 Hello, everyone. It's been a long time since I've done a live video. We're all very busy during the pandemic, managing our own mental health, etc. But I thought rather than on a Sunday, which influences my own workload, I thought I'd start to pose an end of the week live video to kind of warm you up for the weekend. You could save it, watch it over the weekend and get ready for the week ahead. So I want to get back into maybe a rhythm of sharing some live video streams for everyone. Just posing some ideas wishing you all the best, those types of things. So I've not played with StreamYard for quite some time, so I'm a little bit rusty. So I do apologize, but I want to just share and I'll be about 10 minutes. So save the file, save this link wherever you're watching, maybe watch it later or watch it with me now. I'm going to put some slides up on the screen. I just want to talk about some easy but really hard to implement staff well-being ideas at the best of times during the pandemic, probably really, really tough. And then I'm just going to kind of share some hacks, productivity hacks, things that I've tried to do in my own teaching career, as well as my world currently, research, all the different hacks I wear. So here we go. I promise I was a bit rusty with StreamYard. I'm going to put my slides up now. Here they come. Okay, just be here with me, bear with me. Here we go, here we go, here we go. Okay, you should be able to see my tweet that far. Right, let's flip that over. Okay, right, so let me just start with the first, let me just talk about staff well-being in general first of all. So if I just put that slide there. You know, schools who do not have a coherent well-being policy for teachers will find themselves, I think, isolated from the recruitment market. And this is before the pandemic. Not only does this include any school or college having a workload or a well-being policy, but the school should also actively be supporting staff, mental health, and your professional growth. So whether it's pensions or counselling or adaptive human resource teams within schools who can apply policy decisions to individual needs, it's not easy, but all schools, colleges need to start somewhere. And on my website and also in Just Great Teaching, my book, there's a Barb Beacon School, which I talk about, where they've now got, I think, 50 well-being policy template, 50 ideas. And I've tested this with David, who is the kind of teacher leading that there. They actually do live out in practice. If people are interested, leave a comment and I'll share those with you. But I digress. So in this first part of the resource, I want to share three ideas I've used in my own leadership to ensure my teaching and the support staff and the people I was working with were well looked after as part of a longer-term well-being approach to teacher happiness. So that's the rationale. So let me just flip to this slide, I suppose. I guess the things I'd want to talk about here are, think about the week ahead. When last did you enjoy a full lunchtime break? You know, the schools that I'm working with just this week, and I know some schools have been back for a couple of weeks post Easter, you know, all centre assessment grades, etc., etc. When last did you have a full lunchtime break? When last did you sit down and have a conversation with colleagues around you? Point two, when last did you have a hour of sleep? During a work night, for example. I know the last 12 months I've not had some nights where I've slept very well. I'm in a bit of a more positive mindset at the moment. I think during the winter I definitely struggled. I think most of us do. And you know, I wouldn't say I'm not mentally ill. I do have to manage my mental health like everyone else. Practically on your classroom table in your office. These things are obvious, which is why I've called this idea, obviously. Large bottle of water on your classroom table. You know, one or two pieces of fruit while stitching. I used to be super, super fussy about teachers having a cup of tea, and health and safety and safeguarding considered. But having, I say, eating or drinking during a lesson. You know, we have to be humane. We are in a very stressful profession. We have to manage one another as well as ourselves. And there'll be some traditional approaches out there still, and certain methods and some things you can and can't do depend on the environment or the age that you teach. But I think, you know, eating fruit, having a drink of water in a lesson should be acceptable in today's world. Another idea, when last did you sit and have a good gossip with a colleague for five minutes and not fear for your life sitting in the staff room. I know post during COVID, that's going to be a challenge, full stop. When last did you leave school early one night a week? I hope it's always a Friday. You know, I've worked in my career where some meetings take place on a Friday after school. And I know my life as a school leader often, you know, Friday was the thing that I tied it up everything on my desk before I went home. So most occasions, to be fair, and I'm not going to sound like a hero here, most, most weeks I would not leave school premises till five or six PM at night at least. Another idea, obviously, but how easy or hard is it? When last did you say no to somebody? Could you say no next week or once a week for the rest of the academic year? And obviously within reason, depending on the