20 How Do I Thrive Teaching?

Joan had finally taken a turn in her teaching career. Joan’s first few years of teaching were all about learning her craft, gaining her confidence, and learning how students responded to her methods. Joan then spent a dry spell, wondering where her teaching and life were headed. But not long ago, Joan had realized that she wasn’t likely headed anywhere in either her career or life. Chances seemed good that Joan would remain where she was, doing what she was, for a long time. At first, the realization had depressed her. Yet soon, Joan began to take satisfaction in having found her place in life. And then, Joan began to discern how she just might be able to thrive in her teaching.

Thriving

Teachers shouldn’t just hope to survive their teaching careers. Teachers should instead seek to thrive. You need not suffer in order to be a good teacher, at least not suffer unfairly or inordinately. Every role brings a degree of challenge, necessary to spur one’s growth and develop one’s character, while learning to live not just for oneself but also for others. Yet suffering through a teaching career isn’t the point. The opportunity exists to thrive in the role, to relish teaching each day in a way that makes it a gift and privilege, even if also occasionally or even frequently a challenge and grind. With the flurry of demands that teaching continually makes on one’s attention, the question is how to mentally and emotionally step back just a bit to ensure that the role doesn’t overwhelm one’s spirit, submerging it too deeply and fatally in the role. Unless one has that rare perfect match of personality and role, as some seem born to teach, to thrive in teaching can take periodic psychological or spiritual check ins, followed by adjustments in attitude, insight, and course.

Persona

Unless you were absolutely born to teach, not trained, prodded, and molded but instead created for the role, your teaching likely requires you to adopt and project an identity or persona that is not wholly who you are. We develop and deploy personas when we discover that the roles and relationships we find ourselves encountering demand from us demeanor and behavior different from our natural own. You may, for instance, find yourself unconsciously putting on your teaching face as you walk into school and then removing that face as you leave school, to resume acting more like your natural self in your neighborhood and at home. You may even find your spouse or other close acquaintance outside of school having to remind you to relinquish your teaching persona. Or you may catch yourself inappropriately deploying your teaching persona outside of school, such as toward your spouse, children, or neighbors. The point is that your teaching persona can submerge the deeper authentic you, the one who isn’t putting on a mask, even if a useful mask to the particular role. 

Separation

To thrive in teaching, don’t lose sight of your authentic self. You may not know exactly who that authentic self is. Most of us don’t. Indeed, our authentic self lies so deep within us as not to be someone who our conscious mind can readily define, if articulate at all. The unknowable quality of your authentic self is its power, holding your potential, which circumstances must help your consciousness slowly draw out. You know your authentic self by discerning through circumstance, by listening and sensing, even intuiting without fully formed thoughts. Your authentic self is that person deep within you who is not playing a role shaped by social norms, cultural customs, and professional demands. Recognize that while nearly everyone in your school community, except perhaps your closest colleagues, see and define you as a teacher, as essentially related to your teaching role, you are not that role. You were not that role before you taught, and you will not be that role after you are done teaching. To thrive, keep at least a sliver of separation between you and your teaching role. That sliver of separation may be all you need to hear your authentic self telling you to rebalance, rethink, and even transform, to truly prosper in the teacher’s role.

Adventure

When you keep a degree of separation between yourself and your teaching role, you can treat teaching as the grand adventure that it is. If instead the role consumes you, you won’t have a ground on which to anchor it. A boat needs a keel, a centering weight dropped at the deepest point into the water. When a boat has an inadequate keel, too shallow, off center, or too light, waves rock the boat left and right. Without a keel, the pilot cannot steer the boat on a straight course. Wind and waves will carry the boat off course, onto the shore and rocks. When you keep a degree of separation between you and your teaching role, you give your teaching journey a keel to manage the waves and wind, and keep yourself on course. When you stay in touch with yourself, you can remain the discerning guide of your own teaching journey. You can feel the wind and see the patterns of the waves in order to expertly navigate both. You can also see the adventurous destinations you want to reach, as your progress gradually reveals them to you. Stay in touch with yourself. Heed the creator’s spirit deep within you who wants you to reach his glorious destination.

Privilege

When you keep in touch with the creator’s spirit deep within you, that holy whisperer who holds your deeper desires and needs, you can more readily reckon your teaching journey not as a hazard but instead a privilege. You don’t control the wind and waves of teaching. If you need to control everything, then teaching may not be for you. Teachers may have less control over their circumstances and the outcomes of their efforts than in nearly any other profession. Yet when you have control of your own boat crossing those rough waters, the crossing can get significantly easier, so easy as to make the journey a joy, boon, and privilege. Teaching has tremendous natural advantages to it, among them its generally clean and safe environment, weekday and daytime working hours, choice of dress, and position of authority. Teaching also has at its core the great privilege of guiding others presumed to be less knowledgeable and capable than oneself. When you teach, you are in a position of remarkable privilege, expected to pontificate usefully throughout your day. Not everyone gets to do so. Most workers take orders throughout the day, rather than give them. Relish your privilege, and thrive in it.

