How I didn't meet expectations...and it all worked out fine
A new career in primary teaching meant also using new skills that I didn't know I had.
When I set out to be a primary teacher late in life, I had an expectation or self-image of myself in the classroom. I would be a firm but fair teacher, committed to rigour, discipline, learning and perhaps a bit distant from the children. I wasn’t in school to be their friend but to teach them what they needed to know. Unlike some of my peers, I didn’t really find children “cute” but I was convinced that I could make a difference to them.
Looking back at the end of two years, I realised that I was a very different teacher to how I imagined myself at the start of the journey. The things I thought I would be good at were often a real struggle whereas the area I thought I would struggle (relationships with small children) turned out to be an unexpected strength. In the day to day grind of teaching, it’s easy to see what is going wrong – that lesson where the children didn’t get the concept at all, the times when they wouldn’t listen or brought their arguments and fights from the playground back into class. It’s a lot harder to see what you are doing well and I only noticed a real positive about my teaching once I started getting comments from parents like:
“Thank you for everything you have done for [X] this year. You have transformed his attitude to school.”
“…and I would also like to say how wonderfully kind, caring and supportive Mr Goodrich has been to [Y] this school year. He’s always so positive and encouraging and I know it has helped her to feel happy, comfortable and able to come to school every day despite the big changes at home.” (This one was sent to the headteacher which is my top tip for parents if you really want to get a teacher on your side!).
“…you’ve got her through her fears of coming to school.”
In my second year, the kids also started bombarding me with homemade cards usually proclaiming that I was the “best teacher ever”. Although 8 and 9 year olds are not the best judge of such things, it was a lot nicer than being harangued for my failings. So, what was I doing right? With apologies to Tony Blair, I can offer the three following priorities.
1. Be positive.
2. Be positive.
3. Be positive.
However, to elaborate, I think there were three different aspects to my positivity in the classroom.
Positive about the child
There can’t be anything more dispiriting than hearing criticism after you have tried your best and yet still done badly. I experienced this personally during teacher training when one of my mentors seemed to always pick out the many ways in which I had failed during my attempts to teach the class. It wasn’t an experience I was used to from school or university and I realised that it did absolutely nothing to improve my teaching. It is simply impossible to successfully respond successfully when you are hit with a wave of criticism. Not only does the emotion make it difficult to process but if you have a list of 10 things you have done wrong, it’s a clear example of the cognitive overload that my university course was warning that we had to avoide. If that is true for a professionally successful middle-aged man, how much more so must it be for a child?
So, although this experience was terrible for improving my classroom teaching, it did give me a valuable personal experience about getting the best out of a child. I always tried to be positive about the child in front of me, especially if they were often hearing negative comments from others around them. Of course, you have to help them improve their work but that comes much more easily if they are feeling better about themselves.
Positive framing of correction
In my second year, my school adopted the Walkthrus book as a core part of our CPD. We would pick a particular Walkthru and try to implement it in our teaching. On one occasion, I picked “positive framing” and it was both incredibly difficult to do and transformative for my teaching. The basic idea is to reframe negative phrases into a positive expectation (so “stop talking” becomes “I need voices away”). If you find it easy to do this consistently, then I take my hat off to you because for me it was a constant struggle to use positive language when we are so conditioned to give instruction on what not to do. However, trying constantly made me so much aware of how easy it was to slide back into negative language. However, frequent use of positive language really improved the atmosphere in the classroom.
Positive attitude to learning
This one came a bit more easily to me because I genuinely like to learn new things. I remember reading early in my teaching career that saying something was “boring” or “just something we had to get through” was a sure-fire way for your lesson to go badly. So, no matter how I was feeling about what I was feeling about the lesson, I tried my best to be upbeat (even if teaching some obscure piece of grammar that is inexplicably required in Year 4).
It’s important to be positive about the process too. In my second year, my class seemed to contain a lot of children who would give up / have a meltdown when they hit difficulties (or maybe I was just more aware of the problem). So, I found myself constantly talking about struggle, hard work and embracing difficulty and failure. I was helped here by my own children who were a rich source of anecdotes from their own time in primary school.
Final thoughts
If you are starting your ECT journey, I wish you well. If you are like me, you will be constantly surprised by what you can’t do well but be prepared to be surprised by what you can do as well.
One final tip for primary school teachers– really try to listen and resolve problems when a child comes to you with an issue or you have a group who have fallen out. For most of the children in your class, you will quickly become their most trusted adult in the school and so you must try your best to help even if you would rather get on with teaching. As Maya Angelou probably didn’t say “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It might be a fake quote but it rings true based on my experience.