Imagine this, you’ve been struggling to pick up the knack of using the new iPads at work. No matter how many times you have seen others inputting an observation in and linking to every possible learning intention known to man and creating 175 next steps. You cannot get to grips with it. Sometimes you wish others would be more patient with you. Give you time, instead of butting in and taking over.
Whenever you pick up the iPad, your key person (why does she call you that) – she is the member of staff in charge, writes something down on a post it note and gets out a camera and takes a picture. In fact, it’s starting to get quite irritating when she keeps going on and on and asks you, why are you doing that and then interjects with: How does it make you feel when you can’t work it out? Why don’t you ask someone for help? What can we do to make it work?
Finally when you’ve been given a bit of space you manage to do the thing – hurrah! You can do the thing! You smile to yourself feeling a teeny bit of pride, and then you look up and realise your team leader has been filming you the whole time. What the actual…
About a week later before parents evening, at a team meeting, she gives you a book. In this book is not just one or two but several photos of you? In one you’re even eating those chocolates that were put in the staff room last week and you have chocolate all around your face. I mean who who would invade your privacy and do such a thing and you only had one or two, not the whole box like it suggests.
The team meeting progresses and it involves others talking about you, describing you, what you are doing, discussing what they are going to focus on next to promote your development. All the while, nobody actually asks you one question and you sit there feeling really rather uncomfortable about the whole thing. They all keep looking in that book with the photos in and laugh when they see the photo of you eating the chocolates.
Anyway, you wake up the next morning after a disturbed sleep and when you go into work, you tell your work bestie, about what you dreamt about last night.You laugh and say ‘I dreamt I was Lily May and everyone had been taking observations, photographing and filming me and there was a learning journey all about me’. You’re both laughing and your work bestie says, how funny! You explain, it actually wasn’t that funny at all. It felt overwhelming, rude, intrusive and so extremely frustrating that nobody cared about how you felt or bothered to value your thoughts and feelings.
