The Confident Teacher

Developing successful habits of mind, body and pedagogy

Alex Quigley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317237686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Secondary Education

The Confident Teacher offers a practical, step-by-step guide to developing the habits, characteristics and pedagogy that will enable you to do the best job possible. It unveils the tacit knowledge of great teachers and combines it with respected research and popular psychology. Covering topics such as organisation, using your body language effectively, combatting stress, managing student behaviour, questioning and feedback, and developing confident students, it shows how you can build the confidence and skill to flourish in the classroom.

This book will be an essential resource for all qualified and trainee teachers wanting to reach their full potential in this challenging but rewarding profession.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315627328-1

Every teacher needs to improve, not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better.

Dylan Wiliam

I arrived for my first day at school as a teacher on a crisp September morning in York. The beautiful city was my new home of little over a week. As I passed the threshold of the school gates, the freshness of the air was startling.

I had visited the school for my interview, then once or twice over the summer holiday in a mad scramble to prepare myself for the harsh baptism of a new career. It patently hadn’t worked. I felt like my near frantic lack of confidence was on show for all to see – writ large in my every word and action.

My mind lay open to an array of fears and anxieties. What if I screwed this up? What if the students simply laughed me out of the classroom? Despite a year of training, coupled with as much planning as I could muster over the summer holiday, I still felt spectacularly unprepared.

In a desperate attempt to assert some control over my rabid nerves, I had scripted each moment of each lesson of my first day, all by hand, in painstaking detail. I had arrived at school an hour early so I could prepare myself and becalm my nerves.

After weeks of waiting, with quiet dread, it was time to stand at the front of the class and teach. For the first time, no teacher or mentor was sitting there watching – both a liberating and a frightening truth. I fumbled with the board pen to write the title and date. Blowing shallow breaths, I attempted to remember my script, before shuffling back to the teacher desk to read it over.

The students gazed at me with something like curiosity and the cool indifference that only teenagers can cultivate with such ease.

I began.

The whole day seemed a desperate act of masking my raw fears. And yet, nothing terrible happened. No eureka moments were to be had. At the end of the day I slumped in my teacher chair. I felt like an imposter, carrying off a deceitful trick while no one was looking. That surreptitious feeling was intermingled with a near overwhelming tiredness.

Despite the exhaustion, a germ of confidence in myself, and what I believed I could do as a teacher, was sown.

I realised soon after that teaching was very much an act of confidence. I could learn to teach successfully with committed effort – sometimes painstakingly so – but learn nonetheless. It was effort, commitment and the support of my fellow teachers that developed my expertise, but it was confidence in myself, and my belief that I could make a difference to the lives of my students, that helped me persist in reaching that goal.

Challenging times

Margaret Mead once stated that we shouldn’t underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. I have always held by her optimism and, for me, teachers have already been at the vanguard of the committed few.

My confidence in the power of teaching comes from my lived experience and from the influence of working with so many brilliant professionals, but if you read the papers you may be forgiven for judging the teaching profession as in crisis.

Are we at a negative ‘tipping point’ for the profession, where workload becomes insurmountable and we are no longer able to recruit enough teachers?

In countries the world over, the recruitment and retention of teachers is floundering. Stories of mountainous workloads, political interference and widespread teacher stress have dissuaded too many would-be teachers to enter the profession. Stress, burnout and dropping out have become an accepted part of the narrative of being a classroom teacher.

The statistics are chastening. In countries like England and America, nearly half of teachers leave the profession in the first five years; in Australia, the rate is nearer 30 per cent,¹ alongside Canada.² This attrition rate is damagingly high. A large-scale MetLife study of US teachers in 2012³ found that teachers were stressed each of the seven days of the week by the job. Stress and teacher burnout are real problems that we no doubt need to address.

Clearly, we have a problem when far too many new teachers fail to ever achieve the confident degree of expertise that would carry them through to a satisfying, lifelong teaching career. The potential crisis of confidence in the teaching profession needs to be urgently addressed.

In truth, we cannot afford to wait for gone-tomorrow politicians to make the difference in helping teachers get better and helping them stay, indeed thrive, in the classroom.

As one notable politician, and famous US president, said very recently, ‘we are the change we seek’. Collectively, we can better mitigate the problems that attend workload and increase our stress. We can speak with a united voice in defence of our great profession. Together, we can fend off the media mud-slinging and concentrate upon becoming better teachers.

Making a difference

Despite the problems that no doubt attend our profession, most teachers prove a hardy and resilient bunch. For those of us who stick with teaching, we are nourished by our special experiences in the classroom, which give us confidence that what we do matters and makes a positive difference to the world.

Teachers may suffer from an image problem in the media, but scratch beneath the surface and talk to people about their personal experience of their school teachers and a different story emerges. Tease out some of those stories and we find that our teachers prove to be at the very heart of who we are as adults. Seldom do you meet a person whose life was not changed in some way, however subtly, by a special teacher.

The memories we create for our students may often be formed in unintended moments, appearing outside of our deliberately crafted lesson plan, but wherever they appear, we must harness their power.

Being a confident teacher is not about being blind to the issues faced by our profession, nor the obstacles that inhibit our students (both within school and in their lives outside of school), but it is about possessing a belief that we have the power to help our students to overcome those obstacles.

