Supporting Teachers Supporting Pupils

The Emotions of Teaching and Learning

Diana Fox Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134310555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book draws from the real-life experiences and perceptions of teachers in secondary and primary schools, and documents their ideas on how they define their job, the difficulties they face in the classroom and the support they need. Different approaches to teacher support are considered and the book includes an in-depth case study of a school that tried to implement some of these approaches. Key issues covered include:

• the motivations and needs of teachers and pupils
• the gaps between theory and practice in the professional role and performance of the teacher
• the behaviour of pupils and their views on the classroom
• working with support staff
• the assertive discipline system.

Drawing on her own experience and the experiences of others, Diana Fox Wilson recommends that teachers are supported by a classroom environment that fosters insight and understanding between pupils and teachers, and urges a culture of change that recognises teachers as a crucial influence on young people's lives.

Supporting Teachers Supporting Pupils is packed with helpful and practical advice for all teachers. It will be a reassuring read for any teacher finding themselves feeling stranded in the classroom.

Part I
What are we here for?

1
Entertainers, gurus and mentors

Teachers’ perspectives

I think that I would expect from above, from the hierarchy, the administration, a structure in which a reasonably competent, civilized person could perform the function that they’re supposed to perform…I think an average person with average ability and good faith should be able to walk into most classrooms and teach. So I want a framework that allows me to do that.

(Teacher, Wilson, 2001)

Posing the right questions

When teachers say, as most of them have said at one time or another, ‘I need support’, what is meant by it? In a fraught classroom with 9D, it may mean:

There is nothing more I can do with this class at this moment. They are neither interested in the activities I so imaginatively dreamt up for them nor the materials I spent hours last night lovingly creating. They have become bored and restless. They are trying to derive a little fun out of winding me up, and because I am exhausted and frustrated, conscious of the noise spilling out from my classroom and feeling very vulnerable, they will probably succeed. Any moment now I shall blow my top. I need support, but if I ask for it, I am admitting failure.

Or on another occasion:

Darren is starting again. I have just launched into my introductory presentation of the new topic, the presentation that I have carefully prepared to be as motivating and involving as possible, and he has already set about sabotaging my lesson. He begins by asking for a pen. I say he doesn’t need it yet, but I give it anyway to save argument. I continue with my presentation. He says the pen doesn’t work. I say could he put his pen down please, and just listen. He says it’s boring, why should he listen, it’s a waste of time. I ignore that and continue. He says audibly enough for me to overhear, ‘The silly cow won’t give me a pen that works.’ I try to ignore this too. But I feel the anger welling up inside me. I tell myself about all his problems, his need for attention, his need to look hard.

A few seconds later a pen flies across the room towards me from somewhere in his direction. The excitement in the room is palpable. The rest of the class is waiting to see what I will do. If I send him outside into the corridor, he will continue to disrupt, and other people’s lessons as well as mine. If I send him to the head of department next door, that will interrupt her lesson as well and it will be another black mark against me. I can put him in detention, but that won’t solve the immediate situation, and he probably wouldn’t turn up for detention anyway, so I’d have to spend time chasing him up. ‘Stay behind at the end of the lesson, Darren’, I say. ‘You see’, he says to the rest of the class, ‘she’s blaming me as usual. It wasn’t me.’

I’m beginning to panic. ‘Shut up’, I say, seeing the lesson slipping away from me, ‘we’ll talk about that at the end of the lesson.’ He shuts up temporarily, but it’s too late. The pupils have lost concentration. The presentation is ruined. I put a ready prepared piece of work on the overhead projector and tell them to copy it into their books. A gobbet of spit lands on my jumper. I crack. I march up to him and, big though he is, I manhandle him roughly out of the room, tearing his shirt collar in the process, to the delight of the rest of the class. He stalks off down the corridor shouting that I’m for it now. Heads look out from the surrounding classrooms. Somewhere along the way of that disastrous lesson, I needed support.

These are fictitious examples constructed out of elements of real incidents but they follow a pattern familiar to me and to countless other teachers, I am sure. They show situations, not of lazy, uncommitted, incompetent or bullying teachers who deserve the failed lessons, the derision of pupils, and the threat of disciplinary action. They portray ordinary teachers who try hard to be well prepared with motivating lessons; to understand the perspectives of pupils and the needs of individuals; who try to keep calm in the face of mounting provocation and personal attack and who end up providing routine copying activities to restore or maintain calm, or who snap and lose control of themselves as well as the class. What kinds of support might have prevented these fictitious lessons following the course they did?