Success

Teaching, with its privilege of guiding others, has a distinct measure for its success. You can thrive in the role when fully grasping and pursuing that distinct measure. Teaching success isn’t exactly the teacher succeeding. A teacher doesn’t win by growing stronger and more accurate, to carry the ball further down the field or put more balls in the basket. A teacher doesn’t demonstrate success by showing a portfolio of the teacher’s grand designs or great artworks. Rather, teachers measure success by the progress, growth, and accomplishments of students and graduates. Students are a teacher’s canvas. Thus to thrive in your teaching role, don’t measure yourself. Don’t count your own hours, efforts, titles, awards, and accomplishments. Instead, count student successes. After each school term, reflect on the student growth you discerned. After each school year, spend the summer preserving portraits of the struggling students with whom your year began and the caught-up and confident students with which your year ended. Accept every request to write recommendation letters for students, and then preserve those letters as your best evidence of teaching success. To thrive in teaching, have the correct, student-centered measure for success, and revel in student successes. 

Truth

Teaching has an essential orientation toward truth. To thrive in your teaching, realize, honor, and pursue that orientation. Ditch diggers don’t think much about truth. They instead dig ditches. Teachers, though, have the role of continually pointing students toward truth. Teachers could teach deceptions. But they don’t, or at least they try not to do so. Seeking truth involves responding to the call that the subjects of thought project from their essence. You are not manufacturing truths when calling them to student attention. Truth isn’t merely propositional, not simply knowledge, opinion, or judgment. Truth is instead that which it describes, the matter itself, a primordial connection with the thing you teach, whether an act, event, person, or relationship. When you teach, you are observing material circumstances to discern their patterns, to share those patterns with students for their predictive value. You are orienting students to how to proceed in the world consistent with the principles governing real material circumstances. Your teaching authority is in your submission to truth and your willingness to share it with students as a participatory form of obedience. Pursue that deep definition of teaching, and you will thrive in the role. 

Development

You can also thrive in your teaching role when you embrace the broader and deeper goals of instruction. The truths that you teach are not simply factual truths. They are also purposive and normative truths. Your teaching does more than convey knowledge. It also fosters student purpose within a community of shared interests. You teach students their autonomy, helping them to think originally for themselves as independently responsible actors. You also teach students what they and other things should become through their efforts, fostering their efficacy and entailment. You also teach students the connections they need to maintain with the thinking of others, showing them that their thinking is inter-subjective, meaning shared with others. You also teach students objectivity, requiring that they connect their assertions to verifiable truths. And you teach students that their thinking should be universal in the Kantian sense, that replicating their thought would make a better world if everyone else also followed it. Recognizing these deeper and broader aims of your teaching can help you relish the role and thrive in it. 

Relationships

Teachers also flourish through empathy in relationships. Teaching is extraordinarily relational. If you’re not other-centered, naturally interested in the welfare of others, then teaching may not be for you. Consider instead taking up a career in engineering or accounting. To thrive in your teaching, develop your teaching relationship with students and colleagues. Students benefit when they know that you care about them. The more you exhibit that care, the more they care about their studies and themselves. Students can come to school with serious empathy deficits, feeling alone and uncared for in the world. Teachers can be a lifeline for students, even to the point of influencing them away from suicide or other acts of self-harm or harm to others. You may not need to impress yourself with your teaching. You may have accomplished everything you wish in your teaching role, whether in mastery, leadership, or reputation. Yet students may need you more than ever. When you make supportive student relationships your teaching goal, you give yourself a constant source of meaning and ministry in your teaching role. 

Support

You can also thrive in your teaching by building and maintaining a strong support network. Don’t make your teaching a solo flight. Instead, get the support that you’ll likely need. Your support network should ideally include home and family relationships. Your spouse and other family members may be great supporters and solid guides, keeping you balanced and grounded. Your support network should also include at least one and perhaps several colleagues. Your colleagues know what is going on in your school. They share your challenges and can thus be especially good guides for how to navigate them. They also share your opportunities and can be good guides for how to pursue them. Your support network, though, should also include professionals, whether teachers or in other fields, outside your school. You may benefit from time to time from the perspective of a professional who is not immediately involved in matters going on in your school. Your support network should also include your physician with whom you have annual health checkups. You may also want or need your support network to include a mental health professional. Friends, neighbors, fellow church members, and members of recreational groups you join can also support you. Don’t go it alone. Bring along a vital support network on your teaching journey.

Reflection

On a scale from one to ten, how would you rate whether you are thriving or merely surviving in your teaching role? What do you discern that you might do to thrive rather than merely survive in your teaching role? Are you able to separate your teaching persona from your deeper self in which you are not playing a social or professional role? Do you have a sense of your deeper self providing a counterweight or balance for your teaching role? Do you see your teaching as an adventure and progressive journey? Or is your teaching overwhelming you and throwing you off course? Do you see your teaching success as evidenced by the growth of your students? Do you have a concrete way of capturing and celebrating those student successes, in some form of portraits or portfolio? Do you recognize the deep value of the constructs that you teach and how they can guide, inform, and transform students? Do you recognize that your teaching is fostering autonomy, efficacy, and objectivity in students? How committed are you to maintaining supportive student relationships? Do you have a strong support network for your teaching role? 

Key Points

• You can aim to thrive, not just survive, in your teaching career.

• Recognize that you are projecting a public persona when teaching.

• Separate your teaching persona from your authentic self for stability.

• Stay in touch with your deeper self to guide your teaching adventure.

• Your deeper self can construe your teaching journey as a privilege.

• Measure your teaching by student success rather than your own.

• See the truths that you teach as real, purposive, and normative.

• Recognize that you also teach autonomy, efficacy, and objectivity. 

• Center your teaching on strong student and colleague relationships.

• Build and maintain a support network around your teaching role.