Timothy Ferris is a radical in the true sense of the word, challenging the way we live and work and presenting the far-reaching concept of a four hour working week. Sounds good to me I thought, let’s read more! His philosophy on education however is far from encouraging, or indeed favourable (I am certain he would have been a delight in any classroom!). He challenged his kindergarten teacher from day one, asking why he couldn’t just keep drawing; she chose to say the fatal words “I’m the teacher, that’s why”. This desire to question continued and at University for example Tim would corner his professors for lengthy discussions if he received anything less than an A.
Using some very behavioural strategies that made certain his professors thought twice before giving him anything less than an A! There is something about this man that we need to watch out for and I don’t mean his reluctance to do as he is told; it’s his ability to expose loopholes that can be life-enhancing if applied effectively and he raises some fascinating points about time/ work ratios that need to be explored further.
Listening to his audio book some years ago I discovered Parkinson’s Law and the Pareto Principle, both of which have contributed to my teaching strategies, and my personal development. It is the former that I wish to focus on because I do believe that for both teachers and students, getting to grips with this fundamental law could greatly improve productivity, achievement standards and relationships in general.
Parkinson’s Law is probably most profound for me because it supported a
belief I had fostered for some time with regards to student writing, that timing was an important part of the writing process. I don’t mean that there’s a good time or a bad time to write, but this will be explained in more detail later. I had initially developed an idea that was first presented to me in training college. The process is story writing based on a model that is visible to all the students. The model is constructed as a whole class, with the teacher writing on a white board using a preplanned format. The extra ingredient to this writing recipe involves Parkinson’s Law – timing it and timing it tightly. Now this may seem to contradict the idea of fostering writing, but the added time pressure seems to have the complete opposite affect and Parkinson’s Law helps to untangle this apparent contradiction. Simply put, Parkinson’s Law states – work expands to fill the time allotted – so if you have two hours to get a job done it will take two hours. If for some reason you find you have only 1⁄2 hour for the same job, it will still get done in that time. Tim Ferris reminds us of how, if we suddenly have to leave work unexpectedly, we miraculously get everything done. We motor through workloads in hours that would normally take us days. This is not an idle observation, and I am certain that you will have direct experience of this law in action!
What I noticed was that it could be effectively applied in the classroom by drawing attention to short, sharp, timed sessions with ongoing feedback and sharing of work. The results were outstanding both in written content and student reports about their sense of achievement.
For example, I worked with a group of early childhood students to write an essay on their early play experiences. I introduced the class to the idea of a timed essay writing session, explaining that we would discuss the layout of the essay as a group, develop model sentence starters and spend short, timed sessions writing our essay. I said no one was leaving until they had completed the task.
I told them about Parkinson’s Law – work expands to fill the time allotted! I also explained how I had conducted this activity with 5 year olds and teenagers and it had produced amazing results. We began the session by looking up the word ‘essay’ and getting a definition on the board – I added that essays contain paragraphs, and we discussed what a paragraph was and the importance of using them to keep our ideas clear.
We looked at the assessment task and the requirements. I explained that it was a reflection, and the person marking the essay wanted to know the student’s own thoughts and ideas about their play experiences. For any other essay topic you might be covering I would refer to previous sessions/work/assessment/learning from the previous day that would support the content of the current essay. I would then brainstorm what the students know and get notes on the board to prompt students. These students had answered questions about their early childhood play experiences prior to the essay writing activity.
The writing began with me modeling an introduction on the board which the students copied down, and they were asked to put it into their own words. In my model I included 3 obvious subheadings.
I asked the students to say what they thought the first paragraph would be about – having read the introduction and the three obvious subheadings.
We then brainstormed sentence starters for this first paragraph.
Then I gave the instruction – we will now begin writing paragraph one. You have 5 minutes to write paragraph one. During the writing time I quietly reminded the students that there were two minutes left, and so on until the time was up. We then moved on to the next paragraph based on our introduction, stating, “Now we are going to do paragraph two. What do you think this one will be about? How can we start this paragraph, what other sentence starters can
you come up with?”
I then repeated the timing and writing process. After this session I asked for students to read out their work if they were keen. By now they had been writing for only 10 minutes but some had already written nearly 1⁄2 a page. Tension was created by repeating the time limit and repeating that they must complete the paragraph within this time frame if at
all possible. Morning tea approached and they continued writing! We stopped after 5 minutes and I suggested there were two options – continue and finish this section or finish and go to morning tea. The majority of students wanted to keep going and finish, saying that they were already focused and in the mood!
This approach to writing has worked across the age ranges and in a variety of schools where I have been fortunate to work. This framework provides inexperienced writers with a scaffold on which to pin their ideas, allowing them to focus on generating ideas
rather than struggling with structure. It has been exciting for me to ‘discover’ Parkinson’s Law which underpins the process, because it means it can be applied to other curriculum areas and indeed to one’s daily life in general. I am indebted to Timothy Ferris for revealing the secret!