demands. And then the last thing, you know, it's the weekend, at least here in the UK, the weather has been really good. You know, exercise, whether it's walking up and down the stairs in the school premises or a bit of gardening outside or walking the dog, all these things make a big difference. And I look back to my earlier years in the teaching career. And although I was quite a cycling football kind of gym enthusiast in my 30s, that all disappeared. And I started to put workload or teaching first, rather than health. That's starting to shift now as I approach 50. So we're all at different stages in the career. I think it's important to always consider those things. So if you're interested in these slides, I can sign posters, just send me a DM on all the channels where you're watching them, I'll send you these slides. Little ideas, but easy, but hard. The next one here, self-care. So what I want to talk about in this one is a range of approaches. So, you know, these slides I'm going to share can be printed as maybe postcards. The art of looking after one's self-care and about your own well-being as part of a jigsaw is learning habits as we develop our own methods for looking after ourselves, hygiene, resilience, having conversations, just general interactions with one another, looking after ourselves and others. And these things need to be taught. And as schools and employers, they also have a duty of care. Now without getting bogged into the whole details of human resources and policies and things like that. I've worked with many teachers who are well-rounded, highly capable, superb teachers, but life gets in the way for all of us. And we all need a bit of support mentally, physically, and emotionally at some point in our career, and good skills will always offer this. So what kind of school do you work in? So some of the resources here, again, these could be maybe shaped as some questionnaires or some postcards or kind of just signals and signposts on staff room doors. This one here, just simply a reminder to eat regularly. This one here is about psychological self-care. This one here, emotional self-care. And the things that we all need to, all these things influence all of us. Spiritual self, I grew up in the Salvation Army. I'll probably get a bit nervous when the word God's mentioned now. But besides the religious side of things, our spiritual well-being, just being able to think about hope, optimism, especially during the pandemic, that type of spiritual reflection, not necessarily that mindfulness or sitting down and praying. So use these ideas at how you think best fit yourself. Last one here, kind of general workplace things. We know classrooms, schools, colleges are incredibly challenging and busy. Stressful environments. So how does your school, your leadership team create these conditions where you've got a quiet space? I always say to everybody, does your school provide you with the basics? Tea and coffee and the staff room. I know that's a cost, but a lot of schools do provide that. But the one or two that don't. And I know it's a cost factor, but I think there's a good little indication, just simple basic human needs to look after your staff and no budgets are stretched. So the last idea, just kind of sign person, I'm going to go into some productivity hacks to finish. And then I'll leave that, this video floating throughout the internet over the weekend and see people's responses and I'll answer some questions. Now this idea was a bit of a hit and miss in my experience. Rewarding staff loyalty. Some would argue that teachers are already paid to do their job. And I agree with this. However, once you develop a wider lens and work in a number of schools in different circumstances, you can find teachers working really hard. And in some cases, not working them, or I was going to say not working very much. That'd be a terrible thing to say, not putting their efforts in the right place. Or other teachers carefully targeting their work and achieving lots. So there's a great book the four hour week. And my good friend Steven Locke, the first sign post that book to me. If we think about what we do throughout the whole day, I know we're consumed and connected with our children full time. But when we sit down to do our desk work, perhaps, we might be sitting down for two or three hours, but if we squeeze in our actual productivity, it probably is over a very small period. So I know the life of teachers are very different to kind of things that we do remotely or desktop away from kids. So whatever the case, I think context matters, but we're all human and we all like rewards. So the kind of loyalty card, I designed the system in my deputy headship life, working in incredibly challenging contexts with staff motivation, was generally low with pockets of excellence, not shared widely enough. So the goal here was simply to share best practice and give all staff the opportunity and I say carefully to earn extra benefits, whether it's a day off, a duvet day, credits or bursaries towards various research or courses, those type of things. The difficulty is you won't get all staff to engage with this and you could create maybe another tier system. So you have to be very careful. So here are some ideas here that I'll just share with you on the screen. There's a range of things that you can do and I'll probably broaden out the word loyalty card to mean a number of different things now. Sharing best practice, which