A Passion for Teaching

Christopher Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415251808
• eBook ISBN: 9781134529230
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is a celebration and an acknowledgement of the various forms of intellectual, physical, emotional and passionate endeavours in which teachers at their best engage.

Christopher Day demonstrates that teachers with a passion for teaching are those who are committed, enthusiastic and intellectually and emotionally energetic in their work with children, young people and adults alike. Having this passion for helping pupils to learn has recently been identified as one of the four leadership characteristics mentioned in the HayMcBer Report on effective teachers.

Day recognises that passionate teachers are aware of the challenge of the broader social contexts in which they teach, have a clear sense of identity and believe they can make a difference to the learning and achievement of all their pupils.

Offering a refreshing and positive view, A Passion for Teaching is a contribution to understanding and improving the teaching profession and brings new insights to the work and lives of teachers. It is written for all teachers, teacher educators and student teachers who have a passion for education, who love learners, the learning life and the teaching life.

Chapter 1
Why passion is essential

In our rush to reform education, we have forgotten a simple truth: reform will never be achieved by renewing appropriations, restricting schools, rewriting curricula, and revising texts if we continue to demean and dishearten the human resource called the teacher on whom so much depends…if we fail to cherish—and challenge—the human heart that is the source of good teaching.

(Palmer, 1998, p. 3)

Passion is defined in the Oxford Dictionary (1989) as ‘any kind of feeling by which the mind is powerfully affected or moved’. It is a driver, a motivational force emanating from strength of emotion. People are passionate about things, issues, causes, people. Being passionate generates energy, determination, conviction, commitment, and even obsession in people. Passion can lead to enhanced vision (the determination to attain a deeply desired goal) but it can also restrict wider vision and lead to the narrow pursuit of a passionately held conviction at the expense of other things. Passion is not a luxury, a frill, or a quality possessed by just a few teachers. It is essential to all good teaching. It is

not just a personality trait that some people have and others lack, but rather something discoverable, teachable or reproducible, even when the regularities of school life gang up against it. Passion and practicality are not opposing notions; good planning and design are as important as caring and spontaneity in bringing out the best in students. Although not the whole story, passion, uncomfortable as the word may sound, is at the heart of what teaching is or should be.

(Fried, 1995, p. 6)

Passion, therefore, may lead to positive, committed behavioural outcomes on the one hand, or negative, destructive ones on the other, depending on the internal rational-emotional balance. The positive-negative balance does rest on neat division, for example the presumption that anger is a negative emotion and love a positive one. Indeed, current theoretical models arising from neurophysiology (van der Kolk, 1994), cognitive psychology (Metzger et al., 1990; Goleman, 1995) and various therapies (Jackins, 1965, 1973, 1989) observe that intensity of emotion has a high tendency to interfere with rational thinking. Thus, passionate feelings are just as likely to cloud judgement and lead to extremes of behaviour that may not be rational. Often what drives passionate feelings is unconscious. As Nias observes:

Behind the ordered control and professional calm of all the teachers …bubble deep, potentially explosive passions, emotions bringing despair, elation, anger and joy of a kind not normally associated in the public mind with work.

(Nias, 1996, p. 226)

Yet good teachers invest large amounts of their substantive emotional selves in pursuing their work with students. Not only are they accountable for their work to parents and their employers; they are also responsible to the students they teach.

To be passionate about teaching is not only to express enthusiasm but also to enact it in a principled, values-led, intelligent way. All effective teachers have a passion for their subject, a passion for their pupils and a passionate belief that who they are and how they teach can make a difference in their pupils’ lives, both in the moment of teaching and in the days, weeks, months and even years afterwards. Passion is associated with enthusiasm, caring, commitment, and hope, which are themselves key characteristics of effectiveness in teaching. For teachers who care, the student as a person is as important as the student as a learner. That respect for person-hood is likely to result in greater motivation to learn. Caring teachers who know their students create relationships that enhance the learning process (Stronge, 2002). Passion is also associated with fairness and understanding, qualities constantly named by students in their assessments of good teachers, and with the qualities that effective teachers display in everyday social interactions—listening to what students say, being close rather than distant, having a good sense of playfulness, humour, encouraging students to learn in different ways, relating learning to experience, encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning, maintaining an organized classroom environment, being knowledgeable about their subject, creating learning environments that engage students and stimulate in them an excitement to learn.

