Unfamiliar Territory – To Do The Most Good In Schools, You Have To Teach Less
To achieve more in your teaching career, sometimes you need to explore the idea of getting away from the classroom, concludes a reluctant Tom Starkey…
- by Tom Starkey
Management has always seemed like another country to me – an exotic one with extremely changeable weather.
It has its own language and customs that I’ve never been able to properly translate, no matter how hard I stare at the guidebook or wildly gesticulate. This may very well be why I’ve never held a management position – well, either that or the ‘Lack of anything vaguely resembling ambition, drive, or a shirt free from coffee spillage’, according to my last appraisal…
Status trumps ideas
Career progression in schools is a strange beast. In the majority of cases, if you want to go up that ladder you have to leave teaching behind to some extent. It’s a trade-off that’s ultimately always left me cold. For all its faults (usually 30-odd uniform-wearing ones – be-dum, tish! – kidding, it’s normally nearer 10), the classroom when I’m teaching is where I feel most comfortable.
Leaving it for more admin and meetings would make me miserable as sin – but then again, maybe comfort isn’t everything. I might wield absolute power within my kingdom like some petty dictator – but the kingdom I rule is very, very, small.
Yes, you can shape, mould and knead the lives of the young people in front of you, which is a noble endeavour by anyone’s standards. But there’s also wider world out there; beyond the borders of the classroom, chalkface, voices often get lost.
Schools are hierarchical institutions where one’s position within the structure will often trump the value of an idea. Unless your school takes specific steps to ensure staff have opportunities to input ideas that will be considered and actioned if they’re of benefit (in which case, hold onto that place with both hands, as they’re rarer than a clean mug come break time) then any bright schemes you might have for making things better will probably meet with abject failure.
To achieve maximum effect, you have to try to attain a higher level within the structure – thereby leaving behind the things that may be what makes the job special to you…
A path of constriction
It’s a tough, extremely daft choice. A system set up in such a way that to do the most good in teaching you have to teach less? Slow hand-clap, everyone.
Couple this with a lack of alternative progression options that would other allow you to stay in the classroom, and what you’ve got is a path to career advancement with the limits of a straitjacket. Something I’ve come to realise is that if you want to effect change that reaches further, you’d best get measured up for something slinky with really long sleeves and brass buckles.
It’s not ideal. In many ways, it’s a path of constriction that relies on an outmoded structure. I’d prefer to see valid and valued alternative routes to progression that would imbue teachers with equivalent status to management (and the money would be good, too). I’d prefer it if those who decide to stay in the classroom weren’t seen as being lacking in something. However, I suspect that this would take a culture-shift of fairly gigantic proportions, and I don’t think we’re going to see something like that any time soon.
Yet while I’ve always been wary at the prospect of moving out of the classroom, perhaps I’ve got it wrong. I don’t want to leave the kids behind to enter a strange world of action plans, minutes and walking purposefully down corridors – but then if I don’t, I might not ever be able to do anything about the wider problems I see in front of me. Is that the way it should be? No, I don’t think it is. But that’s the reality.
Perhaps I can study the guidebook a little more closely, try to figure out what the natives are doing with those spreadsheets on their iPads. And perhaps I could do with getting a new shirt.
Thanks for reading.
Tom Starkey is a teacher in an FE college in the north of England; he blogs at stackofmarking.wordpress.com and tweets as @tstarkey1212
