Just a teacher.
I have been pondering what that phrase really means recently.
I briefly talked about how I feel being ‘just a teacher’ isn’t valued in education in the same way as ‘being a leader’ is, in my blog post for @MenTeachPrimary (Expectations of male primary school teachers) , but I thought I’d explore it a bit more here.
I have spent the last 7 years trying to be ‘just a teacher;’ after I left my Headship I needed a break from leadership and wanted to get back to the part of the job I love the most: teaching.
The trouble is, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as ‘just a teacher.’
To say ‘just a teacher’ devalues what teaching is all about and misses so much of what teachers do. Schools need teachers that are passionate about teaching and learning above everything else; the most crucial element of a successful school is its teachers.
One of the things I have found frustrating since I returned to teaching is that the focus for cpd has been mainly on developing leadership. This may well be different in other schools and other trusts but this is the experience I have had. I must add that my school and Academy Trust are both fantastic and they do a brilliant job in supporting staff, so I don’t want to sound like I am criticising them. And to be completely fair, there is CPD on offer to develop teaching-it just tends to be focussed at early career teachers.
There is a gap in the market for CPD for experienced teachers in my establishment. I have been teaching for 20 years, and I am confident in my ability but I know there is always more to learn, there are always ways I can be better. The majority of CPD that is on offer for people at my stage in their career is leadership focussed, not teaching focussed.
Since the lockdown, I have been engaging with Edutwitter a lot more, and it has been the most positive thing to come out of this dreadful pandemic for me. I have made connections with some great people and had opportunities to reflect and learn in ways that I haven’t had before. The #TinyVoiceTuesday initiative run by @Toriaclaire and #FFBWednesday run by @deputygrocott have been much appreciated and really helpful. I feel that I have more control over my own cpd at the moment; twitter and the lockdown have given me the space to seek out the cpd that I feel will be beneficial to me.
Initiatives like #brewedisolation have been a relevation to me; (thank you @grahamandre and @MrEFinch for this) I had heard of BrewEd before but I hadn’t really engaged with it, I’d never seen anything advertised that was anywhere near me. Similarly, I’d seen people mention teach meets before, and I had always been interested in being involved but had never seen anything in my area. So moving these sort of cpd events online has been brilliant for me. Also, because I have made more connections on Twitter I feel I have the confidence to seek out similar type events in the real world after the lockdown is over. Who knows, I might even be inspired to set up a #BrewEd event myself and seek out like minded teachers who also feel a bit disconnected living in the dim distant reaches of East Anglia.
I’ve digressed a bit, so will come back to my main point: there is no such thing as ‘just a teacher’. Every teacher has their own interests and passions, their own skills and talents, every teacher brings something different to their school. To say ‘just a teacher’ actually sounds a bit derogatory. It suggests that this is someone who turns up for work at 8:30, teaches their classes for the day and goes home at 3:30 (or whatever ridiculous stereotypical image certain sections of society seem to have of teachers). I don’t know anyone who has stayed in teaching for any length of time who views it as just a job. To be a successful teacher you have to love it, if you don’t you won’t survive, the job will destroy you.
We all know teaching can be stressful, it can also be incredibly frustrating at times, and almost every teacher knows the pain of having to jump through hoops and complete pointless tasks that have no positive impact on children’s learning because it is perceived that ‘that is what Ofsted are looking for.’ But we keep coming back, why? Because despite all this, we love the job. We love working with the children and helping them learn and grow and develop as people. That is the payoff of being a teacher, getting to work with those little (and sometimes not so little) people day in, day out. It takes a particular type of person to be a teacher, you need to be resilient and be able to go with the flow and cope with changes as they are being flung at you from all angles; above all you need to care about people, you need to be self sacrificing. Nobody goes into teaching for the money or the fame, and despite what the stereotype might suggest, we don’t really go into it for the holidays either.
Every teacher brings something to the job that may not be recognised as ‘leadership’ and probably goes under the radar. There are the teachers who bring enthusiasm and motivate their colleagues and the children with their positivity, their are the teachers who always give up their time for every PTA event, and are still there at the end of the disco, helping sweep up and stack the chairs so the caretaker doesn’t have to do it all themselves. Every teacher, in every primary school in Britain is also an amatuer social worker, we may have been trained just to teach, but a huge part of our jobs is to look after the well being of the children we teach and to support their families. The examples of what teachers do beyond ‘just teaching’ are endless, and most of these things they wouldn’t even think about, they just do them.
Good leadership is crucial to schools and it is rightly valued, and there is a view that everyone in a school is a leader. Whilst that is certainly true, everyone does lead in one way or another, it does seem that, in some places at least, only certain types of leadership are valued and celebrated. Ofsted have put a huge emphasis on curriculum leadership in their most recent framework, and the responsibility for showing what a school is all about now rests mainly with the curriculum leaders. For secondary schools I think this model is fine as each subject is generally led by specialists, in a primary school, that isn’t always the case. But it does mean that there has been a big push to develop subject leaders recently. (This is perhaps a topic for another blog)
But what about the other type of leaders? The leadership you often see from those ‘just teachers’. The people who quietly get on with their jobs, setting an example for others to follow. The people who always make time to check on others well-being, just because they are a good friend, or the people who help their colleagues, not because they were asked to, but because they could see they needed help. These people and what they bring to a school community often go unnoticed. In my experience, it is those who shout loudest that get noticed.
I think those people who have an ambition to stay in the classroom and continue to be the best teacher they can should be celebrated. None of them are ‘just a teacher’ they all contribute far more to their school community than is ever noticed. People who aren’t interested in climbing the leadership ladder, who aren’t bothered by fancy titles shouldn’t be seen as lacking ambition, it’s just perhaps their ambition is different, perhaps it’s an ambition to be a great teacher above anything else.
I don’t know what the future holds for me, and I honestly don’t know if I will ever want to return to more leadership responsibilities than I already have. Engaging with a wide variety of people on twitter has definitely made me reflect on my priorities. Whatever I decide though, I do know this, teaching is my passion.
I love teaching, and it has brought me many happy moments over the last 20 years (they far outweigh the sad moments). I started this blog by saying I had spent the last 7 years trying to be ‘just a teacher;’ I failed in that ambition, but that is ok-nobody is ‘just a teacher’.