It is only when teachers are able and enabled to nurture and express their passions for their field of knowledge, and about learning, to bring these to their work, to break through ‘the fog of passive compliance or active disinterest’ (Fried, 1995, p. 1) that sometimes seems to envelop so many students, that they will meet with success.

It is the teachers’ passions that help them and their students escape the slow death of ‘busyness at work’, the rituals of going through the motions, which in schools usually means checking that the homework was done, covering the curriculum, testing, grading, and quickly putting it all behind us.

(Fried, 1995, p. 19)

Passionate teaching and effectiveness

Teachers in all classrooms are expected to be knowledgeable and skilled practitioners, accountable for raising standards of achievement of all students in ways that will stimulate pupils’ interests in learning. They are expected, also, to promote school-parent relationships, address issues of culture and language, environmental concerns and social,

citizenship and moral issues, issues of equity, social justice, participative democracy, and lifelong learning. In other words, teachers’ work is complex, and located in contexts that are both demanding (of knowledge, classroom management and teaching skills) and emotionally and intellectually challenging. They are confronted in their work, it is said, by a number of external imperatives that lead to contradictory demands: on the one hand, there is a growing recognition of the importance to the economy, to life-long education, and to the society, of teamwork and co-operation, tolerance and mutual understanding. On the other, there is an increase in alienation of students from formal schooling, increasing emphasis on competition and material values, and growing inequalities, deepening social differences and a breakdown in social cohesion (UNESCO, 1996; Bentley, 1998). It is important to remember that it is teachers who must bear major responsibility for managing these demands. They are ‘one of our last hopes for rebuilding a sense of community’ (Hargreaves and Fullan, 1998, p. 42).

Government reforms have also transformed the way teachers teach in schools in England and made them more publicly accountable for pupils’ results. The so-called ‘performativity’ agenda (Lyotard, 1979; Ball, 2001) that has been established is not all bad—teachers and schools now plan for and monitor pupil progress much more systematically. However, its broader bureaucratic, managerialist implementation has exhausted many teachers so they have lost that passion to educate with which they first entered the profession. The space formerly available for spontaneity, creativity and attending to unanticipated learning needs of children and young people has contracted as teachers struggle to attain government targets for achievement and fulfil associated bureaucratic demands.

Bringing a passionate self to teaching every day of every week of every school term and year is a daunting prospect. Having a good idea about what to do in the classroom is only the beginning of the work of teaching. It is the translation of passion into action that embodies and integrates the personal and the professional, the mind and the emotion, that will make a difference in pupils’ learning lives.

Teachers have hearts and bodies, as well as heads and hands, though the deep and unruly nature of their hearts is governed by their heads, by the sense of moral responsibility for students and the integrity of their subject matter which is at the core of their professional identity. They cannot teach well if any part of them is disengaged for long. Increasingly, social and political pressures give precedence to head and hand, but if the balance between feeling, thinking and doing is disturbed too much or for too long, teaching becomes distorted, teachers’ responses are restricted, they may even cease to be able to teach. Teachers are emotionally committed to many different aspects of their jobs. This is not an indulgence; it is a professional necessity. Without feeling, without the freedom to ‘face themselves’, to be whole persons in the classroom, they implode, explode—or walk away.

