Meaningful Jobs

The steps

1. List the real work of your lessons. Note the recurring tasks: books out, homework in, equipment set up, messages run, the display refreshed. Keep a task on the list only if the class would notice within a week were it to stop. The rest you do yourself.
2. Give each task a name and a one-sentence duty. Materials manager: books and glue sticks out during the register, back in the cupboard at the end. Register runner: attendance list to the office in the first five minutes. Write the duty so that the job holder can say it from memory.
3. Teach each job like a routine. Show the new job holder what to do, when to do it and to what standard. Watch them do the job once before it counts.
   Dele, you're our materials manager until the break. Books go out while I take the register: one pile per table, window side first. Show me now, and I'll watch.
   Rehearse it as you would any other routine, and expect to give a reminder or two in the first week.
4. Rotate on a posted schedule. Change job holders every half-term (about six weeks), or at another natural break. Display the rota where students can read it, and let it decide whose turn comes next. Across the year, aim for every student to hold at least one job that matters.
5. Use a free job to bring a drifting student back. When a job comes free, consider the student who is going cold on you or on the class. Offer them the job in the same matter-of-fact way you would offer it to anyone else.
   Marcus, I need a demonstration assistant until the break and I'd like it to be you. Tuesdays, two minutes early, and we set up together.
   A real job gives that student a reason to be in the room, and a brief daily exchange with you that has nothing to do with behaviour.
6. Keep the job real once it runs. Thank the work specifically: name the student and what the job added (see Precise Praise). As a job holder proves reliable, add real decisions to the job: let the display curator choose which work goes up. If a job slips, re-teach it as you would any slipped routine.

How you’ll know it’s working

• Time the start of the lesson: books and equipment are out within about two minutes, without any instruction from you.
• The jobs run unprompted. The board is cleared, the homework tray is filled and the register has gone to the office before you would have asked.
• The rota shows every name over the course of a term, including students you would once have hesitated to trust with a job.
• The student you appointed deliberately arrives on time on job days, and most lessons now begin with a word between you about the job rather than with a correction.

Weigh it up

Why it’s worth it

• Minutes come back every lesson. Handing out, collecting in and setting up run alongside the register instead of consuming the start and end of the lesson.
• Every student gets a spell of being needed. For some students, a job is the first thing school has ever needed from them, and they notice.
• It gives you a warm, reliable point of contact with a hard-to-reach student: a few seconds about the job in most lessons, with no correction in it.
• The room gets looked after. Students tend to maintain systems they help to run, so lost equipment, mess and "there's no glue" moments become rarer.
• It feeds other techniques cheaply. Jobs generate true, specific things to praise and to mention in a positive phone call home, and the routine keeps running for a cover teacher when you are away.

The costs

• The set-up takes real teaching time. Each job needs modelling, watching and re-teaching at every rotation, several times a year.
• Jobs are slower at first than doing the task yourself, and the gap is public. You have to let a 9-year-old take four minutes over a two-minute task while they learn.
• The rota is administration that cannot quietly slip. A forgotten rotation, or a class in which only the sensible students ever hold a job, reads as favouritism within weeks.