How should every teacher feel?

Viv Grant (Integrity Coaching @Vivgrant) posted this on Twitter earlier today. This is what every pupil should want from their teacher. I agree, this is what teaching is all about.

But...

Do not all of these apply to the teachers themselves? This is surely a model for great school leadership.

Short post I know, but I don't think I need to say any more at the minute.

Looking after leaders (including you)

This is one of those cross-over pieces from my other blog on leadership. It is about leadership but its main theme is well-being of school leaders. I hope you find it useful. Please click HERE for the article.

It's alright to be afraid

Be honest, do you ever get that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach as you travel to school, as you enter the building, as you enter your office or classroom, as you turn on your computer, when the phone rings or as pupils come through the door? Those who don't find something else to read, those who do keep going. It does not matter whether you are training to be a teacher or an experienced head, this applies to you. This is about personal courage, about accepting  and overcoming demons, and finding ways to improve your quality of life and in so doing becoming a more content teacher.

To begin with you need to realise you are not on your own, whether you are a trainee teacher or a headteacher it is likely that we have all experienced this at sometime in our career and that at this moment in time several of your colleagues share your experiences. Our profession is laden with expectations about conduct and professionalism, about leaving emotions at the school gate, about it being a "vocation", but all of these ignores one crucial point, we are sentient, emotional humans who will react to and reflect our experiences. We are all different and importantly have different perceptions (see an earlier article on 2+2=5!) of events and so our reactions are also unique. Events that cause fear in one person will not cause fear in another but it does not make it anymore real.

Our outward persona, which we maintain for our pupils and more often than not our own self-esteem, will rarely reflect inner turmoil and so we can all be forgiven for not knowing that someone else is going through difficulties. However this is the danger, internalising our fears will only make them worse and so we have to find ways of making fears and stresses manageable. Now I could write a book on the issue but here I only ever write a few hundred words, so I will keep it brief. Central to dealing with our fears is emotional literacy. Clause Steiner coined the term "Emotional Literacy" in 1997 and he breaks the idea down into 5 parts:

1. Knowing your feelings.
2. Having a sense of empathy.
3. Learning to manage our emotions.
4. Repairing emotional problems.
5. Putting it all together: emotional interactivity.

Many of the suggestions I am about to make are based on these 5 parts. Please note that these are simply my opinions and that I do not have an answer for how to make fears go away, all I can do is share with you some ideas I have, some of the coping strategies I have used over the years when I have experienced these demons.

1. Sharing. Do you have a trusted friend or colleague, someone who is not judgemental, someone who will listen? I know it is almost statin the bleeding obvious but the cathartic act of verbalising your fears is incredibly important. It helps you unburden yourself and importantly forces you to "name" your fears. You need to know what it is you are afraid of before you stand any chance of dealing with it.
2. Whether you've shared them with someone else or not, naming your fears is very important. You can have the conversation with yourself; the other participant in the dialogue is paper. Write down your fears, write down everything and see if they have a common root or whether they are all different. Either way it takes courage to do this but will help you in coming to terms with things that cause you distress.
3. Taking a break. At school you need down time, you need time to take stock and press a personal reset button. By all means go to the staffroom, have lunch with your colleagues, but you need to make for yourself. You need time on your own to take a breath and to be yourself (even if it means having a cry or a shout!); it is time for you to press the reset button.
4. Give yourself time. Whenever possible I like to walk to school, it gives me time to think through my issues, both before the school day starts and once it has finished. Clearly not everyone can walk to work but if you can find an equivalent activity it will help. It also means that by the time you get home you have already dealt with some issues and you don't transfer them to your partner, pet or whoever.
5. Work-life balance. This is often the hardest due to the pressures and demands of work, but if you can leave work behind then many of the fear triggers will stay there as well. Here are a few things I do (but I realise these are personal and impractical for many). I only work at work, if I need to do work at the weekend I do it in the office; home has become a sanctuary (when my children were young this was impossible but now it has become practical. I don't do work emails at home; emails are often the messengers of doom and I don't want doom in my personal sanctuary! In my house talk of school is banned after a certain time; that is unless I need an outburst. This returns normality to life.


Teaching is hard, leadership is hard, and both require tremendous courage. But remember you are not alone.

Down with management speak, the contentment revolution starts here!

On a recent holiday I was sat on the hotel balcony mulling over various matters and my wife asked me what was wrong. I explained that "I've got a problem". Without hesitation, but with tongue firmly in cheek she replied "A problem should be seen as an opportunity". Well this was like a red rag to a bull, and in a stream of consciousness and "robust" language I issued forth with a rant against this sort of nonsense.This is that rant.

