Teacher teams

In the easiest case a teacher team is made of two teachers teaching each one group of students at the same time. Teacher teams are required, for instance, in PE lessons where students of a class are divided into a male and a female group. Each group requires its own teacher, and both teachers must always be scheduled at the same time. Both teachers must always be scheduled together for the lesson concerned.

As a general rule, it is desirable to keep the number of teacher teams as small as possible and to ensure that each teacher is only part of a teacher team if absolutely necessary (see the example at the end of this chapter).

To help you organise your teacher teams, Untis provides a 'Teacher team' list where you can view all teacher teams at a glance.

Access the list via one of the two following options:

1.Go to the 'Scheduling' tab, click on 'Reports | Teachers | Teacher teams'.

2.Open the 'Teachers | Master data' window, click on <Print> or <Print preview> on the quick access toolbar and select the type of list: 'Teacher teams'.

The following figure shows what such a list could look like.

The printout shows:

1        The total number of different teams. The general rule is: the fewer, the better.

2        The lessons (including details) in which a team is involved. The general rule is: the more, the better.

3        The time requests entered for the individual teachers in the team. If a number of different time requests need to be taken into consideration, the timetable quality will deteriorate as a result since a teacher team can only be scheduled when all the teachers of the team are available.

In the example above, the PE teachers Rub ('Rubens') and Arist ('Aristotle') form teacher team no. 1.

Let us assume that you have another teacher team (e.g. team no. 4 comprising teachers Rubens and Hugo) scheduled to teach Design. Each time, team 4 is scheduled, team 1 would be blocked since teacher Rubens belongs to both of them.

In this case you need to decide if teacher team 4 is necessary at all (since there already is a teacher team for Design, i.e. team 2). You could also find out if Ruben’s team colleague Arist is qualified to teach Design, as well. If so, the Design lesson could also be taught by team 1. In any case, one teacher team would be eliminated, lending a greater flexibility to the optimisation tool.

As mentioned earlier, the CCC analysis is a perfect tool for identifying such problematic compositions (see the chapter ' CCC analysis ').

Time requests and teacher teams

Time requests are another problematic issue when dealing with teacher teams. In an ideal case, the individual time requests and especially the blocked periods for teachers in a teacher team should overlap as much as possible.

The following figure shows a single teacher team. Please note the blocked periods (time requests '-3').

As a result of various time requests, team teachers are blocked on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday. Let us assume that this teacher team is scheduled for a lesson with three single periods per week. Two of the three periods could be scheduled on Thursday and Friday, but the third period could only be scheduled by violating the blocked period ( time request '-3') of a teacher (something Untis will never do) or by violating the condition that the subject should take place no more than once a day (depending on your weighting settings , Untis may violate this rule; please see the chapter ' Weighting').