My reasons for becoming a teacher

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Welcome back everybody to Course 7, Being a Professional.

This is the final lecture in week one, of what it means to be a professional.

And we're going to look at your reasons for becoming a teacher.

And the reasons other people have given for that career choice.

What I would like you to do at some point is to talk to some of

your colleagues about the reasons they became a teacher.

Some people, for example, will say that they've always wanted to be a teacher.

Other people will say that teaching was something

they came to as a result of various influences.

Others, it may well have been the fact that there wasn't much choice for them.

That doesn't mean by the way that people who go into teaching reluctantly don't

become very good teachers.

As we'll see from some of the research that I've been involved with.

So, when you've asked some of your colleagues why they've become a teacher,

and maybe reflected on your own reasons, and we'll come back to those in a moment,

I'd now like you to have a look at the YouTube clip provided,

where people talk about their reasons for becoming a teacher, and

to compare those with the reasons your colleagues have mentioned to you.

When you look at that YouTube clip,

think about the reasons that apply to your choice of career.

Why did you become a teacher?

Who were the major influences, or what were the major influences?

For some people, as we've said, it's a career that they've always wanted to do.

I've interviewed people who've said basically that from an early age, they

were lining up their dolls in a row and telling them what to do and teaching them.

Other people that I've interviewed have said they used to teach their

younger siblings, their younger brothers and

sisters, when they got home from school what they'd learned that day.

For other people, the decision to become a teacher is what we would call

more calculated.

They would see how it went and whether they liked it or not.

And finally there's probably a third group of teachers who

took on the role because there weren't other options.

But there's another group of factors that are important too.

For many people, teaching was a way of gaining

a career, a profession as we've mentioned,

upward social mobility, in some cases, a higher income.

And many teachers that I've interviewed and worked with over the years,

have said that, they were the first member of their family to become a professional,

to finish high school, to gain a university qualification.

Now, in reflecting on your reasons for

becoming a teacher, and who might have been important as an influence, and

the circumstances that may have been important to you,.

I'd also like you to consider whether those reasons have changed and why.

Are your original reasons for wanting to be a teacher

the reasons that keep you in the occupation now, or have they changed?

Some people when they begin their careers have quite unrealistic aspirations or

understandings about being a teacher.

But those of us who've taught,

know that going from one side of the desk to the other, is quite different.

One of the debates we often hear about when we're talking about teacher status is

the fact that everybody's been to school, virtually, and

that makes them an expert on teaching.

But as we've already mentioned,

teachers have specialised knowledge that the general population doesn't have.

We're going to be talking about teacher satisfaction and dissatisfaction both in

this lecture and later in the series but I'd like you just to reflect for

a moment on the things that you find most satisfying in teaching.

What things give you most satisfaction?

Can you list those?

What are the three or

four main things that really inspire you, and make you want to do the job?

But on the other hand, you might also list those three or

four things that you find most dissatisfying in teaching.

Most unenjoyable, the things you don't really like that much.

When you look at your responses, do you notice any patterns there?

We're now going to look at the results of some research into teacher satisfaction,

carried out by Catharine Scott and myself

with colleagues in various countries.

And we surveyed teachers and school leaders in Australia, New Zealand,

England, Canada, the U.S.A. and more recently in Malta, in Cypress.

We have also used our instrument in China

and in other parts of Africa.

I'm going to concentrate, now, mainly on the results from Australia,

New Zealand, England, and the USA.

And as we go through these results, I want you to reflect upon the

responses you gave earlier

as to what you find most satisfying and dissatisfying in teaching.

So, what did we find when we asked teachers to rank 75 items

in terms of how satisfying or not they were.

Overwhelmingly teachers found their core business

highly satisfying, and when we say core business we mean the main things they do,

and these include, facilitating student achievement.

Many teachers told us about the light bulb moment when they got through to a student,

when they taught a difficult concept, when someone demonstrated that

they understood what the teacher was trying to teach them.

