast. Below is an empty radar chart that you can assign title categories to. They are easy enough to make from a spreadsheet and they show relationships between categories as well as where the energy flow might be in deficit.
In teaching, these segments might correspond to ‘current projects’ or ‘current foci’. Like my kitchen, these might be prioritised to musts and mays - except I wonder what other categories we might assign to an empty chart like this if we had to choose ‘just’ 8 key categories to channel energy into?
Prioritising Plug Ins
Imagine having to choose just eight educational things to plug into at one time? Some education categories that I have been trying to actively put energy into this year are:
Visual Thinking
UDL
Literacy strategies
Learner Agency
New course design
Thinking Routines
AI developments
Gamification
And whoops, I’ve already managed to go over eight categories without even considering current NCEA changes, Hauora, Mana Ōrite, localised curriculum, ANZHC, numeracy, structured literacy, leadership initiatives etc. The list goes on…
Your Eight Category Challenge
Here’s a challenge for you - what would your top eight priorities be? Why not write them down and sketch a radar chart to explore where the energy is currently channeled and where more might be needed. You might give each category a grade out of 7 (to correspond to the segments on the one above) and colour in the segments for a visual representation of your current energy streams.
Like my kitchen drama, I have actually never noticed just how many appliances I have running at once. On a normal day with everything running smoothly there might be an air fryer, a blender, a toaster, a kettle, a coffee machine, a computer, a phone charger, a washing machine, a dish washer, a fridge…. even when some things are not the 'active-job-at-hand - there are so many things running in the background drawing power that are needed just to keep things ticking along.
The diagram below is a radar chart with some data added (although this one has a scale to 10 in each category). The categories are blank for illustration purposes but you can see that some things are running with more power than others, and others are just running at a trickle.
My wondering is, what if our energy is finite? What if we only have, say, a power bank reserve of 30? Where would it make sense to plug in more? And where would it necessitate taking some plugs out?
In the above radar chart the orange focus is tracking well - as is the red - but the grey, the blue, the purple, the blue (and that other colour which is evading red and orange but it somewhere between) are dwindling. Like my fish, could they be suffering if they are not plugged in at full power?
Educators everywhere are being stretched too thin - and it shows when we start to visualise the energy and where it is going. With only eight ‘things’ to put our energy into within these radar chart examples, we can start visualising where we need to next plug in our attention. How does eight things even feel? Is it already too much?
If we only have one source of energy, how can we realistically and logistically be expected to run all things at full power all the time? Maybe the key is unplugging in order to channel energy efficiently to places where it truly counts.
Some things need to be taken off the radar. The challenge for you is to figure out which ones.
Thanks for reading my kitchen thoughts while I wait for my oven to finish baking my daughter’s cookies so that I can run the washing machine. ..
Here’s the TLDR version:
My kitchen circuitry is on the fritz.
Our goldfish’s power needs made me think about how in the classroom we often have to prioritise one thing and it is often at the expense of others.
We educators are a bit like my kitchen with too many things - and we are shorting out.
We need to focus on doing what matters most better - and adopt a subtraction mindset.
Radar charts are a nifty visual tool to track energy and think about priorities.
We need to rethink our approach to education so that we can keep all circuits running smoothly.
Take away - What would your eight priority categories be? How can you prioritise your teacher energy? Power up challenge initiated.
