Love Teaching, Keep Teaching

The essential guide to improving wellbeing at all levels in schools

Peter Radford

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781785835032
• eBook ISBN: 9781785835285
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A practical guide to staying well in a high-pressure profession.
In the midst of a recruitment crisis and a massive exodus of teachers from our schools, now is the time for some joined-up thinking about teacher well-being and mental health.
Filled with insightful advice and practical strategies, Peter Radford's Love Teaching, Keep Teaching invites educators to think differently about the way education is 'done' and shows them how they can keep doing the job they love without sacrificing their health and well-being. Furthermore, he paints a picture of a truly 'healthy school' as being one in which the value of each staff member and student is fundamental to everything they do and shapes the way they do it.
Peter also offers a fresh perspective on school leadership, encouraging leaders to rethink common practices and to explore the rewards and benefits of employing a people-focused approach both in the staffroom and across the school.
Suitable for teachers and school leaders in both primary and secondary settings.

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Part I

You – How to Live and Teach Well12

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Chapter 1

The Subtle Art of Achieving Balance

Mark Manson begins his excellent book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by pointing out that we have a limited number of f*cks to give.1 Though Manson uses the F-word quite a lot(!), in the interests of inclusivity I’m going to replace the F-word with the word ‘stuff’. I realise it doesn’t have quite the same kick about it, but you get the idea.

Every day we have the potential to get worked up about something – or wound up or hacked off or anxious or troubled or irritated or any number of other states of being – all of which Manson would sum up as ‘giving a stuff’. His point, which I want to emphasise here, is that we have a choice about what to give a stuff about. He’s not saying that we shouldn’t give a stuff about anything. Quite the opposite. He’s saying choose carefully what you decide to give a stuff about because what you choose to invest your emotional energy in will define your future.

If we choose to invest that energy in things that don’t really matter, then some other aspect of our lives will suffer as a result. Because we only have a limited number of stuffs to give. We can’t give a stuff about everything. Eeyore put it beautifully when he said, ‘We can’t all. And some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it.’2 Love it. We can try, of course, but it’s the beginning of our downfall if we do. The subtle art that Manson goes on to discuss is that of making sure we clearly identify what really matters to us and what doesn’t. What is worth our time and energy and what isn’t?

Life is short and precious, and personally I don’t want to waste a second of it.

Case in point. This year I had a dispute with my neighbour. I’ve heard about people who have disputes with their neighbours, but I never thought I would be one of them. My neighbour, who enters his property 14by driving (legally) through my driveway, took issue with my adjustments to my own driveway – he now had to turn his steering wheel when previously he could drive straight. But it was his aggressive manner towards me that made my blood boil. Everything in me wanted to stubbornly refuse to acquiesce to his demands to readjust my drive. On a particularly confrontational encounter, I found myself physically shaking as I tried to remain calm regarding his request that I knock down a corner of my fence and move it by one metre.

My wife intervened: ‘It’s a fence, for goodness sake,’ she said. ‘It really doesn’t matter, does it?’ Well, clearly in that moment it mattered very much to me and my neighbour. But our mutually passionate care was making us both extremely agitated and unhappy. It took me a while to calm down, but I decided to choose to put the one square-metre-adjustment to my fence in the category of ‘not worth giving a stuff about’ and acquiesced to my neighbour’s request. I think I have lengthened my lifespan as a result!3

So, we can choose what to expend our time and energy on, but we frequently choose the wrong things. In large part, the shape and quality of our lives today is the product of our choices to date. Wherever you are right now, and however you are feeling about it, your choices have played a key role in leading you to this point.

In this chapter, I am going to suggest that there are three critical factors to achieving the balanced life you want to enjoy:

1 Fully accept responsibility.

2 Balance the ingredients.

3 Commit to do your best.

Let’s look at them each in turn.

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1. Accepting responsibility

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychologist who was imprisoned in a sub-camp of Dachau during the Second World War. He survived, but he lost his entire family during the Holocaust. He later wrote a brilliant book called Man’s Search for Meaning in which he described how the Nazis took away every single freedom the prisoners had. He noted how some prisoners were broken very quickly – they despaired. A flicker had gone out and their demise was then only a matter of time. He also noted how in some inmates that flicker remained, and it often proved to be the difference between death and survival. He said: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’4

To choose one’s attitude – this, Frankl claims, is a choice. It is at the heart of the notion of responsibility. What does responsibility mean? Response-ability. Flip it around: the ability to respond. In any given circumstance we have the ability to choose our response – which we do, every single day.

Every day in schools, in the words of Forrest Gump, ‘shit happens’. Some of it predictable, some of it unpredictable. What is our default setting in situations of stress, when things are not going the way we would like? I suggest that our default setting is to blame.

I have sat in many staffrooms and faculty offices and the conversations don’t vary all that much. In fact, they often fall into four distinct categories:

1 ‘Little Johnny derailed my lesson again!’ – aka: blame a student.

We have all been there – great lesson, well prepped, a mix of activities, differentiated, good pace and challenge. But troublesome/troubled [insert name of choice] decided to be defiant/swear at me/kick another student. Such conversations are commonplace. Every school has a shortlist of ‘known characters’ who, come September, we hope aren’t in our class and about whom we swap stories and commiserate together.

162 ‘Bloody SLT want us to do what now?’ – aka: blame the SLT.

Ah yes, the SLT. Those people who sit around creating new ways to hinder us from doing our jobs and who have forgotten what it’s like to teach a 90% timetable. A new initiative or expected whole-school system that needs to be implemented across the board, or the dreaded data collection point and how it will be used creatively in new and unforeseen ways to catch us out and demonstrate that we’re failing.

3 ‘The government/Ofsted are changing it all again!’ – aka: blame the government/Ofsted.

Although some of us can remember a pre-austerity Labour government, the fact is that changes during the 2000s provided just as much fodder for complaint and discontent in staffrooms as the Conservative/Gove-era changes that continue to provide animated discussion today. We like to point out the short-sightedness of the government and laud our own on-the-ground, real-life educational wisdom whenever we can. It makes us feel better.

4 ‘Can you believe what I had to deal with when I got home from school last night? And I still managed to mark a set of books!’ – aka: blame life.

Conversations quite rightly include what is going on in each of our lives, but like most people, we teachers will unwittingly find ourselves trying to score points by calling attention to and comparing our relative out-of-school hardships, because it helps us to justify why we may not be as ‘on it’ as we fear our colleagues may be. It can also serve to justify why the lesson we just taught was awful (even though we know it was down to the lack of prep we did).

All these conversations have one obvious common denominator: blame.

Here’s the problem with blame: when we blame we adopt and fully accept a position of powerlessness. When we say: ‘It’s not my fault it went wrong,’ we accept the conjoining assertion that ‘There’s nothing I can do to make it right.’ The one statement is the same as the other. Someone else did it, which means I can do nothing about it, which means I am powerless.17

It’s the archetypal human coping mechanism as immortalised in the Ch...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Problem and How We Can Fix It
• Part I: You – How to Live and Teach Well
• Part II: Leadership – How to Lead People, Not Schools
• Part III: School – How to Change the World One School at a Time
• Appendix: Whole-School Strategic Plan to Transform Wellbeing
• References
• About the Author
• Copyright