Last week, I mentioned that my ECE director casually pointed out that fall break meant we were already ¼ of the way through the school year.
Which got me thinking about all the ways we measure how a school year is going.
We track student progress. We monitor goals. We review data. We adjust instruction. We document interventions. We collect evidence that what we're doing is working. (And then we document that we collected the evidence… and document how we documented…)
But how often do we ask whether the WORK is working for the people doing it?
Not whether you're meeting expectations or getting everything done. Whether the way your work is currently designed is actually allowing you to use your expertise, enjoy the parts of the job you love, and have enough of yourself left at the end of the day to be a human outside of school.
Because those are two VERY different questions.
I think one of the trickiest things about working in education is that you can be really good at your job and still have a pretty terrible experience doing it.
You can LOVE your students and dread opening your email. You can be an incredible SLP and want to throw your laptop across the room every time you open your documentation system. You can feel genuinely excited about a breakthrough with a learner and then spend the rest of your afternoon trying to find time for the actual work you were hired to do.
And sometimes that makes us question whether we're still passionate about our work.
But what if the passion isn't the problem?
What if you still love the work, but you're exhausted by the CONDITIONS surrounding the work?
This is one of the reasons I keep talking about Playful Work Design. When I say we need more playfulness at work, I'm not suggesting that we make everything FUN or that we add a game to the next staff meeting. I'm talking about designing work in ways that allow for more autonomy, curiosity, creativity, and the kind of engagement that makes us feel like ourselves.
And yes, there are plenty of things we cannot personally change. An impossible caseload is still an impossible caseload, no matter how playful you are. I'm not about to suggest that a colorful planner is going to fix a district staffing shortage.
But there are also aspects of how we work that have become so routine we rarely question them. The way meetings are run. The expectations around communication. How we share information. Whether people have flexibility in how they accomplish their work. How much time gets eaten up by things that don't actually help us do our jobs.
Sometimes the work needs to change, not the person doing it.
So here's my question for you at the quarter-year mark:
If you could redesign ONE part of your workday without having to justify it to anyone, what would you change?
Not what would make you a better educator. Not what would help you squeeze in one more task. What would make the experience of doing your job better?
I'd genuinely love to hear your answer. Hit reply and tell me, because I have a feeling we'd find some pretty interesting patterns if we started comparing notes.
And maybe we'd also start having a different conversation about what a successful school year looks like.
One where the students are learning AND the adults aren't completely depleted by the process.
Keep playing!