Teachers need support from fellow teachers, parents, and administration. Students need to realize that (most) teachers are really just trying to help. Everyone needs to recognize the complexity of the seemingly simple system in which we all work. Schools need to value the tasks teachers perform and make that value obvious to all. Teachers need respect, not lip service.
Peer Support
“I get by with a little help from my friends” is the mantra of all teachers. I’ve heard of schools where very little sharing goes on between department members and that baffles me. How can we improve our work if we aren’t learning from mistakes and victories of others?
The idea that you sit with a colleague and bounce ideas off each other is key to progress in just about any field. Great work is rarely the accomplishment of one person alone. It’s the culmination of many contributions and suggestions and corrections that have lead to anything good I do in the classroom.
To find that core of teachers with whom you share philosophy and understanding is vital to avoiding burn out. Teachers need a network of strong peers in order to improve their craft.
Parental Support
Many reasons exist for how much time a parent has to spend investigating what’s happening in their child’s school life. But the investigation must happen. Parents who take an active interest in their child’s schooling make the academic road much easier to travel, both because of expectations for the student’s academic progress and attitudes toward education.
A parent who has told the child, “No; you cannot play soccer until you raise that D to at least a C” or “You can’t go to prom with attendance like that and there’s no way I am going to pay for your dress if you disrespect your education and educators in this fashion” sets a standard of expectation. Without those standards set at home, the best school and teachers can do is encourage such expectations for roughly a third of that child’s day. That kind of inconsistency in expectations can only result in inconsistency of behavior.
Parental views of education travel down to children in a most profound way. If parents look at education as not worth their time to inquire about, students won’t see it as worth their time to even think about, let alone work on. Teachers need parents who view education as important and communicate that importance to their children.
Administrative Support
Exactly as it sounds, the support administrators provide is what helps teachers achieve so many of the things they need to. Providing professional development opportunities, looking for funding to cover a class project, interfacing between teachers and parents when emotions get in the way of logical decisions, these are all the things administration should be good at taking care of. Their larger goal of keeping the system running should involve consideration of how teachers and students are impacted by system-wide decisions.
There are so many things that administrators can do to give teachers the freedom to remain focused on their classrooms. Testing dates need to be set well in advance, along with accompanying bell schedules. Proctoring assignments need to be clear. Collected data, disaggregated in a way to make it useful in the classroom, should only arrive with a clear explanation of what it means and how it can inform instruction.
One of the things I hate about teaching is that I am so often called upon to leave my room, mentally and physically, and deal with other issues. I’m a teacher and I want to keep my head in the game, worrying only about what’s going on between my four walls. That’s what I’ve been trained to do and it’s what most benefits the students I encounter.
Teachers need administrators who can work to make it easier to stay focused on our classrooms and our students, not policy and forms and signatures and money.
What about you? Are you a teacher? Do you play one on TV? Any ideas to throw out?