Article from The Guardian
Teaching is a naturally stressful profession but with colleague support you can learn to manage it creatively and positively
Day in, day out... we all know teaching is a naturally stressful profession - but with a little bit of help from your colleagues you can learn to manage it creatively and positively. Photograph: www.alamy.com
We chose our profession. It is a naturally stressful profession. The law requires that children (25 or more) spend five or six periods a day (in small rooms); five days a week, three terms a year. Teachers have to lead, guide, encourage, motivate, manage, discipline, enable and support their students every hour of every day. This is no mean feat. Most of us do it with goodwill, remarkable patience and – often – good humour.
We do this with the daily reality that some of our students have significant learning and behaviour disorders (such as ADSD, ASD and ODD). Some of our students come from homes where there is "first world poverty": long-term unemployment, substance abuse, inadequate diet (at the most basic nutritional level), values about race, religion, sexism, homophobia significantly at odds with a pluralist society. In some families there is significant family dysfunction correlated with these factors. Why wouldn't our profession be naturally stressful?
In my book Managing Teacher Stress I've taken a lesser known quote from the famous soliloquy of Hamlet ("To be or not to be ...") "The thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to ..." I've suggested that this is apposite to a teacher's daily, incredibly busy and demanding role... "a thousand natural shocks..."
Managing what is naturally stressful in our profession does not mean the absence of tension but our ability to collegially cope with, and support one another in that naturally stressful environment.
Learning to creatively live with that natural tension and stress is essential; it is the fundamental message of my book Managing Teacher Stress.
This book arose directly out of my work with very challenging schools in Australia and the UK. In Australia – however – we don't use terms like "schools in serious weaknesses", or "schools needing special measures". We also don't have an OFSTED.
Each year I work with several challenging schools as a mentor-teacher; working directly in challenging classes in a team-teaching mentoring role.
This form of mentoring is elective, supportive, classroom-based and seeks to encourage and support colleagues struggling with very challenging students or whole classes (or, more commonly, challenging "cohorts" of students within a class).
Many teachers know how stressful managing a very challenging class can be; when each lesson is ruminated on with concern, anxiety and even (at times) with dread!
The kind of mentoring my colleagues and I are involved in is directed at offering (or inviting) a colleague to work with a mentor directly in their challenging class(es).
Using our (rare) "free" periods we link up with colleagues to work directly with them in the classroom context where they are experiencing more than normal stress.
The mentor-colleague teaches alongside their "mentee" colleague to both observe, and relaxedly model, the sort of behaviour leadership they will discuss later – over coffee.
It is this existential sharing; this teaching with them (in their most challenging classes) that enables the sort of collegial trust that can utilise non-judgemental professional self-reflection. This is the opposite of appraisal.
This kind of mentoring, though labour intensive, builds collegial trust and often enables that goodwill, and confidence, essential in building a cohesive relation and learning environment with our students. Where a teacher is struggling with a particularly challenging student such mentoring support can often enable a positive repairing and rebuilding. This is discussed (at length) in the book.
Many books on stress emphasise personal responses such as relaxation activities (such as meditation or yoga); exercise; diet etc. While these are (obviously) important where we work, day after day, and how we do our work is also crucial to what kind (and level) of stress we experience and how we cope and manage that stress.
Where we work has a significant impact on our stress; the nature, extent and utility of colleague support has a crucial impact and effect on how we cope day-to-day (particularly in challenging schools). The research on colleague support bears this truth out over and over again (see my book I Get By With a Little Help: Colleague Support in Schools).
Building a supportive, collegial culture means we have to listen to our shared, our common, needs at the local school level. Senior staff who enable the genuine sharing of espoused needs (rather than assumed needs) also have a more responsive, connected and engaged staff.
In the book, I've sought to outline how a school leadership can build and maintain a supportive collegial culture to mitigate and manage our natural stress in areas such as classroom discipline; challenging classes; students with challenging behaviours (including diagnosed, or symptomatic, behaviour disorders); time and workload pressures and supporting struggling and (at times) reluctant teachers.
I have tried, also, to address the challenging experience of those who give (often unstintingly) support to colleagues in stress.
Three chapters are devoted to classroom discipline, challenging classes and individually challenging students. A full chapter is devoted to a mentoring model to support positive behaviour leadership in classroom (and non-classroom) settings.
The particularly disturbing issue of teacher bullying is also addressed. Some students (in our schools) use calculated, intentional, purposeful behaviours to intimidate, manipulate and "control" group behaviour towards some teachers. This is bullying. It is always wrong. No teacher should have to put up with the psychological harassment of some students in some of our schools, (most bullying is psychological).
Senior staff need to be alert to, and aware of, such behaviours in their schools and support colleagues who experience such behaviour. Teachers who may be more vulnerable to the power-seeking behaviour of some students should never be subsequently blamed under labels of "poor discipline" or "poor teaching". Bullying (of any kind) is always wrong and must be confronted in an appropriately restorative way. This issue is also addressed (at some length) in the book.
In a collegially supportive school teachers feel, and know, that when they ask for support when stress becomes wearing (particularly with challenging student behaviour) then it will be given without implied or open censure.
We all need support in our teaching and behaviour leadership (even lesson planning at times), our behaviour management and discipline, our follow-up and follow-through with our most demanding and most challenging students.
We need to be able to ask for such support without feeling that we are inadequate, ineffective or (worse) incompetent.
Most of us can find some moral support amongst our colleagues (and we always need that), we also need to build and maintain supportive colleague opportunities, structures, processes that can be depended upon for support. Colleague support cannot be left to goodwill alone or to chance.
The book is replete with case studies that address issues as diverse as bullying of teachers, anger and anxiety management, how to manage challenging behaviour in classrooms and the challenge of dealing with demanding and angry parents. The central message, though, is how colleague support enables us to manage positively and creatively with "the thousand shocks...".
In those schools where I noted a positive sense of consciously addressing the need for colleague support I noted three fundamental dimensions where such support had enhanced a positive colleague consciousness: moral support, professional support and structural support. What enables any aspect of colleague support is, of course, our shared humanity.
• Bill Rogers is an international guru on educational behaviour - he is based in Australia but spends at least three months of the year in the UK working with schools and teachers at workshops and seminars. Bill is Fellow of the Australian College of Education, Honorary Life Fellow of All Saints and Trinity College, Leeds University and Honorary Fellow, Melbourne University Graduate School of Education
Bill Rogers books, The Essential Guide to Managing Teacher Stress and You Know the Fair Rule are available through Pearson Books with a special discount for our readers - simply click on here to find out more.
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