I feel like a failure
At some point every year I will have a conversation with a beginning teacher who confesses that they feel like a total failure.
“I just don’t think I’m up to the job,” they say. “I just don’t seem to be able to do it”.
The common denominator in these conversations is the background of the beginning teachers. Invariably these are talented and incredibly hard-working people. Due to their intellect and dedication, they have usually experienced success in whatever endeavour they have cared to turn their hand. Now they are faced with the reality that, no matter how hard they work on their lessons, sometimes it just doesn’t go to plan or work out as they intended because they are no longer the only variable involved in the outcome. Post lesson conversations with their mentor may be the first time they have experienced critique, especially critique on something they have genuinely poured their heart and soul into. For these beginning teachers it doesn’t just feel like a professional failure when a lesson goes wrong—it feels like a personal indictment of their intelligence or worth. They feel cheated: I worked hard, therefore I should have succeeded. They struggle to separate the act (the lesson) from the self (the teacher).
It’s just not what I thought it would be
Every year I will also have at least one conversation with a beginning teacher who is struggling because the blueprint of ‘school’ stored in their mind—the model of what a pupil is, what a teacher does, and how learning happens—is not reflected in the reality of their placement.
“This isn’t what I thought teaching would be like,” they say. “I didn’t think I would have to work so hard to motivate my students.”
Perhaps their prior experience as a pupil was one of quiet, high-attaining classrooms, where good behaviour was the baseline, and success came easily just from being clever and diligent. Now, they are in a vibrant, complex school, where pedagogy, classroom management, and even the simple act of maintaining a student’s attention require skills they never had to observe, let alone practise. Their dream, of becoming the teacher they most admired growing up, now feels impossible. They feel lost, and that feeling is devastating.
Personal development to forge a professional identity
This is why teacher training is not just about lesson planning or curriculum knowledge. It also involves personal transformation. It is why teachers, no matter how much natural talent they have in the classroom, are created rather than born.
Most beginning teachers think their ITE year will be about learning how to stand in front of a class and speak with confidence to share the subject they love. They expect to learn practical and theoretical skills to prepare them for the classroom and meet professional standards. Rarely do they come into their ITT year appreciating how much of a role their own sense of self and their self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) will play in their journey to becoming a teacher. Nor do they arrive expecting to undergo a process resulting in emotional and personal development. Their experiences as a beginning teacher place them in positions where they are forced to recalibrate their understanding of their ‘personal domain’ (Clarke and Hollingsworth, 2002) as they adopt their new professional identity. This is something they almost certainly never imagined when they applied to undertake their training. No wonder it feels uncomfortable.
Self-reflection that strengthens professional resilience
In these two, very common, conversations, the beginning teachers are beginning to engage in the self-reflection that is required to strengthen their professional resilience. They are learning that:
- Critique is a professional tool, not a personal weapon. It is not criticism. Lesson feedback that critiques the beginning teachers’ classroom practice is not saying they are a failure. Instead, it is saying, “You are working hard, but your current skill-set is not yet sufficiently developed to anticipate and manage everything required by this incredibly complex job. Here is the next step to improve.” Learning is a process of errors. That’s not a failure; that’s a requirement for growth.
- The beginning teachers’ experience as a pupil is not the definitive model of schooling. This means they need to leave their experiences at the door and accept that effective education can come in many different forms and is highly contextual. To be effective as a teacher, they need to engage with the reality of their current students’ context. This is an act of learning, and it is to be expected that this will feel hard.
Part of the process
In both conversations I hope the beginning teachers leave convinced that their feeling of struggle is a positive sign of their development of a beginning teacher. It’s not that they aren’t up to the job, rather they need to set aside their preconceived notions of what success in the classroom looks like. They have to let themselves be a novice and accept this means they have things to learn. And they need to meet their pupils where they are at, not where they think they should be. This is part of the process.
References
Bandura,A.(1997). Self-efficacy:TheExerciseofControl. NewYork,NY:Freeman.
Clarke, D. & Hollingsworth, H. (2002) Elaborating a model of teacher professional growth, Teaching and Teacher Education, 18 (2002), pp. 947-967. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0742-051X(02)00053-7
Resources
Becoming a History Teacher 