is what we do. So we kind of need to design a system that rewards staff loyalty through just doing the basics, not going above and beyond what we'd normally expect teachers to do. So one of the little things that we did was this little loyalty card could redeem contributions. One of the biggest things when we think about the teacher standards is teacher standard eight, wider school contributions. And then if we think about experienced teachers in a profession, the UPS with a lot more challenges, sorry, upper pay scale for people watching outside the UK. There's a greater challenge on those teachers to share their wisdom with others and we know life or other workload things get in the way. So how do we encourage that sharing beyond the teachers who are generally sharing ideas through love and passion on social media like myself here? How do we get this happening in our school to transform cultures? So here is just the kind of way that we did it, how we gathered the data. The loyalties one aspect of say CPD menu, regular CPD sessions, bursaries protected a protected part of cash to fuel bursaries, whether it's MAs, NPQSLs, etc. So all staff have avenues available to them and these are communicated and transparent. Okay, so I'm just going to finish now. So there's a few more things in there, but if you want those slides and ideas, send me a direct message and I'll ping those over to you. So I'm just going to come off the slides for a moment and just talk about productivity hacks. Now, this was inspired by working with Mark Martin, OB. So Mark Martin, some of you will know him on Twitter and Instagram called the Urban Teacher, Mark's a computer science teacher, really passionate about diversity and inclusion. So these are my slides, but this was inspired from working alongside Urban to try and think about productivity hacks. So what I want to share the next five slides just to finish is what tools I use to manage my time, productivity, my social media insights, some blogging secrets. I know a lot of teachers are interested in blogging and just generally how to create content. And a lot of us are doing these kind of things today. So the first one here is time management tools. So these are, there's loads of these and through the pandemic, particularly the last 12 months, there's been loads of others. I think Moat, M-O-T-E's, being a particular favorite for teachers to give online feedback to students. I've been a big fan of Kaizina, K-A-I-Z-E-N-A. It does very much the same thing. There's a couple of apps there, Auto and Speechfy. I think from memory, there's a little kind of fee for those if you want to use them on your own personal devices on apps. But I've been a big fan of Dragon Dictator. I've been using Dragon Dictator for 10 years, inspired by a head teacher I used to work with, Paul Sutton, who's a head teacher in Tottenham, who's paralyzed from the neck down and he used to use Dragon Dictator on a microphone and his hands were paralyzed so he couldn't control the keyboard, so to speak. So he used Speech to go about his day-to-day work. Excuse me. So as a young school leader, I thought, well, how can I use this technology in my own work? So 10 years later, writing books, blogs, documents, emails, all the things I'm saying on the microphone here would be narrated. All this technology is in our fingertips, on our phones, on our computers. So really good ways to save work. I also use it in Google Documents. Now, Google Documents, you can voice tick tapes, not as accurate, but it's another good way to use your speech to type up detailed documents. Think about writing policies, emails, or even marking your students' work. The final one, tip five, just press record. So another app, you press it, you're having a conversation with someone else. It records the conversation, you then press transcribe, and then it types up your conversation. I think about all the journalists I know. They use all these apps all the time. We've been around for a long time. Things that we can translate into our work as teachers to make our lives better. Next one, productivity tools. There's loads of web-based stuff. My favorite is Trello. Teachers are super organized. They would love Trello. So if you've not discovered this, I design all my online work with schools or organizations as a to-do list. It's a tracker. I can tag, I can do everything in anything. And it has a kind of Kanban style, just above me where I'm working. I've got a Kanban board physically on paper. And it's pretty much designed in four columns, potential work to start. Who am I working with? What's in progress and reports? So those are my four columns. But for a teacher, you could have current projects. What needs to be tackled? What's in progress? What needs to be evaluated? So think about how you work. Just look at Kanban style lists and see how you can use this idea in your teacher classroom. Excuse me, I've got something in my throat. And anyway, emails. One little tip on emails. Your apps on your phone are designed to keep you connected. So you might like that. But when you've got lots of people emailing you and tagging you on lots of different channels and also email accounts, it can be non-stop. I think the last time I checked, I've got about 10 different email accounts, not because I want them, but to access my teacher training, the work I do for universities as a tutor, the work that I do from a research for University of Cambridge, or my personal email, or