Serving Up Success: Helping beginning teachers to embrace change and growth

Back in March, British tennis player Jack Draper secured his first Masters 1000 title at Indian Wells, the biggest title of his career; securing a Grand Slam title now seems likely.

I’m not an avid tennis fan but my ears pricked up when I heard Annabel Croft’s radio analysis of Draper’s victory, highlighting his improved emotional control, contrasting his current calmness with his junior days. She noted specific routines he’s built into his training, including on-court breathing exercises, which seem to have helped him change his demeanour on court. Draper himself mentioned in January his increased “robustness,” crediting his physical trainer, physio, and the professional support he’s received for anxiety.

Jack Draper’s story made me consider one of the biggest challenges beginning teachers face: the need to overcome personal beliefs and self-perception to develop and adopt the behaviours of a teaching professional. All too often, beginning teachers express the view that they’ve ‘always been like this and can’t change’ or that the requirements of the job are overwhelming and unfeasible. Increasingly, they often expect that the job will accommodate them rather than embracing the need for them to adapt to the demands of the job. In these moments, how can we help beginning teachers to see themselves in a different light?

Relationship between beginning teachers’ personal and professional identity

Discrepancies between a new teacher’s personal values and ways of being and the realities of the profession, can create significant emotional hurdles that impede their professional identity formation. Nichols et al. (2016) have highlighted the interplay between a teacher’s emotions, actions, and evolving identity, while Yuan & Lee (2015) have explored the influence mentors and peers have upon the formation of beginning teacher identity. Beginning teacher identity is consequently fragile and complex (Lindqvist et al., 2022) developing through interacting personal beliefs, external stimuli, classroom practice, and its consequences (Clarke & Hollingsworth, 2002). Interestingly, this aspect of beginning teacher development is rarely made explicit to beginning teachers, or even their mentors.

The observation and feedback cycle can present a significant challenge for beginning teachers who are struggling to reconcile their personal and professional identities. Even experienced teachers find the reflection and feedback cycle challenging, hence the need for mentors to avoid ‘judgementoring’ (Hobson & Maldarez, 2013), but for beginning teachers the relentless frequency of the cycle is felt acutely. When beginning teachers have negative, perhaps even unprofessional, reactions to feedback, my experience suggests these often stem from issues connected to their personal identity. Emotional or defensive responses can be self-protective behaviours developed as a response to their past experiences, leading them to perceive feedback as criticism rather than professional critique. Similarly, instinctive ‘fight or flight’ responses to poor student behaviour often reflect their prior experience of tense or confrontational situations, rather than a lack of knowledge about behaviour management techniques.

The expectation of the profession at large is that beginning teachers will learn to manage their emotional responses. Isenbarger and Zembylas’ (2006) case study of a teacher managing their emotional response to their role, reveals the ‘challenges and struggles of suppressing or neutralizing one’s emotions in teaching’ but suggests that ‘the difficulty can also be seen as exciting rather than simply as alienating’.  Meanwhile, Hadar et al.’s (2020) study explores the idea that beginning teachers need more support at the start of their professional career to develop social-emotional competencies to manage their personal response to challenge and the uncertainty often experienced by teachers. Mentors can therefore help their mentees by making the process of constructing a teacher identity explicit. 

Beginning teachers’ need to understand that emotional volatility, defensiveness, and anger are not favourable characteristics in teaching, whereas caring (Isenbarger and Zembylas 2006) and constructive professional engagement are expected dispositions. Building a professional identity often involves self-reflection and behavioural adjustments to improve their resilience in emotionally challenging situations. Developing this ability to constructively handle situations they perceive as distressing or unpleasant (but which are a fundamental and necessary part of their new professional role), is vital if they are to avoid the fight or flight response that might otherwise be triggered.

Practical Support

What can we do then if we have a mentee who is struggling to formulate their teacher identity, who seems resistant to professional development and growth or is unable to move beyond their own personal identity in their new teaching role?

Use a model of professional growth to frame your mentoring conversations

• Share with them a visual model of professional growth (such as the Clarke and Hollingsworth (2002) model) that explains how teacher identity is formed.
• Discuss openly the aspects of personal identity, positionality, values, and beliefs your bring to your role as a teacher. Encourage them to do the same.
• Consider how critical incidents in your own teaching journey have acted to shift your viewpoint and helped to shape your teacher identity. Share these with your mentee and help them to draw out key moments from their journey so far (those they perceive positively and those they view negatively) and the impact they have had.

Provide your mentee with a resource to do some work on their starting points and emotional responses to pressure.

• Direct your mentee towards the ‘Building Resilience in Teacher Education’ BRiTE materials (https://www.brite.edu.au/) and encourage them to engage with the Personalised Self Quiz and linked materials. This helps beginning teachers to build awareness of their own starting points and the skills and practices that will help them to navigate developing resilience as they build their teacher identity. It is particularly useful for highlighting their own priorities areas for development.

Coming into form

Jack Draper’s rise to form did not happen overnight. He has worked to improve his self-belief, resilience, and robustness in the face of his sporting challenges. Beginning teachers too need to work on cultivating their professional identity alongside developing their classroom practice competencies. Maybe we can all learn something from Draper?

References

Clarke, D. & Hollingsworth, H. (2002) Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18 (2002), pp. 947-967

Hadar, L. L., Ergas, O., Alpert, B. & Ariav, T. (2020). “Rethinking Teacher Education in a VUCA World: Student Teachers’ Social-Emotional Competencies During the Covid-19 Crisis.” European Journal of Teacher Education 43 (4): 573–586. doi:10.1080/02619768.2020.1807513.

Hobson, A. & Malderez, A. (2013). Judgementoring and other threats to realizing the potential of school-based mentoring in teacher education. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 2 (2), 89-108. [Article]

Isenbarger, L., & Zembylas, M. (2006). The emotional labour of caring in teaching. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22(1), 120–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2005.07.002

Lindqvist, H., Weurlander, M., Wernerson, A., & Thornberg, R. (2022). Emotional responses to challenges to emerging teacher identities in teacher education: student teachers’ perspectives on suitability. Journal of Education for Teaching, 49(5), 798–811. https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2022.2152982

Nichols, S. L., Schutz, P.A., Rodgers, K. & Bilica, K. (2017). “Early Career Teachers’ Emotion and Emerging Teacher Identities.” Teachers and Teaching 23 (4): 406–421. doi:10.1080/13540602.2016.1211099.

Yuan, R., &  Lee, I. (2015). “The Cognitive, Social and Emotional Processes of Teacher Identity Construction in a Pre-Service Teacher Education Programme.” Research Papers in Education 30 (4): 469–491. doi:10.1080/02671522.2014.932830.