Time-Block Planning: backsliding and finding a foothold

Over the last few weeks I have not kept up with my time-block planning as much as I had hoped I would. During these last two weeks I tried using my Outlook calendar to manage my time, and for the most part it worked in that I got to my meetings on time, but I did fall behind on a few important projects. 

In thinking about why I didn't create a time-block plan I realized my family had a number of social plans the past two weekends. With the pandemic protocols loosening, and with my wife and I being fully vaccinated this week we'll have to go back to navigating fairly busy weekends. This is compounded by the fact that my wife's work schedule includes Fridays and Sundays. It seems likely that I will need to step up a bit more on the domestic chores through the Summer, so she will have time to work on her new business and freelance projects. This might be a good push to figure out more meals that can be prepped ahead of time, establish some task lists that I can get done quickly once I get a routine, and work with my child Jack to figure out how to put toys away.... Hey, a parent can dream. 

I took some time on Sunday night to create my time-block plan for the week, and as I was doing so I listened to a past Deep Work podcast. This was a really nice task as my mind was engaged with the podcast, my hands engaged with drawing out my plan, and if I needed to write anything down from the podcast my notebook was handy.

To plan my week I wrote a weekly overview with my personal plans, five work days with the full deep work schedule and lists, and two weekend days with just the dates. 

Weekly Schedule

Daily Schedule

After creating these 'blank' schedules I then reviewed my work Outlook calendar for meetings, appointments, or workshops, writing them in the relevant daily schedule. After that I looked at my ideal schedule and scheduled the remaining times, balancing meetings with moving forward on projects. I feel like there is some tension between my ideal schedule and the meetings I have to attend, but I think this is good as it pushes me to think about the meetings I have scheduled and if I need to go to them. This term I've cancelled a number of workshops or asked if I really needed to be at a meeting on the basis of not having enough time for my ideal schedule.

Daily Schedule Completed

Each pass of the schedule seems to address an important part of why I try to manage my time.

• Drawing out schedules - Aside from enjoying the arts and crafts feel of taking a straight edge and drawing these schedules, it also gives me a minute to really process the upcoming days, as without this exercise I feel like time just slips away. 
• Personal schedule - Allows me to address any personal commitments I have, my wife's work schedule, if my childcare provider cancels a day, any special meal prep I need to do (we plan meals with Google calendar and their shared shopping list site), and allows me to think up plans. 
• Work schedule - There are a number of meetings I'm expected to attend based on my role as chairperson, in relation to projects I'm managing this term, and as different events come up. It also gives me a chance to look at the status of a variety of projects and see if any are lagging, and what, if any, updates I need to provide stakeholders. 
• Ideal schedule - This is my quarterly plan for how I want to spend my time, but I've been iterating on it this term every month or so. I realized early that doing emails first thing in the morning was spinning out my days to focus just on emails and replies. Instead starting with a smallish focused project and not checking emails until 10 or 11 helps me start the day productively, which in turn makes me feel comfortable about spending time in my emails. It also helps me feel accomplished earlier in the day, to get that next ball rolling. 

In the past I would complete my daily schedule for the next five work days, but this week I decided to do that only for Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday I am visiting my campus and am still sorting out what I'll be doing that day, and it seems likely the following days will be spent catching up on other tasks I wasn't able to get done then.

How do you manage your days? How do you determine if you need to go to a meeting or not?

Planning: Summer 2021

I'm thinking about what I want to do for the summer and have a few thoughts I want to share here and see if anyone has suggestions, ideas, or recommendations. My summer runs from Tuesday, June 22nd to Thursday, September 9th, a total of 79 days.

• In my role as chairperson I am expected to spend 10 days over the summer working. Our Summer term is about eight weeks so I figure if I work the same day each week I can respond to emails, and move the ball on some smaller projects, like;
• move department documents to our Teams site
• move department leadership documents to a separate Teams site
• think of how to facilitate the department in creating a mission statement with values that would support...
• determine what committees, job functions, and roles are important to the math department in preparation for a conversation about how faculty want to use their service time to the college that reflects our department mission statement
• create online homework for a professional-technical course we are working on this term
• work with student services on a revision to our math placement process
• review corequisite support data from the past few years
• work with our institutional research group to build dashboards and determine other reporting needs

A highly respected colleague once told me that you only get 20% of your summer to-do list accomplished, so you think of the important things you want to focus on and not stress on the other stuff. Not sure what that 20% is from the list above, but I'm sure I'll know by the end of the summer.  