It is with such a belief, that a great teacher can trump the many barriers placed before our students, which spurs me on to write this book. With such belief, commitment and no little support, we can develop the confidence and skill to flourish in the classroom. It is such a nourishing confidence that sustains us through failure and helps us to grow professionally, until we attain something like expertise.

My hope is that this book can turn the cloudy notion of ‘the confident teacher’ into something concrete, tangible and useful. You can have teachers who display some ‘natural’ talent, but the majority of us are going about fashioning our self-confidence by developing our competence. If we are committed, and supported with the requisite conditions to grow as professionals, then we can reach the heights of an expert teacher.

My confidence was not quickly won after my scripted opening day of teaching. It was often a gruelling trek through long days in the classroom – facing my fears and failures daily and refusing to give up. My growing competence was met with growing self-confidence. The process was often maddeningly slow and gradual, spanning years, but it was essential in creating a deep groove of competence and self-confidence.

It wasn’t until my third, or even fourth year of teaching, that I felt truly confident in my ability to teach all-comers in the sense of simply managing the room effectively. And yet, despite this improved control, I would continue to flail and fail on any given day. Still, I had – and have – lots to learn about the best strategies of expert teachers, but my deep reservoir of experience helps to sustain me. It is this type of self-confidence, rooted in competence and experience, which can help sustain every teacher.

So what exactly do I mean by self-confidence?

The answer is to be found rooted in the word itself. The definition comes from the Latin confidere – ‘to trust’. Authentic confidence for a teacher stems from the trust we secure from our students and our colleagues. It becomes a trust we hold deeply within ourselves and helps guide what we do. We gain that trust by going the hard yards – the ultimate show of professional competence.

I don’t wish to unduly romanticize the life of a teacher as being all hugs and high fives. Gaining trust from our students, or indeed our colleagues, is no swift or easy task. No class has yet stood atop their tables and quoted Walt Whitman at me – in a chorus of ‘O Captain! My Captain!’ – in unfettered adoration. I have not yet transformed a ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ into an ivory tower of learning. Alas, that is the stuff of Hollywood dreams. Instead, real teachers live by small, often unremembered, and seemingly unremarkable, acts of kindness.

Truthfully, boredom, frustration and struggle can too often attend our daily business. Despite this, teachers who possess a strong sense of why they do what they do in their working lives can better bear the many obstacles and buffers along the way. Sometimes teaching can feel tougher than the chewing gum clinging grimly to the underside of classroom desks, but with greater self-confidence we can feel optimistic about taking on the unique challenge each day.

When teachers feel in control, supported by their school leaders, their resilience and self-confidence can bloom. They can better fight stress, resist burnout and stick with teaching for longer.⁴ We must replicate these conditions in each classroom and in every school. Of course, as teachers, we don’t have the power to change the education system wholesale, but we can do the next best thing: we can change ourselves, what happens in our classroom and even our school.

Political meddling, unhelpful bureaucracy and workload issues may prove a universal experience for too many teachers across the world, but the compelling act of teaching and learning goes on. Teachers can – and do – make a difference. It is that which gives us purpose.

Notes

1. Watt, H.M.G. and Richardson, P.P.W. (2007), ‘Motivational factors influencing teaching as a career choice: Development and validation of the FIT-choice scale’, The Journal of Experimental Education, 75 (3): 67–202.
2. Karsenti, T. and Collin, S. (2013), ‘Why are new teachers leaving the profession? Results of a Canada-wide survey’, Education, 3 (3): 141–149.
3. ‘The MetLife survey of the American teacher’ (2012), [Online]. Available at: www.metlife.com/assets/cao/foundation/MetLife-Teacher-Survey-2012.pdf (Accessed: 10 June 2015).
4. Klassen, R.M. and Chiu, M.M. (2011), ‘The occupational commitment and intention to quit of practicing and pre-service teachers: Influence of self-efficacy, job stress, and teaching context’, Contemporary Educational Psychology, 36: 114–129.

Section 1 The confident mind

DOI: 10.4324/9781315627328-2

2 How much confidence is enough?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315627328-3

There is no perfect teacher, nor the perfect degree of confidence: the classroom is much too complicated for that. We must then face up to the complexity of our varying degrees of confidence.

We know that our confidence can fluctuate on a daily basis. We can be confident in one aspect of our teaching, indeed our lives (yes – teachers manage to sometimes muster a life beyond work), but that can have little bearing on other aspects of what we do. Any given teacher could prove a subject expert, whilst having little or no confidence that they can manage the behaviour of their classes adequately.

Therefore we need to break down each aspect of our self-confidence and do an honest appraisal of where we stand as a teacher. Let’s make a start. Rate yourself on the rough-and-ready confidence continuum below, based upon your judgement of self-confidence in the following ten broad areas:

1. Your capacity to manage student behaviour successfully
2. Your command of your subject(s) knowledge
3. Your ability to speak to groups of fellow teachers
4. Your knowledge and understanding of how children learn
5. Your knowledge and understanding of common misconceptions in learning
6. Your capacity to manage your workload
7. Your capacity to manage your physical health
8. Your capacity to balance your work with your home life
9. Your sense of control when teaching in the classroom
10. Your sense of control over your teaching career

Unconfident

Very Confident

If we ask ourselves these questions then the natural next step is to probe a little further. If we are middling on our continuum for question 1...