My initial problem with her response was very simple, a problem is a problem, if it had been an opportunity I am sure that I would have said "I've got an opportunity". I am reasonable bright and I know the difference between the two, one is positive and one is negative. Maybe I'm being negative but I see a flat tyre as a problem, a nuisance, an inconvenience, rather than an opportunity to spend my time getting grubby and frustrated.

I have heard this trotted out on many occasions, so-called motivational speakers telling me (not discussing and debating, just telling) about opportunistic problems, but this is a case of the Emperor's new clothes, it isn't there. This is an opportunity to work harder and sort out something that someone else has done to make your life more challenging. In reality these management aphorisms have created their own mythology, a mythology which at its heart is designed to pile pressure on people, make workers compare themselves to each other, and to apply pressure to fit the mould of being an effective manager. Failure to turn a problem into an opportunity is seen as a failure.

I am not completely dismissive of all of this, there must be some wisdom here. Stephen Covey's "7 Habits..." states as Habit 7 that we should "sharpen the saw", in other words look after ourselves. But even this is still business focused, look after ourselves to make us more effective rather than for the sake of personal happiness. Unfortunately most of these maxims seem to be regurgitated junk or manifesto statements of sociopaths trying to squeeze the last drops of juice out of the orange by playing on feelings of guilt and inadequacy.

Behind the language is an implicit relationship between employer and employee. Business success and personal economic prosperity are at the heart of a majority of the books which populate the management bookshelves in airport bookshops (just an aside why are there 10 times more of these books than science or 100 times more than poetry?). I must admit that during my leadership career I have read many of these books, both general business management and specific educational management. My worry is that most of these books seem to ignore the humanity of colleagues, they are about the individual and just see others as cogs in a machine, cogs that either drive you or cogs that you drive. These cogs are generally not seen as a mutually beneficial machine, cogs are metallic and hard, impersonal and unemotional, but the reality of organisations is that the cogs are organic, these cogs are emotional, vulnerable and unique. Relationships are seen through an outcome-focused lens, a lens that equates professional success with output and profit. I would question if such a belief is sustainable and certainly whether everyone comes out on top.

This may sound like a socialist take on leadership, and may be it is, though for me emotions are as important as economics. At the beginning of the Bruce Springsteen's live video of Born to Run he says "remember in the end nobody wins unless everybody wins". When I first heard this as an idealistic teenager it stirred me, but now as a gnarled middle-aged man I still see it as a plausible maxim for ethically sound organisations, and especially schools. [A small aside I suspect staff at my previous school feared that it would be renamed Bruce Springsteen School].

Most schools are not profit making machines (even most private schools just break even and are charitable concerns) so why would we be wanting to use the language and philosophies of business where the raison d'etre is rarely the betterment of the whole community? Whilst schools operate within tight budgets, have expensive outgoings and often struggle to get to the end of the year, they are not businesses is the sense that the local supermarket is. I therefore feel that we need to be a little sceptical about adopting the philosophies of profit-making organisations where success is often judged in terms of profits and dividends. Ultimately what I am calling for (and also actively promoting) is a different metric of success. Can we see beyond the power, ego, personal gratification and wealth that apparently makes us "happy"? Can we aspire to be content? Can we make our ambition to achieve contentment? That contentment may be achieving good exam results with your classes, seeing low ability children make excellent progress or seeing a colleague thrive, none of which will make you richer. Could we have a simple ambition, to be content? Could school leadership set its main target to achieve whole school contentment?

We need to do something, teachers are leaving the profession in droves, there is a crisis in leadership and stress is going through the roof. Let's be brave, let's be content.

World Mental Health Day 10 October

Monday 10 October is World Mental Health Day. At the Mental Health First Aid website there are lots of very useful resources that can be used. Please click HERE to see what is available.

Leaving it all at the school gate

Back when I started teaching I received all sorts of warnings about professional conduct and school expectations. I remember once being told that we should, as professionals, leave our personal life at the school gates. Fair enough I thought I shouldn't be talking to your pupils about my marriage or how the decorating is going, but what was actually meant is that I should also leave by worries at the school gate and not let them interfere with school life.

Think of all the difficult and frankly bad things that happen in our lives, buying houses, illness, bereavement, relationships, divorce, money problems, children and so on. Who hasn't experienced at least a few of these? Inevitably they impact on our emotions and that determines our moods, how we see ourselves, how we think others see us, how we see others and how we see our lives. Essentially our experiences shape our entire emotional being and yet some people believe we should be able to separate these off for 8 or 9 hours a day. Quite honestly it is ridiculous to tell anyone to leave their troubles at the gate.