• Read Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman with a group of colleagues from my department. 
  
  
• On April 23rd I went to a WAMATYC virtual session Thinking About Assessment and Grading Differently: Standards-Based Grading in MATH& 141 and MATH& 142 by Matt Lewis and Michal Ramos from Yakima Valley College. In the session they shared that in earning a ESCALA Certificate in College Teaching and Learning in Hispanic Communities they wanted to revise their precalculus courses to use highly equitable classroom practices, including standards based grading. I've seen other implementations of standards based grading, competency based learning, and other schemes, but what set this one apart was their setup for measuring each learning objective (LO), and how they awarded grades. Each learning objective got its own rubric, for example this was their initial general rubric;
  
  
  
  
  In the presentation they shared that this general rubric wasn't great for every learning objective, and thus revised them for each objective. Here is an example of a specific LO;
  
  
  
  Students demonstrated their abilities for each LO through a variety of assignments, using WAMAP's internal objective tracking.
  
  The most unique part (to me anyway) was their use of these rubrics to determine a student's grade. These rubrics weren't just abstract things for faculty to worry and fret over, and students may or may not have thought much about, no! These rubrics mattered in a real and substantial way. 
  
  
  
  So students couldn't pass the course if they didn't at least try every topic, and couldn't get an A unless they were expert in at least 20 topics of the 24, with at most 4 topics being proficient. This is related to something I struggle with a lot, explaining to students how their grade is reflective of their understanding of the course material. With this scheme, I hope, the connection is made clear.
  
  From the data they presented it seemed clear that gaps in performance persisted, but the overall distribution of grades shifted to more A's and B's, AND student's subsequent performance in their next math course went up as compared to past students. 
  
  For the summer I would like to take my corequisite business math course and build this into the course for the Fall term. To do this I am going to have to change my homework system to WAMAP, build in the learning objectives into the course, develop assignments that align, and figure out how to show a student's current grade in our LMS, along with a host of other things I'm not aware of right now. (Feeling some very Around the World in Eighty Days vibes here where I know what I have to do, but unsure of exactly how I'll do it.) Each of these is a pretty big task, but for each I have either done this for another course, can leverage materials from past iterations of WAMAP material, or, over the summer, devote some deep work time to it.
  
  I should also note that I will be teaching this course face-to-face in the fall, and it is unlikely I'll be able to use many of my existing active learning group activities as we may still be social distancing. With the instructional upheaval I'm going to have to think about, it makes sense to make big changes to grading and assignments so that there is a coherent structure. I'd like to do some amount of flipping the prerequisite topics, this being a corequisite course we cover prerequisite topics as needed to prepare students for course-level material. 
  
  
•  I'd really like the chance to do something that utilizes some old or skills I am trying to develop over the summer that is self-contained. A paid opportunity would be nice, but I am open to the right volunteer job. I'm looking on UpWork and will be posting something on LinkedIn at the end of the month about my availability, but I'd like to stretch and do something like;
  
• A month long project designing a training course or materials for a corporate client.
• Accuracy checking a K-12 or undergrad textbook. 
• Help an edtech company make or test a product or service using Canvas' Python API.
• Create a course, learning objectives, assignments, assessments, or other instructional design and curriculum development tasks in an LMS I don't have experience with. 
• Volunteer for a non-profit to setup a Moodle instance, develop learning activities, and/or support tutors in using technology to meet students.
  
  
• The POGIL Activity Clearninghouse has activities for review that I'd like to look at, and I'd like to submit some of my trigonometry activities. I think I have enough activities for a text, but I'm the only one who's used them and have had only a couple looked at by others. I'm just not sure what this would look like and am unsure if this is a months-long project or a years-long project. 
  
  
• Home projects, the list that never seems to get shorter. 
• repaint the interior of our house (master bedroom, living room, hallway, main bath, kitchen, parts of entryway)
• test colors for exterior painting
• back bathroom sink fixed
• back porch drainage fixed
• dog door installed to our back yard
• landscape the remaining 25 ft. length of hellscape
• replace a 30 ft. length of wooden fence
• repair floors
• tend to the vegetable garden

On reflection it seems that I could perform chair duties on Tuesdays, work on home projects in the morning and weekends, and during the heat of the day work on building my course for the fall and/or on an outside project. I would like to have my activities accepted by POGIL and printed as a text, and may need to fit that in when I can. We do have a few camping trips planned, so I'll have to think about fitting tasks around those.