(Nias, 1996, p. 305)

At their best, however, teachers display, through who they are and how they act, a deep and passionate commitment to their work. Under such circumstances and faced with such challenges, it is vital that they sustain their passion for teaching. In a comparative study of policies that aimed to increase teacher quality, the common factor among excellent teachers identified in studies in New Zealand (Ramsay, 1993), Italy (Macconi, 1993), America (White and Roesch, 1993), Sweden (Lander, 1993) and France (Altet, 1993) was that they had a passionate desire for the success of all their students. This was communicated through the classroom ethos—their sense of humour, interpersonal warmth, patience, empathy and support of their pupils’ self-esteem; through classroom practices—they employed a broad range of teaching approaches that promoted semiautonomous and collaborative learning; through collaboration with other teachers; and through a capacity for continued reflection of different kinds (Hopkins and Stern, 1996). Fried (1995) argues that there is a clear connection between passionate teaching and the quality of students’ learning:

1. When students can appreciate their teacher as someone who is passionately committed to a field of study and to upholding high standards within it, it is much easier for them to take their work seriously. Getting them to learn then becomes a matter of inspiration by example rather than by enforcement and obedience.
2. Without a trusting and respectful relationship among students and teachers, everyone’s ability to work collaboratively and to take the kind of risks that learning requires is minimized.
3. Unless students are able to see the connection between what they are learning and how they might put such learning to work in a real life context, their motivation to excel will remain uneven at best.

(Fried, 1995, p.47)

Teaching and learning at its best is not, then, an entirely rational set of processes. High-quality input does not always result in high-quality output. Good teaching can never be reduced to technique or competence.

There are many factors that help or hinder effective teaching and learning. Not least among these are the family histories and circumstances of the parents and the students; the leadership and learning culture of the school; the effects of government policies; the perceived relevance and value of the curriculum; behaviour in the classroom and staff room; relationships with parents and the wider community; and teachers’ knowledge, skills and competencies. Yet the primary factors in good teaching that is effective are much more than these. They are the inner qualities of the teacher; a continuing striving for excellence (in herself and others); a caring for and fascination with growth; and a deep commitment to providing the best possible opportunities for each pupil. Good teaching is to do with teachers’ values, identities, moral purposes, attitudes to learning (their own as well as those of their students), their caring and commitment to be the best they can at all times and in every circumstance for the good of their students. It is about their enthusiasm and their passion.

The call of teaching

Haavio, a Finnish educator, identified three key characteristics of the good teacher:

• Pedagogical discretion—he ability to use the most appropriate teaching for each individual
• Pedagogical love—the caring instinct, i.e. the desire to help, protect and support
• Vocational awareness—it seizes the teachers’ personality in such a way that he is ready to do his utmost for it and finds in it internal gratification and the purpose of his life.

(Haavio, 1969)

Such ethical and moral dimensions of teachers’ lives distinguish committed teachers who ‘educate’, whose work is connected to their whole lives, from those who ‘teach’, for whom teaching is a job rather than a vocation. For the former, emotional engagement, love of children/ young people, caring and critical thinking are essential complementary components of teaching. In observing passionate teachers at work in classrooms, there is no disconnection between the head and the heart, the cognitive and the emotional. None is privileged over the others.

David Hansen (1995, 1999, 2001) conceives teachers’ work as a calling, a moral and personal commitment that has to do with ‘cultivating students’ minds and spirits:

Teaching is a continuous activity of encouraging or fuelling attitudes, orientations, and understandings which allow students to progress rather than to regress as human beings, to grow rather than to become narrow in their outlook and range of capabilities…. Other things being equal, a person with a sense of calling comes to inhabit the role of teacher more fully than does an individual who treats it as only a job…will be m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The need for passion
• Chapter 1 Why passion is essential
• Chapter 2 Moral purposes: Care, courage and pupils’ voice
• Chapter 3 Emotions and identities
• Chapter 4 The passion of commitment: job satisfaction, motivation and self-efficacy
• Chapter 5 Building knowledge about practice
• Chapter 6 A passion for learning and development
• Chapter 7 Passionate learning communities
• Chapter 8 Sustaining the passion
• References