Some teacher testimony
Many teachers have to teach classes where they do not feel in completely relaxed and assured control and are not working at levels 9 and 10 of the scale (see Chapter 1). Many teachers acknowledged that they sometimes had groups where they did not enjoy their teaching. How did teachers respond to that situation? A variety of suggestions emerged
Some of the coping strategies were as much philosophical as practical. One strand of this was remembering that (usually), lots of teachers are finding it difficult to get to level 10:
‘I’d had a bad day and my mentor advised me to just have a walk round the school during a lesson when I wasn’t teaching. I saw other teachers having a tough time and it made me feel a lot better.’
(Trainee)
‘We do have issues with behaviour. We’ve got some lovely, lovely kids, but also, a small minority who are really difficult. I’ve had to develop a thicker skin, to realise that it’s not just me, it’s not personal. You see other, more experienced teachers having trouble and it makes you feel better.’
(NQT at a school ‘with serious weaknesses’)
‘You worry about it and if you are sensible, you talk about the issues, the pupils who are doing particular things to give you a hard time, and this usually helps to get things in proportion. It might not provide a magic answer but you realise that it’s not that big deal, it’s not beyond the parameters of what’ s happening to other teachers…’
(Teacher Educator)
One Advanced Skills Teacher talked of how important it was to try to not take it personally when pupils were aggressive and rude, and how difficult it was to do this:
‘It is incredibly hard not to take it personally, not to think that their awful behaviour should in some way have been prevented or minimised by you. I still take it personally after all these years, even as I tell younger teachers that they mustn’t take it personally. It is crucial for your psychological well being at this school but that doesn’t make it easy to do.’
‘Keeping things in proportion’ was also suggested as a strategy for coping with unsatisfactory pupil behaviour and deficits on the 10 point scale. Remembering that Level 10 is not a natural state of affairs, and that lots of pupils with problems are prone to misbehave and ‘try it on’. In going into the world of classrooms, you are in a sense leaving the adult world with its developed and generally accepted conventions of appropriate behaviour and going into an environment where many of the inhabitants have not yet understood and internalised these conventions, and part of the teacher’s job is to help them to get there:
‘It’s not a nice feeling not being fully in control of a lesson but you’ve got to keep things in perspective. Not giving up, not stopping trying but being philosophical about things not being perfect. Not thinking that life will never be the same because 8R were not fully under your control.’
(Teacher Educator)
‘Some of them (teachers) seemed to have the ability to shrug things off… to think after a bad lesson, a rough ride… tomorrow’s another day, to learn to be resilient. Not to give up, to stop trying, but not to just brood about it in a sort of negative, passive way.’
(Teaching Assistant)
‘Some teachers were just so professional… always calm, polite and composed, even when they were under pressure. Some of them also seemed able to put incidents behind them once they were over… to walk away from it and just move on to the next class.’
(Teaching Assistant)
It might be helpful to think in terms of a sort of ‘Richter Scale’ of pupil atrocity to try and keep things in perspective:
‘I think of the atrocities that happen the world… 9/11, beheadings, terrorism, muggings – or even the stuff that happens in this school, and in the great scale of things the fact that one small child with problems doesn’t want to do the work doesn’t seem such a big deal. I’ve still got to try and do my best to sort out the best possible way forward but it doesn’t seem quite so desperate.’
(NQT working in a difficult school)
From Haydn, T. (2007) Managing pupil behaviour, London, RoutledgeFalmer: 96-9.