What are your plans for the summer? Any projects you're thinking about but are unsure of how to start? Summer tasks you always mean to get to, but never manage to? Getting a COVID vaccine and living out of a backpack for a month or two?

Doing Good: Personal dictums that align to my values.

Over time I've learned that there are a number of personal and professional things I have a categorical responses to, that I hope align and support my values. These could be requests, offers, or a behavior I'll do in response to some action, social media post, etc. Many of these things make my life easier in that I don't have to think very hard about doing them, there's no debate about if I should, how I should, or other cognitively demanding weighing of social, personal, and professional factors. As I get older I am finding that weighing these factors is kind of stressful and taxing on me, so following these kinds of heuristics is really helpful. 

Here is my current list as I think of them;

Always share job postings I run across in my feeds on social media, and if I can think of someone who may be good for a job forward them the posting. 

One of my work study jobs was to help out at a student employment office and from that experience I gained a better appreciation of how hard it can be for people to find jobs. In sharing job opportunities with my networks my hope is that others who may not have heard about the job see it, apply, and get that job. 

In forwarding job postings to others my hope is that I'm acknowledging the potential in others, and for those of us who suffer from imposter syndrome to give some kind of encouragement and support. When I do forward job postings too many people respond with "Oh, I'm not qualified for that job." and I don't understand that response. My mom always said "Let them tell you no." meaning to apply for the job, even if you think you have little chance of getting it, and don't let your internal doubt get in the way. Sure, you might not get that job, but you could very well get the next job, or be thought of for a future position. 

Always pay for whatever my friend is making or doing. 

I've never understood asking your friends for free stuff from their business. If they're working at some giant retailer, that's a moral gray area for me, but when your friend is working with their own hands to create their own business, I don't get it. A corollary is to always like and share my friend's business posts.  

So what values do the two dictums above reflect? I'd like to think they reflect my belief in the potential of everyone to grow, and become the person they want to be. Not in any achievement-for-achievement's sake way, but for personal betterment, growth, and to make for a more successful community. I don't agree with prosperity theology, but I think there is a humanist equivalent where humans have agency over their own financial future and physical well-being, and that of others. That last part is what I believe we're addressing with BLM, Me Too, and other movements that are trying to address the systems some humans (that look a lot like me) have setup that negatively impact others. It's kind of hard to pull yourself by the bootstraps when someone has cut all of your bootstraps, let alone that expression doesn't make any sense by itself. 

 Never participate in reviews, trainings, or workshops of products where the host offers to pay me. 

I regularly get emails asking me to go to some event sponsored by a textbook publisher, technology company, or another institution where they offer a gift card, or to be entered into a drawing for a trip or some such thing. Sure, I might be missing out on padding my bank account, but if the thing they're selling is all that great I kind of doubt I need coaxing to check it out. 

The value here would be personal integrity, but valuing my time enough not to take these sale pitches.

Always take the meeting. 

Now, if some textbook publisher, technology company, or another institution reaches out to me specifically and wants to meet about a product, service, etc. I'll take it. Sure, they get some of my time, but I will usually try to ask questions of them to get a sense of what problems they're trying to solve, their approach, and if they might have something of interest to me. This also applies to job interviews, publication interviews, etc.

I get the feeling that some might think this dictum runs counter to valuing my time enough not to take a sales pitch, but I think of this more as an opportunity for two-way information flow. With those kinds of paid sales pitches all the information is one way, from the host to you. In a conversation I feel more confident in asking questions, gleaning information from the host, and sure learning about a new product that I might not have known before. The value I hope I'm expressing here is that I love learning. If I didn't, then why teach?

This post is a bit more navel-gazey than I thought I would write for this blog, but I'm becoming more worried about those of us in higher-education that are asked to perform administrative tasks without reflecting on our core values. If we are always buffeted about by endless emails, 2-4 hours tasks that crop out of no where, and the grind of grading then where do we let our values lead our actions?