Teaching is Traumatic
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 4:23PM Email Article I'm sitting in a café with local colleagues Summer Charlesworth and Malyn Mawby. It's several days after the end of school term for 2011.
And I'm not sure how we got onto it, but I started expounding on my 'teaching is traumatic' theory.
Summer recounts her reaction to this in a blog post, which I will quote at length here:
"When I first heard this statement, I had a physiological reaction. Maybe it was because I was tired, or maybe it struck a real chord as I’ve been working with pre-service and new teachers who I have watched struggle with fatigue and frustration, and I remember this as I feel that I finally found my groove this year. Teaching is Traumatic in many ways, it’s true. Our job is pretty high pressure and high stakes. Trauma reminds me of hospitals, and if you think about it school admin is much like the emergency ward. You can make a list of things to get done, but an incident may happen, or something needs you swiftly, and this means everything stops and all focus is on this unexpected event. It means lots of the creative, and the ‘to do’ work is done late into the night, into the weekends. We are dealing with raw human, heightened emotion every day."
How apt is that? That "school admin is much like the emergency ward"? There is a triage process where you decide which 5 out of the 100 things you wish to achieve will actually get done in your available 15 minutes.
The greatest layer of brutalisation, in my opinion, is the 'classroom management' paradigm, where 1 adult teacher is given 1 alotment of territory with 1 group of students, for 1 year at a time.
Tell me that doesn't sound like the premise for a Big Brother reality TV show?
This scene from Summer Heights High sums it all up for me:
Teachers will recognise it as excruciatingly close to the bone. What does anyone expect will happen? It's the school machine that brutalises teachers and students alike.
Many students emerge from the machine with subtle scarring that is still identifiable decades later. I've noticed it emerges at dinner parties when strangers discover I am a languages teacher. Invariably this triggers a reversion and they recount how they "Made their French teacher cry once." They've not re-processed this event properly since reaching adulthood. All they remember is the moment of triumph where they stuck it to THE MAN (or woman).
It's human nature to kick against confinement.
Teaching is traumatic.
In their first and second years of teaching, teachers settle on coping mechanisms and classroom tactics that somehow WORK to allow them to survive. For some this means repeatedly nagging the kids into submission, reacting to nothing and tolerating very high levels of chaos, as if resigned to a perpetual tug of war over every little detail. Others climb and conquer Mount Classroom Management. Hardly a victory, to my mind, because order was never the litmus test for learning. (See www.anarchyinlearning.com for the counter-example... high disorder + high organic learning, but disorder does not equal chaos).
So teachers find a way to cope. They define their own status quo.
But they earned it at a cost. They survived their first years with tears.
They cry at their desks. They go home and sleep 14 hours Friday evening and don't want to go out all weekend. They get grumpy at their loved ones and then feel like rats. I say they, and I mean me too, although for me, personally, it was a feeling like I had 'lost myself' somewhere in the day. It was all numbness.
Summer's blog post continues as an unfolding story of shifting from survival mode to thrive mode.
Her post deserves a close read to track the dynamics of the shift. Look at her vocabulary. It invokes the language of journey, of community, of connection, of meaning.
I, too, found a path through, assisted greatly by online connections, wonderful, loving colleagues at my school, and a paradigm shift that has only intensified each year I have worked from 'school as a machine' to 'school as a village'.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic and your own journey.
Also, watch this space. I'm working very hard this very moment to put together an online mentoring program for 2012 designed to stare these issues directly in the eye.
I am thinking it will:
- be spaced out over 6 months to allow slow, genuine growth.
- be accessible at multiple, flexible times via videoconferencing, and available worldwide.
- be modularised so people can dip in and out as suits the rhythm of their lives.
- mash up direct advice, and critical thinking, and small-group communities to share a journey together.
- confront all the faultlines we have to navigate, from school politics, to educational philosophy, to inner growth, to workflow and information management.
- aim to nurture a savvy, resilient, leadership-orientated mindset that will stand colleagues in good stead for years to come, across multiple scenarios.
I'll announce the details very soon. It will be a 'SCIL' thing, not something I am doing privately. I wonder if the idea appeals? I'd appreciate your thoughts as always.
Reader Comments (3)
Hi Steve
I am incredibly keen to participate in a mentoring system for teachers /with teachers. Since having to move states 2 years ago I have struggled as a relief teacher with only a small group of colleagues as a support structure. If teaching is traumatic (and I agree with your premise but often in a positive way too) then it is imperative that we access suitable support for that trauma. In the past I was lucky enough to be part of a school community and I felt the availability of support was adequate at that time and met my needs. Now, as a relief teacher, I don't have a school community to call 'home' on any regular basis and I am finding the trauma can sometimes get to critical levels. An online community has enriched my academic studies in 2011 and 2012 could be looking good to find an online community to support my professional needs.
Bonjour Steve :)
Bonne Annee! I think this is a great inititiative. The AIS already offers the "Meaningful Mentoring" program (which I highly recommend - I participated in this as a mentor in 2010), but an online community, particularly for casual teachers is essential. Teaching is indeed a journey which sometimes feels like you're a lone backpacker out in the wilderness, at times like a hungry comsumer in a large, fast city, and at times like a weary but happy traveller returning home to our village/commumity of birth. It is a journey which takes us not only through different classroom dynamics but also staffrooms - and new responsibilities, as we accept new roles. One thing's for sure - we never stop learning!
Excellent post - love the video clip you used to illustrate - unfortunately so true!
Two things you might be interested in:
1. Microsoft developed a free educator Peer Coaching program that has had proven success in not only providing teachers with support and professional learning & development, but also has a high rate of success in what teachers then successfully apply into the classroom.
This might provide you with some shortcuts when devleoping your own mentor program http://www.microsoft.com/education/ww/leadership/partnerships/pil/capacity/Pages/peer-programs.aspx
2. At PLANE we're adapting this Peer Coaching program to be available online as one of our offerings, launching mid-year. We've already trained a number of HATs to be peer coaches, some of whom are now going to also take the next step of training to teach others to be Peer Coaches.
If any of your readers are interested in becoming a Peer Coach we can provide training. Email helpbuildplane @ plane.edu.au, with something in the subject line about wanting to become a Peer Coach.
If any of your NSW readers would like to have a Peer Coach help them, we'll be able to help them once we launch later in the year - until then they could follow our blog / twitter @planejourney / or email us to register their interest so we can keep them in the loop. (Initially PLANE is a NSW pilot)
In addition to Peer Coaching, PLANE will have online and virtual environments for teachers to network, collaborate, share resources, undertake professional learning & development, maintain their digital portfolios, with integration into Moodle and accreditation bodies.
Funded under the Digital Education Revolution, this will be free to Australian educators across all sectors.
Stephen, when you do get your own mentoring scheme up, please let us know so we can promote it to our members and network. The more support options there are for teachers, the better :)