A third scenario concerns a teacher who believes in teaching individually for most of the time. She spends a great deal of effort and imagination preparing individualized worksheets for the wide ability range in the class, in the conviction that the pupils’ needs are best met in this way and control of the class is easier if they are engaged in tasks that offer them a sense of achievement. But reading and understanding the worksheets is not easy for some of the pupils, and while she is helping these, others become stuck and in need of help. The task of getting round the class giving the help that is needed when it is needed becomes overwhelming. The pupils become frustrated, bored and therefore mischievous, preventing others from working. The teacher blames herself for the pupils’ disruption, thus adding to her own sense of stress and guilt.

The point about all these vignettes is that the teachers concerned are trying to be good professionals. They think about the needs of the subject, the pupils, the particular context of the lesson. When things go wrong, they tend to blame themselves: the lesson wasn’t pitched right, the activities were not motivating enough, they handled this pupil wrongly, they did not foresee that situation, they should be able to control the class and themselves, they have not acted in accordance with their own teaching principles. They perceive, correctly or not, that colleagues will also blame them. The outcome of all this self-blame and feeling of failure is to create a snowball of stress so that the chances of similarly failed lessons in the future are increased.

Yet these teachers are theoretically amongst those that Chris Woodhead, Chief Inspector in the mid- to late 1990s, might have counted amongst his 4 per cent of incompetent teachers (Woodhead, 2002).

Difficulty in managing classrooms has traditionally been seen as one of the characteristics of failing teachers:

There is also a minority of teachers, who, for a variety of reasons, cannot manage an orderly classroom, and who are judged by students and colleagues alike to be of doubtful competence. Most of these teachers survive; few are dismissed or guided into alternative employment. The measures for removing incompetent teachers are slow and complicated, demanding remarkable patience and skill from a complainant head teacher. Worse still, everybody in schools knows this is a problem that needs to be addressed, but are too embarrassed to do so openly.

(D Hargreaves, 1994, p 8)

Yet few commentators on educational matters query the term ‘incompetent’ and bother to look at the values, motivations, commitment and sensitivities of those teachers so labelled. I shall argue throughout this book that:

• The way schools and teachers regard classroom management needs to change radically, from seeing it as the sole responsibility, and often a matter of pride, of the individual teacher, to seeing it as a collective responsibility of the school.
• Attitudes to teachers who ‘appear’ to be failing in keeping order need to change.
• Classroom disorder often arises from or is exacerbated by the conflict caused to both teacher and pupils when they find themselves acting ‘out of character’, that is, against the person they really want to be.
• In the pressures and complexities of today’s classrooms, both teachers and pupils need support to act out of the best of themselves; to be fully human in the most positive sense of the word.

So what is meant by support? Throughout the book, I shall attempt to tease out teachers’ support needs, and identify the kinds of support that best meet those needs. Underpinning these needs are the personal and professional values of teachers, and the kinds of teacher they want to be. The kinds of questions that need to be asked in relation to the three hypothetical situations described above are:

• What kind of teacher does this teacher want to be?
• What are her or his intentions for the lesson?
• What is preventing the teacher from fulfilling those intentions?
• What are the teacher’s perceptions of what is going on?
• What are the pupils’ perceptions of what is going on?
• What are the emotions generated in both teacher and pupils?
• What kinds of support might have allowed the lesson to proceed in the way the teacher had intended?
• What kinds of longer-term support might help the teacher make changes in the conduct of lessons, and his or her coping strategies?

‘Needing support’ is often talked about without properly defining exactly what it is in the situation that requires support, and what kinds of support would meet the needs of the situation. Support strategies in the literature tend to be devised by external experts to meet problems defined by the experts that do not necessarily reflect the problems as perceived by the practitioners. The assumption is that if teachers improve their lesson planning, delivery, choice of materials, relationships with pupils and handling of inappropriate behaviour, all will be well. If only…There is little recognition that there are emotional dynamics in the teaching—learning situation that may sabotage the best efforts of the most committed teachers. In this book I hope to give some insight into these.

In the next section I draw on my research to explore how the teachers in my fieldwork school perceived the job of teaching in today’s classroom, what brought them into teaching, what are the difficulties for which they feel the need for support and what kinds of support they need. I present teachers’ ideal professional image— the kind of teacher they want to be—and reveal some of the barriers to fulfilling their professional ideals. I show how the emotional pressures of the classroom distort their professional behaviour and cause conflict between the professional self that teachers want to project and the way they are in fact being perceived. I suggest that the main function of support is to prevent or alleviate this experience of disjunction. What kind of support will allow teachers to be the teachers they want to be?

