Working Hard To Appreciate Each Teaching Day
The importance of making each moment in my classroom count
Teachers can find themselves in difficult situations at school which can challenge their mental health strategies for staying well.
In my teaching career spanning 30 years, I’ve been in some challenging situations.
I’ve found myself in classrooms where students don’t want to learn and have ignored what I say, refused to do as asked, and in some cases they have been abusive and sometimes violent towards me.
Senior leaders who should have been helpful and supportive weren’t able to fulfil their roles.
Usually, when I faced a challenge in my teaching, I’ve had to stop and think hard about how to deal with it. But after a while of feeling stuck, a little voice in my head would remind me that gratitude could help me climb back up into the light and give me strength to face the challenges that I faced at that time.
Those moments when I take the time to think got shorter as I became more experienced as a teacher.
Learning how to hold the class
It hasn’t been easy at times.
I’ve been lucky to have great colleagues who always supported me in difficult times when teaching challenges and run ins with senior leaders were serious issues. I am grateful to my fellow teachers for hearing me out and giving me some great advice.
I know that I’ve been in a privileged position helping students to move on in life. I’ve not been able to reach some students, and that’s sad, but I hope that I’ve contributed positively to their lives.
Gratitude for all that’s happened in my teaching career, including the bad days and weeks, is more than just a feeling. I’ve built up a gratitude bank account in my head and the deposits sit there in the back of my mind. I can usually pull out previous examples of how I dealt with a challenging class by tapping into those deposits.
How I recognise and work with gratitude in my life
Over the many years I’ve taught, I’ve had some great mentors.
My mentors didn’t always know that they were mentors. They were teachers who inspired me to find the best in each day’s teaching, no matter how difficult and tiring the day had turned out.
After a couple of years, I started to write down all the useful ideas that worked which helped me meet the challenges that I faced head-on. I am grateful to all of them for giving me great ideas.
Here are just a few of those ideas that I’ve used and found uplifting when I was feeling down.
1. A Gratitude Journal
I used to take a few minutes each week to write down the things that I was grateful for. This was sometimes difficult when I felt down, but if I dug deeper into all those weekly memories, I could always find something, no matter how small, to be grateful for.
Self-reflection could be calming and often helped me start the day more positively.
2. Expressing my appreciation
Other teachers could be supportive at times when I wasn’t at my best. I’ve had teachers who have taken my classes when I wasn’t feeling well and needed to take time out. Sometimes it’s parents who send a card at the end term telling me how much I’ve helped their children progress.
It’s great to feel valued as a teacher. It’s sad that it happened so infrequently for me.
3. Doing a mindfulness practice
I used to get to school early in the morning when it was cold and dark in the winter. Having battled through traffic, it was always great to park and get into the school building early. Twice a week I used to do a 10 minute meditation practice from my playlist before I started work.
Meditation helped me start the day feeling energised and ready to go.
Making the Most of Each Day
I’m not saying that gratitude solved all my challenges, but it helped me to reframe and see things from a different perspective.
Once I got into a grateful state of mind, I would usually find that the energy I had put into worrying about what could happen during the day would go away. I could really enjoy teaching and get into the flow and dynamics of the classroom. I noticed that I couldn’t feel angry or anxious when I was feeling grateful so I tried to hang onto the grateful feeling for as long as I could.
I’ve always believed that a teacher does their best work when they are able to connect with their classes and teach in the way that they know works well for them and their classes.
Finding something to celebrate each day
Looking back on my 30 years of teaching, of which 25 years were spent in a classroom, I’ve realised that the time has gone so quickly and that I was lucky to have the opportunity to create great memories of teaching my students and to do something that I loved.
Each day I tried to do these things to make my teaching go well.
1. Setting teaching intentions for each day
I’d begin each day with a simple clear intention.
If I had a class who were finding a topic difficult, I would be determined to make sure that everyone understood that topic by the end of the lesson.
I had a year 9 computer science class once, where a large number of students struggled to understand what a database was and how it could be useful. So we talked about data in our lives, and how it could be stored. Then we’d look at a real-life design for a database and try to appreciate the thinking that had gone into creating it.
Then I got my students to put together a database of their own on a topic that was important to them. It could be a music list, or a list of computer science terms, or a list of events that would be coming up for them over the next few weeks.
Time was limited, so working together in pairs, they made more progress on this task and having help from their peers often helped with their understanding.
2. Embracing new experiences
I loved stepping out of my comfort zone and trying to learn new things that would help me teach better.
But there were so many occasions when I sat in staff meetings and learned nothing new. A lot of what my new learning came from courses I chose to do once I had left school.
I did a 2-year course on weekends on Neuro Linguistic Programming and how it could help learners to achieve success in their studies. Each weekend, I discussed what I had learned with like-minded people and found that the concepts I worked on gave me lots of ideas on helping my students to be the best they could be.
2. Prioritizing Self-Care
It took me years to look after myself. I think as the oldest child in my family, I was taught that I needed to take care of my younger siblings, and when I became a teacher, having classes that I was responsible for just reinforced that idea.
Time for myself was rare, and when I did have it, I often didn’t use it well.
Now I know better, and I make sure that the time I have for myself is well spent doing things that leave me feeling that I used the time well.
Keeping my curiosity going each day
I like to think that threads of kindness, curiosity, and gratitude run consistently through my life. I’ve had difficult periods in my life, but knowing that these will pass helps them to fade away more quickly.
By embracing gratitude and teaching with intention, I can make the most of every moment teaching my students.
It’s the little moments that add up to a day that I can later reflect on and feel great about, because I know that I did my best to make sure that it went well.