my work email. Already, there's five or six email accounts. So these apps, I guess the top tip is, they're default push notifications to you. So if I email you now, you're going to get that email in your inbox and it will distract you when you don't want to. So turn them off and choose when you want to collect the emails. There's a choice, particularly for school leaders watching, that we want to have new emails and be told straight away. Well, I think you're letting other people determine your work-life balance. I think particularly out of school hours, over the weekends, personal or professional devices also, who pays your mobile phone contract. We all want to be connected. We all want to delete emails on the journey to work, on the sofas in the evening. We need to switch these things off and redefine our meaning of work-life balance. Tip number three, slightly over time, my social media insights, the stuff that I see on a daily or weekly basis, what teachers click, how long they read for. I'll give you a general summary. 14.5 million website readers, the average reading time is a minute and a half, video content, YouTube, or even this. I'm now in my 15th minute. I suspect many of you only watched the first five minutes or 16 people watching live now are probably going to watch for the next minute and then log off. Analytics for videos, five minutes, because work in memory gets overloaded and we start to switch off. So bite-sized. And if you think about TikTok and all these other social media platforms and the constant connectivity that we have, we're being saturated. We then want things to be speed up quicker and then we, in some respects, our work becomes watered down. So we need to kind of be niche, I would argue, create content that's very specific, know your audience, for example, and also look at the data. So for school leaders also watching, when you send newsletters home to parents or peoples, you don't know if they're actually reading it. So one-minute summaries and through a newsletter application, you'll know exactly who clicks, who opens, who reads what, who clicks on whichever link, other than the traditional bit of paper that goes out and no one has an idea who's actually read the document or interacted with it. So there's lots of stuff you can take away from that one. Blogging secrets have already kind of mentioned, so I know there are a lot of teachers out there who are passionate bloggers. I started blogging, well, in fact, in the year 2000, but for Teacher Talkit 2007, it's taken me 15 years to get to this place. And on average, I've probably written about three, you know, the first three years, no one read, no one replied, and by year three, I had about 30,000 teachers reading the site. And then I moved it over to the current platform, teachertalkit.co.uk. Forty and a half million readers now, two and a half thousand blogs. That's about three blogs a week. That is a full-time job. And the last three or four years, I've been working with lots of skills, but, you know, for the first 12 years of that blogging life, I was a full-time school leader. I chose to do these things. I learned to voice automate, to share content quickly, might bite size, occasionally do something deep and meaningful. You choose your own workload. You choose your own passions. You choose what's important to you. I chose blogging, and as a result, that feed that I believe made me a better teacher. So there's lots there. The final one, I'm going to share you an image that I didn't share for six months. And I think the illusion of social media here is that we think the world is rosy for everyone else. You know, you're watching this now. The world isn't rosy for me. I go through all the normal challenges. I might post a video or a selfie, but behind the scenes has been 12 takes, or there's lots of kind of not so good stuff taking place. Here's that image. This is me after a very difficult inspection process where it really influenced and affected my mental health. And I think we need to be very careful about, you know, not always sharing the positive side of our work. We have to talk about mental health. We have to talk about supporting each other, supporting ourselves, and developing our own rhythm to workload and well-being. We're never all going to get it right. You'll see all teachers talking about ideas all over social media all throughout the weekend. I think you choose when you connect, when you log off. Don't necessarily insist on when someone else replies. So one little tip on my personal Twitter account. I've switched off direct messages. I don't want to talk about work on that channel. Simple as that. So that's one little fix I've done recently to try and take back control. So I'm going to leave. I'm going to stop the screen sharing for a minute. I hope that all worked your side. I told it was a little bit rusty. We'll screen you out. So I'll check back later. But if you've got any questions, anybody, support at teachertalkit.co.uk. Any ideas for a future video, then let me know. But what I'd like to do is get in back into a rhythm, sharing live videos on a weekly basis and sharing the resources. So my new kind of window is lasting on a Friday so that some people can watch this over the weekend rather than last thing on a Sunday night when all you want to do is just get ready for the work in a week ahead. So that's it from me, everyone. I hope you're well. I'll speak to you next week. Thanks for watching.