A long week of DoSsing

The times

Monday: 1000-1900

Tuesday: 1000-2100

Wednesday: 1000-1700

Thursday: 1000-1845 at school, 1930-2200 at home

Friday: 1000-1930

The meetings

One hour senior teacher meeting

Thirty minute general meeting for all staff

Fifteen minutes getting feedback from the staff rep

Six one-hour collaborative planning meetings with teachers

The CPD

Those collaborative planning meetings ^

Three mentoring meetings totalling about an hour

One hour of action research group

One hour workshop, jointly run with the other three senior staff at our school (one of us each with a small group of teachers)

The reports

Seven hours of reading mid-year reports to check them against our standards

Two of talking to teachers about said reports and talking them through updates to be made

The recruitment

Two hours of updating my list of trainers to contact with job offers we have available to pass on to their trainees

Two hours of dealing with other recruitment-related things, like responding to applications and arranging interviews

The timetabling

Three hours of updating the timetable based on changes for the new year

Thirty minutes of updating the consultation timetable to reflect other timetable changes (possible slots for 25-minute tutorials for students who need them)

An hour of creating a time and room timetable for tutorials with adult groups

Half an hour of organising and confirming cover for teachers who were sick (generally outside the times listed above)

The student-related stuff

An hour and a half going to a company to placement test students, doing said tests and coming back

An hour in total of talking about struggling students and what we can do to help them

The other admin

An hour of completing and checking the overtime spreadsheet so we all get paid correctly

Three hours creating two tests for different groups, adapting them from materials supplied with the coursebooks so that they suit our students (mostly written during the collaborative planning meetings, as the teachers are pretty independent now) 🙂

Half an hour of clearing emails and replying to others (yep, I know I’m lucky!)

The lessons

An hour and a half last-minute cover lesson (on Tuesday night)

An hour teaching Polish

Three hours teaching general English and English for work

Three hours of associated planning for said classes (mostly on Thursday night)

The breaks

Twenty to thirty minutes for lunch

Loo breaks 🙂

The rest of it

Catching up with teachers after their two-week winter break holiday, often during lunch

Dealing with all the little things I’ve forgotten about that popped up during the week

The caveats

This is one example of what a long working week involves for me, but luckily I only have five or six of them spaced out across the year. They tend to occur when a whole load of deadlines coincide. In this case reports needed to be ready before parents’ meetings and tutorials, tutorial times needed to be ready, consultation slots are needed so we can offer them to students, and the timetable normally changes a lot at this point in the year. Inevitably, they’re also usually the first week after a holiday, even if I try and do a day or two during the holiday to mitigate the effects – we’ve just had a two-week Winter Break, and this was the first week back. I also know that other people have it worse (often teachers!) – 49 hours or so could be far more. I just wanted to show what a working week for a DoS in a medium-sized language school might look like.

In contrast, next week doesn’t have any deadlines (I don’t think!) and I already have my lessons planned as the students didn’t get through as much as I expected last week 🙂 Just the ever-present recruitment, so I’ll be doing an interview tomorrow (Sunday)…

And yes, I made sure to relax when I could – some cross stitch most mornings, a bath on Wednesday evening after physio (why I left so early!), and cinema trips on Monday and Friday evenings. I’m trying very hard to keep everything in balance, but sometimes this ^^^ happens 😉