The teacher I want to be—the love triangle

I came into teaching because I wanted pupils to enjoy [subject] like I enjoyed it at school. I wanted to give them that opportunity because I really enjoyed it, so why couldn’t I just go and help somebody else to enjoy it as much as I did?

(Student teacher, Wilson, 2001)

When I started teaching, one of the things that I was expected to do was to give as much information and to educate and advise and support young people, and that was the sole purpose of my job. It was to go in there and do absolutely everything.

(Teacher, Wilson, 2001)

The ways in which these secondary school teachers talked about their work dispels the old distinction between primary and secondary school teaching—the ‘I teach children not subjects’ dichotomy. This distinction was still being asserted as recently as 2002 (Hodkinson at BERA conference, 2002). The presenter of a conference paper maintained that secondary school teachers saw themselves primarily as subject specialists, while primary school teachers saw themselves as teachers. My research suggests that this is an oversimplification of a more complex relationship that secondary school teachers have both with subject and with pupils. It is a triangular relationship, with teachers often loving their subject and wanting to convey the beauty and enjoyment of it to pupils. At the same time, they are aware of the intellectual, emotional and social needs of pupils, and value the closer relationships with them that have developed in the last few decades. They are concerned, not only to teach their own subject in educationally valid and motivating ways, but to do this in ways that take into account the specific needs of individuals. With regard to the pupils in this triangle, the aim is that they should be inspired and influenced by the teacher to understand and appreciate the subject area, and eventually become independent learners.

This makes teachers vulnerable on two counts: the subject and the relationship. Failure to communicate the subject matter in motivating and intellectually valid ways causes frustration to the teacher and boredom to the pupil. Failure to respond appropriately to the needs of pupils arouses resentment, hostility and alienation in them, and guilt and defensiveness in the teacher. Either way, pupils are turned off the subject and teachers feel demoralized. It is necessary to look more closely at the things that can go wrong in both the subject and relationship dimensions of the triangle and at the kinds of support that teachers need to fulfil both teaching objectives.

Recognition of the importance of both objectives does not imply that all teachers feel they have equal competence in or propensity for both. All the teachers I spoke with recognized that motivating and effective communication of subject involved responding to pupils’ individual needs, but some expressed a preference for the teaching of the subject over a more explicit pastoral role, while others were increasingly drawn by choice into pastoral responsibilities. Clearly, supporting teachers will involve recognizing and taking account of these individual differences in their skills and aptitudes:

I have always thought of school as being primarily academic, and that the social side of it should have remained part of the hidden curriculum, a very important part but nevertheless hidden; and I resented the formalization of what people of my generation always saw as the accepted but undefined curriculum…and in that sense I would have accepted the changes if the people directing the changes had recognized the talents and beliefs, for want of a better word, of people like myself, and said there was room for people like me…as well as those who saw their role in the wider sense of pastoral care for children; and I feel strongly that there is room for both in schools.

(Teacher, Wilson, 2001)

The teacher as subject communicator

I decided that I wanted to teach [subject] because I really like it as a subject, and I think a lot of people should like it, but they don’t…I’m trying to get people to understand it a bit more. I mean, it is a beautiful subject.

(Student teacher, Wilson, 2001)

But I do enjoy teaching [subject]. It’s good fun. Yes I enjoy teaching because most of the time we’re doing [aspect of subject] at the moment, which admittedly I prefer, and they enjoy it. They enjoy doing that sort of thing.

(Teacher, Wilson, 2001)

These teachers had come into teaching because of their own love of their subject and their desire to communicate this love to children; and they were prepared to put much effort into achieving this. They talk about enjoyment and sharing, about enthusiasm and the buzz that comes from perceiving that pupils have understood something they did not know before. Imagery taken from the fields of entertainment and the arts abounds (see p. 28). Some teachers talk about the beauty of their subject, and teach with almost messianic fervour. Many wanted lessons to be fun for both the pupils and themselves. Two talk about the aesthetic and humanistic value of knowledge for its own sake, irrespective of its economic benefits. One speaks of the enthusiasm with which she follows developments in t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: What Are We Here for?
• Part II: Support—Prop or Validation?
• Part III: The Talking School
• Appendix
• References and Additional Reading