Or “Cometh the lesson plan, cometh the man”
Or “Know your enemy”
Or “How to handle an auditor”
The time we have all been fearing arrives, I need to teach my first lesson, and, worse, put together my first lesson plan.
Cometh the lesson plan, cometh the man.
In order to make something which, to be quite honest, is reasonably stressful, into an ordeal of Biblical proportions, the college have managed to devise a pro-forma of such devilish intricacy it can only have been designed to see who would crack under the pressure. Spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert? Pah! If you really want to test yourself, try teaching a week of lessons when you have to fill out the college’s lesson plans template first, for each and every one of the lessons in a week. Then do that for 6 weeks running.
Bear in mind, this stuff matters. Staff in school assess us, and we get visits from lecturers at college doing the same thing. You can fail lessons (including the infamous less plan), start doing that, and you’re in trouble.
But fortunately, I’ve seen stuff like this before. Anyone who has ever been involved in IT in a bank, will be familiar with the omni-present auditor. You can view the auditor and the assessor as similar breeds, both purport to be there to be able to offer constructive criticism, but the harsh reality is that they are there to pick holes in what you are doing. They are answerable only to other auditors, and there is no right of appeal. If they ask to see something, you are obliged to hand it over. It’s a bit like the teaching equivalent of the Stasi.
Know your enemy
This doesn’t mean they are bad people, hey, they aren’t estate agents. In cynical self-interest I spent some time with an internal auditor. If you ever talk to one, you will find that they are more than happy to talk to you, probably on the basis that no one else will. And they are worth listening to.
Basically, most auditors have decided before hand how big a big black mark they are looking to give you. It will be based on the last black mark, and general feeling they get from talking to people, i.e. gossip. They then spend a couple of weeks looking to justify their position, and will have a target of the numbers of things they want to find which are wrong, and they won’t give up until they reach that number. In the end they produce a report, and you are obliged to act upon it.
How to handle an auditor
So, this is how you play the game. You point out some things that really need doing, and that really are critical, which are the things you were planning to do anyway, or, if you’re really sneaky, the things that you always wanted to do but no one would ever let you.
They still need their list of things that are wrong, so you plant these. If they are looking for 5 control issues, you collate your information such that 5 control issues jump out and smack them in the mouth (you can’t tell them what they are, they need to find out for themselves, it’s a bit like teaching year 2). And don’t be too subtle, I’m guessing auditors don’t have the crème de la crème to choose from when its time to pick graddies.
So to apply this to lesson plans. Start low, you’ve got a 6 week placement to get through, and they need to find holes all the way along. If you don’t give them the obvious stuff to go for, at least to start with, the mind boggles what they might start faulting you on.
And be careful about where you want these holes to be. They need to be in areas that you think you have covered, don’t give them something that you’re going to struggle to cover. But be honest with yourself, if there is something that you struggle with, try and do it adequately, and perhaps be a little more slack on the stuff in your comfort zone, it will be the stuff in your comfort zone that you will be asked to improve on.
And then improve, slowly and steadily, over the 6 week period. You’ll probably still be struggling in the last week, but that’s much better than starting to struggle in the second.
However, there is a significant risk with this (as with the auditor). If you really are crap, and you start adding in artificial holes into something that was barely hanging together anyway, than the whole thing might fall apart. But hopefully you should be able to judge that in your first week.
Hopefully.
