Getting organised to support efficient, effective practice

Analysing and cataloguing tasks

The role of a teacher or educator is much more than simply teaching and interacting with children. It comes with lots of responsibilities and accountabilities to record and document teaching, assessment, individualized plans and so on. It also often involves contributing to the service or school’s continuous improvement processes, event planning and other odds and ends.

Keeping all these tasks in your head or on endless to do lists contributes to feeling of stress, anxiety and burnout. A great first step in streamlining approaches is to note down all the things you need to do when you need to do them and what exactly you need to be recording.

Once you have the list now is the time to consider whether some of those things can be:

1. Eliminated because it was part of an old system of process or your practice has developed over time to take on different approaches.
2. Combined as they are on a related topic or happen at roughly the same time each week, month or term.
3. Enhanced or modified if they are causing you anxiety or frustration.

Checking with what’s actually required

This is a great step when looking at all of the things you ‘have’ to do and that is to check in or critically reflect on exactly what is required in relation to legislative, quality, learning framework and curriculum requirements. Empowering you with the confidence to articulate what you do (or your system or approach) and how it meets the requirements to your upline leader or manager, to families, the community and curriculum or quality authority.

This is also a great process in helping build your confidence in your professional knowledge and judgements. It gives you the confidence to be innovative and creative in how you meet professional expectations.

Identifying and remedying pain points

One of the things that can really support organization and feeling more ‘on-top’ of your tasks and paperwork is identifying and managing ‘pain points’ or when required task or process is time consuming and/ or clunky. Take a good look at these tasks and be open to consider the use of technology or artificial intelligence to help you streamline the way you achieve that particular requirement.

Try not to fall victim to introducing new things into your repertoire because someone else does that and you feel it looks impressive or you ‘should’ be doing that. Be mindful and respectful of your own time and be honest with yourself. If that new idea or approach eats into your own time, make a call to cull something, change an aspect of what you do or let it go altogether.

Implement systems and processes that work!

Becoming an organisational guru takes time and involves a continuous commitment to reviewing and developing systems and process that work for you. It also involves recognizing that things change, requirements change, technology changes, new research or approaches such as the increasing use of artificial intelligence or the introduction of digital platforms. So be open to new ways of doing things, remembering that the end goal is to make life easier for you.

Support to improve

At the Early Years Learning Hub, we’re passionate about helping you become a great teacher, educator or leader. We know when the ‘paperwork’ side of things takes less time there is more time to spend with children, supporting their learning, development and wellbeing. So, we created our ‘one stop shop’ journal or diary for all the things that you need to do, plan for and reflect on when it comes to education and care services. We’ve done all the hard work for you!

Our Service, communication, reflection and planning journal promises to be a game changer in helping early childhood and school age care services to be organised, efficient and effective in all aspects of service operation. It can be used by individuals as a great ersonsl relative, planning tool and/ or by the whole service. It includes sections for:

• Daily communication- messages from families, visits from health professionals, birthdays or special events.
• Monthly goal setting- focus areas for improvement and critical reflections on practice and program operation.
• Leadership- space for Educational leaders and Nominated supervisors to plan and share focus areas for mentoring, practice improvement and continuous improvement
• Collaborative teamwork- an opportunity to support teams to know each other better, to draw on each other’s strengths and build a great culture.
• Whole service planning- helping you to get organised for the year’s celebrations and special events, drills and team leave.

The best feature of all is there is no set dates so you can purchase and use this journal whenever and you get full years use out of it!

Related Early Years Learning Hub resources;

• What are the expectation of a teacher?
• What are the expectation of and educator?
• Assessment and planning bundle
• Learning frameworks resources