and Keeping Teachers in the Classrooms (Zarra, 2018) and Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay (Santoro, 2018) continue to emerge. Simultaneously, teachers’ websites gain traffic through posting provocatively titled pieces such as “The Exhaustion of the American Teacher” (Kuhn, 2013), “Why a Teacher Cannot Have a Normal Life …” (Trosclair, 2015), “Teacher Burnout or Demoralization? What’s the Difference and Why It Matters” (Walker, 2018), and “Why Teachers Are Walking Out” (Nichols, 2018). What is most disconcerting about these articles is that they are autobiographical in nature. These are not dry journalistic tomes of discouraging data harnessed to justify minor policy changes or pedagogic tweaks. Instead, the teachers writing these articles are trying to sound an alarm bell, or at least elicit some community concern, about the profound changes occurring within the teaching profession in just a short amount of time. Their pleas are deeply personal. Their wisdom is born out of struggle, not detachment. Together these writings speak to an underlying reality that teacher stress and strain cannot be a figment of teachers’ collective imaginations.
And yet many teachers enter the profession with positivity, optimism, and even idealism. Teachers at all grade levels and in all subject areas understand the classroom has a pulse of magical possibility in it; as teachers, we are imbued with the privilege of possibly making the ultimate difference in students’ lives. The words travel writer Horatio Clare (2017) uses to describe a new journey in his book Icebreaker: A Voyage Far North could just as easily be the words and sentiments of teachers at the dawn of every school year: “I experience one of those leaps of the heart, of love and thrill for the world, a euphoric gratitude for life … for which there can be no one word in any tongue” (p. 2). A potent appreciation for a lifetime spent shaping and influencing young minds is why teachers in the twilight of their careers often possess a quiet but palpable sense of contentment. They are rarely rich or famous, yet they know that their careers have been forces for good in the lives of many people. They have experienced too many “leaps of the heart” to feel otherwise. So how do teachers negotiate 21st century stressors and the ambitious, passionate spirit that drove them into the profession in the first place?
Adapting to the Changes
A fellow history teacher in the district where I teach, who also happens to be my older and wiser brother, Howard, said something that I connected with as I was writing this book:
The problem with the constancy of change for us teachers is that after a while it eventually just becomes noise. This is daunting on a million different levels. But the worst part is teachers who can’t cut through the noise never flourish. They just get by. (H. Adams, personal communication, December 2018)
Teachers at all grade levels, no matter where they find themselves in their careers, must be able to confront the constancy of change in education so that they do more than merely “get by.” And my goal with this book is to assist them in doing so. I want to empower teachers to flourish. I want to impassion them to excel. The best teachers possess dexterous skills—some pedagogical and professional, some personal and intellectual—that allow them to successfully manage those changes that define the teaching profession. Thus, this book aims to help teachers adapt to the never-ending process of reform and change so that teaching remains both vital and meaningful to them.
As any veteran teacher can attest, there comes a moment in every teacher’s life when the newest wave of reform no longer appears as an opportunity to ride higher and cultivate fresh skill sets. Instead, new waves become menacing in their constancy, forces of nature that must be endured if one is to continue the odyssey of classroom instruction. From this perspective, it should surprise no one that anxiety and apprehension are fixtures in the lives of teachers.
This book offers a sensible approach to change that is both sympathetic to the various difficult situations teachers often find themselves in and positive in the belief that teachers can find, or recover, the deeper meaning of everyday classroom instruction. Hence the title—finding this deeper meaning hinges upon teachers riding each wave of reform, recognizing it as one they can deftly navigate, not one that will surely overcome them. As David B. Cohen (2017), author of Capturing the Spark: Inspired Teaching, Thriving Schools (Cohen, 2016), has argued, “The question is whether or not educators can make choices or select strategies that seize the exciting potential of change without feeling so overwhelmed that we want to leave the field” (p. 34).
Strengthening Key Relationships
An oversimplistic view of teaching focuses exclusively on instruction between the teacher and student, and usually only on instruction that occurs within a traditional classroom setting for a prescribed amount of time per day. But teaching requires more than basic interaction with students—our commitment to education includes obligations, interactions, and relationships with colleagues, administrators, and the public. Thus, to equate education with teaching is to misunderstand both.
Teachers who enjoy their profession and prosper in it do so because of the relationships they cultivate: relationships with the students they teach, the colleagues they teach alongside, the administrators they report to, and the broader communities they serve. But during a time when schools’ and teachers’ professional responsibilities never seem to lessen, it is common, and natural, that we feel strained in ourselves and in our relationships. As any teacher can explain, these stresses and strains start at the individual level. And we carry them with us wherever we go. They haunt us even when we are not on the job or in the classroom.
To appreciate the magnitude of the strain that constant change places on teachers, consider the five concentric circles in figure I.1. Imagine that in the innermost circle is a mirror in which a teacher can view only the stress and strain within him- or herself. Every time the teacher steps back into a wider circle, a complex web of entangled relationships is revealed. When the teacher steps back from the first circle, it is obvious that the strain and stress of constant change also affect his or her relationships with students and the classroom. Another step back, and the teacher can see other teachers on campus and the ever-shifting dynamics among colleagues. The next step back reveals the office, filled with administrators attempting to implement macro policy on a micro level—a process rife with tension and anxiety for everyone involved. Finally, on the outermost circle, the teacher sees the community, which grows increasingly frustrated with schools and educational outcomes, while the teachers within these schools feel misunderstood and unappreciated by the public they serve.
FIGURE I.1: Five relational circles of classroom teachers.
Each part of this text will address one of the five pivotal teacher relationships and common questions related to it.
