notes from the director

Tracking Your Time

We’re well into the second half of the quarter and now find ourselves looking ahead to the start of portfolio units in 131 and other culminating assignment sequences in other EWP courses. Next week we’ll have more to say about ordering your student evaluations and some general evaluations FAQ, but for this week in keeping with the spirit of care and community-building in previous newsletters, this week we want to touch on ways that you can streamline some of your teaching and recognize the limits of your time, energy, and resources (particularly this quarter).

Before we share some practical strategies for keeping boundaries around our teaching work, we also want to acknowledge that many of you are teaching 131 for the first time, or teaching in person for the first time. Both of these experiences amplify the energy and labor that go into teaching. This means it is more–not less–important for those of you in these situations to have boundaries around your teaching and to identify ways that connection and community with others–including those of us in A-011–can help support you.

Stephanie loves the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and all graduate students and faculty here at UW have access to their resources. She likes this short essay that specifically focuses on listening to your body and how to ask for help / get what you need. (To access the link you’ll need to activate your free institutional membership with NCFDD)

In addition to listening to what you need and learning ways of asking for those things, we also want to recommend time-tracking as a way to get a clearer understanding of how much time you’re putting into your teaching and how you’re allocating / spending that time.

If you’re not already tracking your hours, we suggest that you do this in a low-key way for one week, perhaps on a post-it note that you keep near your desk or in your planner/favorite notebook. Every time you do some teaching-related work, just write on that post-it note the day and how much time (e.g., Mon, 15 min–email students; Mon–120 min–teaching class). At the end of a week, you’ll have a sense of where most of your teaching energy is going and whether you are holding yourself to the 20 hours you are contracted for.

If you are an ASE, your QJDA includes the following clause as part of your contract to teach in our program: “It is important to monitor your time management regularly. While your workload may vary week by week, it is your responsibility to notify the EWP Director immediately if you feel your workload is exceeding the average weekly hours defined by the contract so that adjustments can be made.” Even in difficult teaching conditions, it is important that we put boundaries around our time and labor based on how we are being compensated and resourced for that work. We are here to help you with this.

From Stephanie: when I have previously done this time-tracking activity (usually tracking multiple spheres of activity, not just teaching), I always learn something about how I am actually spending my time vs. how I think I am spending my time. Too, if you do this activity and discover you are spending more than 20h a week on your teaching, that is data you need to bring to a conversation with any of us in A-011 / on the EWP team so that we can support you in working within your contracted boundaries.

From Francesca: Your union, UAW 4121, offers a time-tracking worksheet broken out by activity. This worksheet is designed to help you think about your workload and anticipate if you will be going over your contracted 220 hours per quarter. Caitlin Postal has also developed a time-in/time-out tracking sheet that might be friendlier for writing down your work time interval. Caitlin and Missy González-Garduño are your two union stewards if you have questions about how this tracking relates to your workload rights.

From Missy: I’ve never been great at tracking my hours. I’m really bad at working a little, checking my phone a lot, working a little, grabbing something to eat, etc. in an endless cycle that makes it really annoying and tedious to track what is actually work. In the past I’ve strongly suspected that I was going over hours, but never worried about it much because I felt that time/energy was necessary to building a great class for my students.

Through my work with the union, I decided that I should keep a tally for at least one quarter. Full disclosure: I only ended up tracking my hours for two weeks, but even then, I was shocked by how much I was actually going over. And I knew that those numbers weren’t totally accurate, because like I said: I’m not great at tracking, so there was definitely more time that I wasn’t accounting for. Those numbers were totally eye opening for me, so I decided to do something about it.

As I suspected (and feared) managing my time entailed a lot more than just tracking my hours. I had to think critically about how I was going to spend my time every day and I had to commit myself to actually doing work during the time that I said I was. That’s not to say that I am now amazing at sitting down and doing one task without looking at my phone, or walking my dog, or any other thing that my procrastination-brain can think of, but it does help me try to eliminate those distractions and have the motivation to be protective of my time in a way that I wasn’t before.

–Francesca Colonnese, Missy González-Garduño, Stephanie Kerschbaum

Checking-in, with warm invitation

As we wind down the first half of the quarter there’s been a bit of looking around in shock–really? We’re already almost halfway through?–and it seems a good time to take stock of where we find ourselves right now. We want to invite you to check in with yourself–and with us–around how the return to in-person instruction is shifting your experience of teaching or is presenting new rewards as well as challenges.

You can check in with us in any way you like–and this Director’s Note, co-written by Missy González-Garduño and Stephanie Kerschbaum, takes up the theme of check-in to describe some of the ways that you can connect with us and with a supportive network in our program.

This google form is a check-in of the sort that you might use with your own students, and it offers a brief set of questions that can communicate to us as EWP administrators what we need to have on our radar as well as what we should ensure we continue or maintain. This is new terrain for us as it is for you, and we don’t want to just guess at what may be at the forefront of your minds or experiences as we prepare resources, supports, and next-steps. So if you’re willing, please consider taking 5-6 minutes to jot down quick responses. We will share in a future Director’s Note what we learn from this mid-quarter check-in and how we are moving in response.

In addition to the above Google Form, we are also doing other kinds of proactive outreach. One of these efforts has focused particularly on instructors who are teaching in-person for the first time in our program. One of us, Missy, has been organizing small-group conversations among 2nd year instructors during collective office hours. EWP ADs have been giving short tours of the A-11 suite and chatting with instructors about their course plans, in-person experiences, and COVID concerns. We have particularly enjoyed showing folks around the suite for the first time: showing off our new communal table, the printing room, and the different AD offices as folks popped their heads out for quick hellos. Feel free to stop by and get some tea if you are cold and curious about the space.

These small-group conversations have been open and collaborative spaces where ADs and instructors alike have helped each other troubleshoot different issues such as time management, new lesson plans, and challenges around fluctuating attendance patterns as students negotiate cold/flu/possible COVID symptoms. These challenges include trying not to teach two classes at the same time (one remote, one in person) or doing extra work to support absent students–and we’re glad to talk more about these kinds of challenges with any others who might want to consult or check in with us. We’ve enjoyed hearing folks talk through the transition to new courses and in-person teaching; for those of us on duty, it has been so great to live vicariously through the awesome teachers who have been so generous as to share their experiences with us.

And as a reminder, Stephanie is in the office Monday-Friday and has open office hours where she is available both in her personal zoom room or in person in A-011 from 3-4 p.m. on Wednesdays and 2-3 p.m. on Thursdays. If those times don’t work for you, just email kersch@uw.edu to schedule a time to come by. We’re currently working on trying to get a chalkboard to make it easier to signal when Stephanie is in the office & available for you to stop in and ring her doorbell.

Finally, another way to connect and check-in would be to attend our first Fall quarter Teacher Talk. This event, hosted by Francesca Colonnese, begins with the recognition that many of you may be experiencing complex emotions–including anxiety and uncertainty–as you continue to hear about positive COVID cases and close contacts and navigate teaching in this time. If this resonates with you, please consider joining our virtual event this coming Wednesday, 27 October at 2:30 on Zoom (RSVP link here). Francesca is explicitly designing this as a space to process and share what it has been like to teach under these difficult conditions.

–Missy González-Garduño and Stephanie Kerschbaum

Tag: notes from the director