Automation in Administrative Practice

Note: The example used in this post is not one that I came up with. It is the brain-child of Ms. Michelle Kwon, Curriculum Associate for English Language Arts & Libraries, and Mr. Christopher Kauter, District Administrator for Instructional Technology, both of whom I am privileged to call my colleagues here in Deer Park.

I’m not sure that the typical administrator understands the power of automation. This isn’t intended as an oblique shot at any of my colleagues, I know that I frequently don’t realize just how useful it is to automate those parts of my working life that can be automated. It’s really easy to keep doing things the way they have always been done. Effort is required to realize when you are doing things by hand that could just as easily be done by an automatic process (and then, of course, to figure out how to implement the automatic solution).

An example from my own experience; Lesson Plan monitoring. One of the responsibilities of my position is the monitoring of lesson plans that are submitted by teachers in my departments. We don’t have a particularly cumbersome lesson plan expectation for tenured staff, but they are expected to submit a weekly document that says what they are teaching on any given day, and how they are teaching it. It’s largely up to the teacher to decide what format this document will take. Most of my staff uses a Google-Drive-Based solution: Either a folder they drop their plans in a formatted spreadsheet that they have shared with me. And every Tuesday, I am supposed to check these plans.

Looking back on 12 years worth of teaching for my district, I don’t know that I ever got feedback on the lesson plans that I submitted to my boss. In the later part of my time as a teacher, I knew for a fact that they were almost never checked thanks to the versioning that Google allows on its documents. On one level, that was never a problem for me. I really didn’t care if my boss ever looked at my lesson plans, and I was always pretty confident that I was doing solid work in my classes, should there ever be a question. I’m also sure that any of my prior bosses would easily be able to point to “better things to do” than check and comment on lesson plans for a staff of ~35 people. Because reading through (or even glancing at) ~35 sets of lesson plans and then making contact with ~35 different people is a pain, particularly the last step. Even via email, sending ~35 notes a week is the kind of repetitive time-suck that is just not tenable for any effective admin. There simply are not enough hours in the day.

“Repetitive time-suck” is a pretty good indicator that something is ripe for automation. Any action that you repeat is exactly the type of task that computers are built to do for you. Sure enough, sending out ~35 emails to the same ~35 people every week on the same topic fits the bill precisely. Here’s the automated solution that I’ve employed:

1. Lesson plans are looked at. I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you to find out that all of my department lesson plans are put into the same location in my district Google Drive. Putting them all in one place means that I just have to go to that place to check them out. It also means that I can bookmark that spot (or in the case of Google Drive, star it) so that I can get there in one click.
2. My comments about a teacher’s lesson plans are entered into a spreadsheet. Each week’s comments goes into a new column in the row for that teacher. I don’t leave huge, detailed notes, just a thought about what I see (or what I don’t), or something related to what they are doing for the week, or a quick note of “thanks” for them being awesome. No one has the time to write, or read, a novel.
3. FormMule is used to email my comments to my teachers. This is the real magic automation sauce for this process. FormMule is an add-on for Google Sheets that takes the entries in a spreadsheet and merges them into individual emails to recipients, as determined by a template that I created. This way I don’t have to send ~35 separate emails. FormMule does that for me (and it takes it about a minute to generate and send them, which is faster than any human could ever hope to do it).

That’s the process. Because of automation, suddenly something that was not possible is super possible, almost trivial. Which is exactly the point. As soon as we automate the repetitive things we need to do, things that seemed like too much effort become manageable. And of course, since running a department is a complex system, making these sorts of changes lead to all sorts of interesting emergent properties. My staff has tangible evidence that I actually look at their lesson plans, so they are more likely to do them. I get to have a little, informal conversation about what they are doing in their classes every week. Nothing bad happens from making a change like this. Added up with all of the other automatic systems that I can integrate, I start to get significant time savings that I can use to do the work of running, and leading, my departments.

Of course, I don’t want to suggest that automation is always beneficial. There are many aspects of society where automating things is currently having profound effects on people’s livelihoods and welfare. At the same time, setting up auto-emailing systems and other administrative processes that make the day-to-day work of managing a staff are about as far away from something like a self-driving car as you can get while still being in the automation field. In my experience, figuring out where I’m repeating myself in my working life, and then working to make that happen without my direct energy has never been a bad thing.

How are you using automated processes to make your administrative (or teaching) life better? Let me know if you have a moment. Always happy to share!