A work rant...

Got in yesterday to find out from colleague that prior to my arrival (I was unusually early) a decision had been made to get the new trainee cover supervisor to start covering lessons. Due to staff shortages this was considered a necessity. He would be in lessons with us and the department lesson observations and the remainder of the training programme devised for him by me has come to an abrupt end. Without any previous relevant experience I can't deny I am concerned. I consider it to be unfair after such a short time observing, although he was beginning to take parts of lessons as I had requested teachers to encourage him to do so. Despite voicing my opinion it appears this is considered a necessity by senior management in the face of ‘tough times’. I couldn’t help being reminded of Senge, the reference to change and learning organisations when I heard my colleague making remarks like: “I didn’t get two weeks of training – I only got two days”. I thought 'but does that make it right to continue with the same system of training, is this reason enough to stick to the same method? Why not try to change and improve the training of cover supervisors? We may even end up with some double loop learning (Schon and Argyris) as a result, where they actually end up staying in the role for more than just a few months at a time. Where the whole object of the exercise is not defeated by them taking a lot of time off due to stress compounded by their lack of training !