The key to this is about being emotionally self-aware, being honest with yourself and "giving a name" to these factors that shape your emotions. If you are conscious of your emotions, their causes and their impact on you, you do stand a better chance of being able to manage them rather than letting them control you. We all have bad days and I know I do not always practice what I preach though I like to think I'm getting better. Nevertheless none of us want our emotions to impact on a negative way on our pupils and our other school work.

I have various ways of dealing with bad days and bad spells in life. This may seem trivial but I am fortunate in being able to walk to work, and that work is neither too far nor too close. In the half an hour there and back I can address most of my personal issues; I am neither at home (which is the root of some problems) nor at school (which may also be the root of further problems) where they manifest themselves. I also have a few trusted colleagues with whom I can be honest. I used to bottle-up my worries and found that they became rather self-destructive. Now I can chat to a couple of people in the morning (or whenever) and it makes me feel a whole lot better.

Leaders have a part to play, not only should they not set unreasonable expectations on staff but they must also care for themselves. The ideal is that colleagues feel comfortable discussing issues with leaders and knowing that they won't be told to pull themselves together, rather that they will receive emotional support. However at a bare minimum they need to know that their emotions are not barred at the perimeter fence.

I mentioned leaders must also care for themselves; leadership can be very lonely and as a headteacher I know this all too well. The higher up you go the lonelier it gets. You have to be more guarded and your circle within the staff inevitably shrinks. Nevertheless you need to find someone. I have been fortunate in that I have always had another senior leader to talk to; my deputy comes into my office every morning and he asks how I am, and that makes such a difference.

Finally the opposite is not certainly untrue. Whilst some schools may expect you to leave negative emotions at the gate no-one expects you to leave being jolly and full of vigour behind when you cross the school threshold! Imagine turning up at school, full of life, on top of the world and then forcing yourself to be miserable just in time for lesson 1.

Bleak House: the impact of the physical environment on teacher well-being

On paper my last teaching post should have been one of the nicest. The school was good, the children were well-behaved and I had all the kit I needed but there were days when I simply hated doing my job. The reason was simple, it was my classroom. As a science teacher I had a lab but my school was a mid-seventies unit-built school and the labs were in the middle of the building. They protruded from the top of the building but they had no windows at eye-level, just at 8 feet off the ground. There were days when I could go into the lab at 8;50 with a blue sky and emerge 2 hours later to find snow on the ground. I felt trapped, the lack of light made me feel constantly miserable and not having anything else to look at except the walls and the pupils was challenging. I can honestly say that this had a significant impact on my well-being and I couldn't wait to swap my lab for an office. The knowledge of my lousy environment created pressure, and this pressure eventually piled up on top of all the other pressures to become stress.

I have also worked in some vile locations where schools felt like they were dumped either in the middle of high-rise estates or on the edge of nowhere. I've worked in some awful buildings with lousy decor, poor lighting, low ceilings and small windows. I was miserable before I went through the door.

On the other hand I spent 4 years working in a school in Cyprus. The panoramic windows at the back of my lab looked up to the Troodos mountains and the front of the school looked down onto the sea. The school was spacious and bright, well-designed and easy to move around; I can't remember a single day when I really didn't want to do the job. There was simply so much light, not from fluorescent tubes but natural light. I was happy, the children were happy! You may say that you're not surprised I was happy, I was in Cyprus, who wouldn't be. There were plenty of things I didn't like about being out there and many of these things were precisely because of where I was, but the school itself did not make me miserable.

I have no doubt that your physical environment is a key factor in causing stress. Schools with pleasant classrooms, plenty of facilities, well furnished and nicely decorated premises, have a positive impact of all of those who work or learn there. I believe that most pupils respond positively to pleasant environments but when their environments are unpleasant they may feel that this is a reflection on their worth as learners. We all know about teaching pupils who feel that schools do not invest in them, it is hard work, and there we have another pressure. Lousy environments rub off on the pupils, who  then react against the environment and make the lives of teachers even harder.

What can you do about it? There will be times when the answer is simply to leave that school. Schools are hard-up and you won't get a rebuild. However you can do some things to help yourself. Simply improving lighting can help, talk to your school leaders about this. Given that light can have such an impact on mood and the feeling of well-being it is important that you share your concerns. Brighten up your classrooms. Without getting into the issue of who puts up displays, have exciting and colourful walls. Also look at classroom layout. As a secondary teacher I was never too imaginative but I have seen some great uses of space in primary classrooms. Be imaginative with layouts (if the room allows it), make the room easier for you to move around (movement may help you feel happier and not trapped), and seek advice.

Almost everything I have written about has been about human interactions, but the physical environment can have an impact on your well-being. Make yourself heard!