Treat your teacher - towards a culture of support

Ten years ago, when I started teaching English, my main priority was the educational well-being of my students. As a teacher, I wanted my students to learn something new and have fun while doing so in an environment where it was okay to make mistakes. 

When I transitioned into teacher training, I found that my goals had not fundamentally changed - I aimed to encourage my teachers to learn something new in a fun and meaningful way. This time around, it was even more of a challenge, because, as we all know, teachers make the worst students, and it was (and still sometimes is) hard to unlearn habits picked up in a teacher-centred, hierarchically organised classroom.

When teachers became my students, I soon realised that it was relatively easy to instill in them a communicative, positive learning culture, but it was more difficult to impress the importance of a teaching culture. For many, there is no difference between the two, but the distinction I make is linked to the two spaces where we operate as teachers.

A culture of learning is fostered in the classroom. A culture of teaching is fostered in the staffroom. 

Most teachers are highly motivated and successful

I challenge the teacher trainers reading this to think back to the courses they have run - they are bound to have come across a brilliant teacher in the classroom, but one who was less than stellar outside the classroom, when they had to interact with their peers.

My belief is that most of us are highly motivated and successful in our lessons, because we care about our students, because we see it as our job to cater to the needs and varying motivations of our students. Also, the sense of achievement and recognition we get from students fuels our positivity and engagement with our work. 

But is that always the case outside of the classroom?

We show kindness on a daily basis - we are also entitled to receiving kindness

We are entitled to support - and that support need not end after our initial training / mentoring programme. At work, interactions outside the classroom happen in the staffroom - this is the place where we spend most of our non-teaching time, but still on the clock time.

However, the staffroom should not be just a tranzit area, a mere stopover from one class to the next. Instead, it should be a safe place, where teachers can relax, unwind, learn and develop. A staffroom should be the place where teachers can ask for and receive help and advice, kindness and support. Professional development may not start in the staffroom, but it routinely takes place there.

If the staffroom is then the physical manifestation of a culture of support, then the key tenets of such a culture would be pleasure, engagement and meaning.

Quit your job tomorrow and you’d miss more than just your students

An informal survey I conducted among my network of teachers and teacher trainers revealed that what teachers value most about their jobs are the opportunity to help different people, the sense of achievement they feel when their students have a breakthrough, the AHA moments that occur when we’re quick to think on our feet and troubleshoot and address an emergent need and last, but not least their colleagues.

This shows me that we are caring, empathetic creatures who derive pleasure and meaning from helping others succeed. As teachers, we have dedicated our careers to engaging others with new ideas and content, but we seldom stop to think about ways we can engage each other.

The need for quick fixes

Teachers want tools, not concepts - after all, we are practitioners, not theoreticians. But there are no quick fixes to developing a culture of support. A staffroom culture - like any other workplace culture - is a ‘habitual way of interacting to achieve a specific outcome’ [Palmer & Whybrow, 2019:52]. That means that we must develop habits and routines that promote engagement. 

Positive working relations are not difficult to kickstart - the way we build rapport with our students is no different than the way we build rapport with our peers. A kind smile, eye contact and the occasional sugary treat can go a long way. Positive interactions create opportunities for recognition, both horizontally (among peers) and vertically (from managers). A sustained practice of recognising efforts, breakthroughs (be they small or large), activities that yielded results, attitudes that contributed to keeping up morale etc. leads to an increase in self-efficacy. Once we have the confidence to try out new things and decide on a path of professional development, it is easier to be more proactive, which in turn contributes to creating positive working relations and spaces, thus closing the circle and initiating another cycle.

Sharing is caring

Culture is about sharing what we’ve learnt and experienced. This can be done at different levels of interaction. In preparation for a class, take some time to write down a list of the skills you use in your job and the character strengths that you have developed. You can share that with your students as a model for a task they need to go through and / or you can share it with a colleague in the staffroom as the first step to identifying and implementing suggestions for positive change and personal  and professional development. Set a meeting with your manager and discuss how the list of skills and strengths can be used to initiate a mini-project in your school in order to promote proactiveness. You can involve students and other teachers - a culture of support thrives in a community.

It’s all a game of TAG

If you’ve made it to the end of this article, chances are some ideas have been sparked or at least, some concepts considered. So, treat yourself and your teachers and:

Tell a colleague what you’ve learnt, liked or found surprising.

Ask each other a thoughtful question about this new idea.

Give and implement a positive suggestion.

The courage to be proactive and foster a culture of support starts here.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading

?Palmer, S. & Whybrow, A. (2019), Handbook of Coaching Psychology, Routledge

?Wisniewska, I. (2010), Learning One to One, CUP

?Foord, D. (2009), The Developing Teacher, Delta Publishing