What are the most important factors for teacher sustainability?
I'm sure there are many. Student behaviour, planning time, teaching hours, pay, etc. I'd like to look at just two factors that, when thought about simultaneously, provide a rough heuristic for pondering whether an activity or assignment is good for sustainability or not.
The two factors are how much these activities develop the student, and how much they develop the teacher. Crossing these continua we get this:
While we have a mix of activities in our teaching practice, only that which develops both the teacher and the students is sustainable. The rest are not.
It's a rule that I've stuck to since I started teaching. What I do obviously has to develop my students, but it also has to develop me. If an activity doesn't develop me as a teacher, what will my future be like? To be sustainable, a teacher needs to benefit from experience such that the job gets easier. When it gets easier, more time and mind are freed to think about new things, pedagogical changes, curricular innovations, and maybe even new subjects.
When teachers don't develop, the job remains as hectic as it is for early-career teachers. This can lead to burn out. When students aren't developing there is general malaise in the system. Students and management become unhappy, which feeds back to the teacher's experience. This is also unsustainable.
Remember that this is a simple model of just two factors, and by considering other factors we could add more nuance and say 'it depends on X'. The power is in its simplicity for making some decisions. Here's some examples off the top of my head.
For example, if you're marking students' work, make sure there is something in there for you. Just marking classwork doesn't produce robust feedback loops. Students learn little, and so does the teacher.
Instead, marking should be of specifically planned work. A piece of writing that is designed to show us exactly how students see a concept. In turn, it has to be planned for the teacher to not just correct work, but to learn from it—setting up feedback loops for teachers to be able to respond to students by adjusting teaching and curricula. Or maybe using student work to build domain specific frameworks that can help you communicate to students what good thinking looks like.
Another example is how I spent a year teaching by drawing on the whiteboard. It was great for student development and they appreciated my diagrams built through dialogue. But I had no record of those diagrams or lessons. Without them, I had no record of my thinking for the next time, or no way of editing to improve those thoughts.
I improved to a more sustainable and growing position by switching to teaching with a visualiser and taking a picture of my explanations at the end of every lesson (see here).
It can be useful for administrators too. Giving stable assignments to teachers, especially within specialism, is savvy (see The Teaching Gap). Assigning teachers over non-specialist subjects (unless highly experienced and ready for it) is not so sustainable, as teachers struggle to cope.
I've found, that as a 'rule of thumb' it can be useful. When I think about new activities, lessons, work to be marked, I wonder what I can learn from it. What idea can I put to test?
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