For everything we do can be plotted in relation to two categories.
Category 1, Enjoyable: How much do I want to do this thing?
Category 2, Necessity: How much do I need to do this thing?
For principals, teachers and students mapping the activities that you do at school can be an interesting experience. For principals and teachers, it can help us reflect and reset. If we look through the lens of our students, it can help us support them reach their goals. To assist this, the enjoyment/necessity graph can be broken into 4 quadrants.
Quadrant 1: There is a cost to any activity. I might enjoy this activity but energy I am putting towards it may be outweighing the benefits I get from it. The reflective question to consider is “Is the enjoyment I receive from this activity worth the energy it costs me to do it?”
Quadrant 2: Winning. “If you love the work you do, you never work a day in your life” or so the saying goes. If the activity is enjoyable and necessary, then it is likely to be easy to sustain. The question to consider is “How can I do more of this?”
Quadrant 3: If you don’t like it and don’t need to do it then consider what is the motivation for doing it. This might be an opportunity to stop rather than sustain. The question to consider is “Why am I doing this?” and “Can we stop doing this?”
Quadrant 4: This is the quadrant where the rubber hits the road. When we need to keep doing something that we don’t enjoy. The question here is “How can we make this more enjoyable or at least more tolerable?”
For many of our students that disengage with education and many of our teachers who move away from the profession it boils down to spending too much time in quadrant 4. So, the problem becomes “How do we turn quadrant 4 into quadrant 2?”
At any point in time, we are trying to sustain many things. While it is easy to simplify and think about each thing we are doing in isolation, the reality is that all things we do draw upon the same resources. Therefore, when we do too many things, we get run down and exhausted. The easy solve then is: ‘Do less things”. Where possible, it is absolutely advantageous to do fewer things. As teachers, we all know that unfortunately, the reality is that we probably can’t do less. ‘Which of these super important tasks am I going to drop?’ For our students they often have even less agency “Should I complete 4 assessments 75% each or do 3 assessments at 100% and 1 at 0%?”
Failing having more time and less things to do, the next best thing we can do is try to make it easier to sustain all the things we need. One strategy gaining momentum is celebrating and rewarding effort. This strategy suggests that the best way to move from quadrant 4 to quadrant 2 is to make it more enjoyable to put effort into achieving the necessary things in quadrant 4. This can be assisted by breaking the necessary task up into many small achievable sections (possibly measured by time on task rather than output) and building in rewards and things to look forward to when a milestone (possibly time spent) is achieved. The idea being that the reward is sufficiently enjoyable to balance the dislike of the task.
So, if you are game, map out all your activities for next week on the enjoyment/necessity quadrants or ask your students to. Does the balance seem right to you?
[ Rydr Tracy is the Head of Education at Life Skills Group and former Director Strategic Priorities at CESE. He is a specialist in evidence-informed practice in educational innovation, with a career focus on strategic change that improves student outcomes. He draws on a rare blend of successful experience in schools, system leadership roles and industry practice – experience that has given him deep understanding of the complexities of the education sector from the classroom to the boardroom and a demonstrated capacity to generate practical recommendations that are grounded in context and evidence. ]
