What if you don’t want to leave teaching? Maybe you don’t want a promotion or you’re not dreaming about a completely different career. Maybe you still want to be in the classroom, doing the job you trained for and, somewhere underneath all the tiredness and frustration, probably still care deeply about. But you do want things to be different. You’d just like to enjoy it again.
For many teachers, the difficulty isn’t teaching itself. It’s everything that seems to have accumulated around it: the workload and accountability, increasingly challenging pupil behaviour, pressure from senior leaders to take on more responsibility and, for some, the underlying worry that struggling to meet expectations might result in being placed on a support plan.
These are real pressures and when we’ve been experiencing them for a while, it’s easy to reach the conclusion that something must change before we can feel differently.
And sometimes, of course, it does need to change. But perhaps not always.
In The Relationship Handbook, psychologist George Pransky writes about what he calls a ‘change of heart’ – those occasions when our perspective on something shifts, sometimes unexpectedly, even though our circumstances haven’t changed.
I suspect we’ve all experienced this in one way or another. You can spend days worrying about something, turning it over in your mind and becoming increasingly frustrated or discouraged. And then, perhaps while walking the dog, driving home or drinking a cup of coffee, something shifts.
The problem hasn’t disappeared. You just don’t see it in quite the same way.
Pransky suggests these shifts are often preceded by a quieter moment, something he calls a ‘moment of truth’. Our thinking settles enough for us to see beyond the way we’ve been looking at things and something fresh becomes available.
I think there’s something particularly helpful here for teachers who still want to teach but are struggling with their experience of teaching.
When we’re overwhelmed, our world can become very small. The difficult class begins to dominate our thinking. A conversation with a senior leader plays repeatedly in our head. We worry about the next observation, the results, the behaviour incident, the possibility of being judged as not good enough.
From that state of mind, it can all look rather hopeless, so it is useful to remember that our state of mind isn’t fixed. There will be moments when the noise settles. Perhaps a lesson unexpectedly goes brilliantly. A child who usually challenges you engages. A colleague makes you laugh. Or you simply arrive at school one morning feeling lighter for no obvious reason.
Nothing outside you may have changed, but your experience of it has.
This isn’t about pretending that poor behaviour, excessive workload or unreasonable expectations don’t matter. Nor is it about learning to tolerate circumstances that genuinely need addressing. It’s about knowing that a fresh perspective might lead you to set a boundary, ask for support, have a difficult conversation, change schools, or eventually leave teaching.
It might also reconnect you with something that has become temporarily obscured by all the noise. That you still love teaching.
We don’t always need to work quite so hard at answering the question: ‘How can I make myself enjoy teaching again?’ We might simply remember that the way teaching looks and feels today isn’t necessarily the way it will look and feel tomorrow.
Thinking settles. Something new becomes visible. And sometimes, we find ourselves seeing the same world rather differently.
Reference: Pransky, G. (2017) The Relationship Handbook. Pransky & Associates.
Photo Credit: Hannes Knutsson on Unsplash