As well as student achievement, the second broad thing that people reported as

being highly satisfying was developing their own capabilities over time.

Becoming a better teacher, knowing more, being more experienced, knowing

the strategies and the responses that they need to

be able to demonstrate to move student learning forward.

Our own capabilities, we call self-efficacy,

how well do we think we can do our job?

We know for example that if we feel inadequate, we can't do our

job very effectively, this produces stress, and makes us very dissatisfied.

Another aspect of teaching that our sample of teachers across those

countries reported as being highly satisfying, was working with colleagues.

Teaching may take place in individual classrooms, but

much of teaching is done collaboratively.

With our colleagues, with our peers, with our principals and

supervisors and so forth.

The final aspect that teachers reported as being highly satisfying to them

was what we would call the pastoral care aspects of teaching.

In other words, helping students who may be having difficulties,

turning them around, improving their attitude towards teaching.

Now, what did teachers report as being highly dissatisfying?

Number one, across those countries, was the poor status of teachers in society.

In your country where you work,

what is the status of teachers?

Is it high?

Medium? Low?

Certainly in the western countries that we have surveyed,

teacher status is a real issue.

Teachers feel they're not respected as much as they used to be.

A second thing related to that issue of status that teachers reported

was that they find criticism of teachers very dissatisfying.

And this includes things like the short hours they supposedly teach,

the long holidays they get, the fact that really they're just childminders, and

really teaching is women's work.

We know that not to be true of course,

but occupations which are highly feminised, tend to have low status.

The other thing that teachers report as being highly dissatisfying was

imposed change.

Change from outside,

where they had to change what they were teaching,

how they were teaching, how schools were organised, and so forth.

And the final area of dissatisfaction was to do

with working with educational systems, their rules, their procedures.

Now, that's a summary, but you might again reflect upon your own sources of

satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

We have said their core business of teaching within their own classrooms and

working with colleagues was highly satisfying.

We have said that things outside the school, such as their status and

imposed change, and how people regard them was highly dissatisfying.

But within school, we found most variation in teacher satisfaction.

And the key factor influencing how satisfied teachers were

with things within their school was the quality of school leadership.

In schools where there was good leadership,

supportive leadership, teachers tended to be more satisfied.

In schools where there was poor leadership, schools were chaotic,

inconsistent application of rules,

the fact that school leaders were absent,

not seem to be involved in teaching and learning -

satisfaction was lowest.

So, what this shows us is an important thing.

It's possible to be satisfied with our core business,

at the same time as we are dissatisfied with things outside the school.

Something else we found of interest,was that the longer people had been in their

current school, overall, and their current position, the lower their satisfaction.

This was an unusual finding.

But what it tells us is that sometimes we can be in the same place for too long.

On the other hand, if we do take a new position, even within the same school,

a promotion, for example, this can actually be rejuvenating.

A final thing of interest

was that when we look at occupational satisfaction around the world,

what we tend to find is that within a hierarchy, within an organisation,

the people at top are the most satisfied and the least stressed, believe it or not.

The people in the middle tend to be in the middle.

The people at the bottom tend to be least satisfied, most dissatisfied and

most stressed.

Now, when we look at schools, we might expect a similar pattern, but

we didn't find this.

We found the most satisfied,

least stressed people were actually school principals.

And this is a function we think of the fact that they have status, control or

authority, responsibility, and in many cases, high salary.

But they also most probably have a high sense of

self-efficacy because they have reached that position.

Below school principals in satisfaction were deputy principals.

This fits the pattern we described earlier.

But beyond and below deputy principals, were classroom teachers.

The group with the lowest satisfaction, highest dissatisfaction and

highest stress were actually the middle leaders in schools.

The people who were heads of departments and coordinators.

These are people with fairly high teaching loads, in many cases,

but also important responsibilities above and below them.

We'll talk more about this in week six.

In our next session, we're going to move into week two

and talk about ethics, codes of conduct, and standards for teachers.

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Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Being a Professional

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