On the joy of being a (class) teacher
Is the shortage of teachers a result of the profession being made less attractive?
by Margrit Brügger*
(31 October 2022) Rebellious children, demanding parents threatening to sue, excessive administrative tasks, the curricula and official inspectors who often aren’t helpful at all to pedagogy – class teachers are confronted with all this and on top of that often massively hindered in their work. Alain Pichard has described the diverse, sometimes trying tasks of a class teacher.1 So, how can you speak of the joy of being a class teacher?
The alarm clock rings at 5.30 a.m. A day with seven lessons lies ahead of me. I don’t feel fit at all when I carry out my morning chores. I would rather go back to bed. Besides, yesterday’s private discussions are still on my mind. Alas, it’s no use – I have to go! At 6.45 a.m. I’m at school, briefly sorting out my preparations, writing the last items on the board, maybe making a few photocopies.
Then at 7.15, it’s time to start. The students come in. We greet each other with a handshake and I’m fully engaged in the interaction with my students. With each and every one of them, I am again aware of his or her situation, what happened yesterday, how he or she was doing. Here and there I make some short remarks, express my interest in one or the other, my sympathy and that I’m well aware of him or her.
Of course, the students are chattering, noisy, walk about. They don’t automatically sit down and look at me expectantly. That is my doing. It also works: I stand in front of the class, look at the students, in my eyes and my posture there is the expectation that they will become quiet, shift their attention to what I have to say to them, what we will do today. Of course, I sometimes make a direct appeal to everyone, for example, “It’s time to start, please, sit down!”, or to a particular student, for example, “Ghökan, do you need a letter of invitation?”.
It doesn’t matter so much what I say, these are not magic words. What matters is that I am certain they will listen to me that they sense it’s about them. I have to be fully present and be happy to stand in front of them with an awareness that we are now about to embark on something important and exciting that will involve everyone, where everyone is needed. It does work.
It works because children and young people are adult-oriented. It works even better when they feel it concerns them, when they feel liked and they are being taken seriously. Young people are also not per se disinterested or against adults. They want to be noticed, they want to be part of a community, they want to learn something and achieve something.
The lessons begin. And with it a multifaceted interaction between the students and me and among the students themselves. We learn, that is, we deal with subject matters, acquire insights, understanding, skills and abilities. In this work there is a recognition in each other, we are in an exchange, we get to know each other better, we experience each other, we build relationships. At the end of a school day, I often realise that I have completely forgotten my private worries, that my morning tiredness has given way to surging energy and motivation. Only after the last pupil has said goodbye, I realise just how exhausted I am. Most of the time my attention and my presence in the relationships usually lasts until then.
“To educating professionally in a pedagogical relationship and to educate through subject matter”2
Being a teacher is, of course, about teaching subject matter; mastering the methodological and didactic craft is a prerequisite for success. But then it is first and foremost relational. From the moment the students enter the classroom, I am fully present, ready to receive them, to shape what happens in the class, to promote learning processes, to encourage, to guide, to initiate relationships, also to guide conflict resolutions.
Pupils want something from the adults, we can guide them, encourage them, listen to them, be a role model, engage with them, take a full interest in them. We can bring pupils together to form a class community in which everyone is significant, in which mutual help lives, which gets things done jointly. Or to put it differently, a class is “a community that works together on the subject matters at hand and grows together as persons in the process.”3
The joys you experience as a teacher when you help a young person to overcome discouragement by supporting them to learn successfully is something I can hardly imagine in any other profession. To awaken in young people an interest in the world, to open their eyes to biological or physical phenomena, or simply to help them read a text in such a way that they can understand it, to solve a mathematical problem with the help of a rule of three, solve the mysteries of percent calculations, show them how to sew their own clothes or build a sturdy shelf, or also conducting a discussion in a bitter argument among them in such a way that they learn to listen to each other in spite of being angered and enraged and thus to see the other’s point of view, to understand and to find a way back to each other.
The list of meaningful learning contents, human and interpersonal development opportunities is so endless and varied. Regardless in which subject, at which level, in which type of school: where do you have greater opportunities to have an effect, where can you relate more abundantly, more directly and more genuinely in relationships, where can you more effectively accompany, support, educate and mould young people?
Needless to say, subject teachers are also important and can achieve a lot of significant things. As a class teacher, especially in school types and levels where you teach your class for many hours, you can set the tone, the atmosphere in the class to a big degree. If you are alongside the pupils throughout their school life, take part in all the festivals, events, camps, etc. with them, have talks with parents and develop life plans – secondary school, career – with them, you have a great deal in your hands to shape the goings-on, the mood in the class, to encourage, to promote a class spirit.
Where are the young teachers?
This raises the question of why today many teachers prefer to teach subject-specific lessons rather than to be a class teacher. And even further: why are there too few teachers in the first place? The teacher training colleges in Switzerland proudly report that they train a lot of young people. But, where are they? We also learn that a large number of fully trained teachers leave the profession after only a short time of teaching. Why?
After all, they chose it, so they probably intended to do it. Professor Jochen Krautz, confronted with this question as a teacher trainer, agrees that young people enter this profession with the hope of helping children and young people to have a better life. But then “they are trained in the coldness of the PISA empiricism, taught to ‘evaluate’ and ‘optimise’ the ‘output’ of their methods and techniques. Pedagogical relationship? For God’s sake – how unprofessional!
What commitment remains must survive further training to become curriculum fulfillers and the overwhelming demands of an insanely controlled and bureaucratised everyday school life.
And yet, at the bottom of all pedagogical action remains hope. If it dies, pedagogy dies and with it the human meaning of school. What is the point of a school of skills training, output measures and digital devices? What is the point of being a teacher for that? Many teachers, young and old, are currently despairing of this.”4
Nevertheless ...
I’m defying it. Until now. I try to maintain the agent recognised as being essential for learning in school, namely being in relation and its formation. I stick to classroom teaching. The effectiveness of this form of teaching has been empirically proven many times over.
Michael Felten, coach for teachers and consultant for school development, explains, following the Hamburg educational scientist Herbert Gudjons, that “this form of teaching is highly efficient and plannable, it allows lively interaction and the development of a culture of discussion and social cohesion, it offers diverse feedback possibilities and a broad variety of methods, and it enables using the potential of the whole class”.5
With this clear insight, why are we being asked to use increasingly fragmenting and isolating self-centred learning methods? It’s absurd, but I almost do in secret what works well for my students. I only go along with as much evaluation, measures and self-centred learning methods as is unavoidable. But all of these are superfluous, aggravating and sometimes harmful influences that make teaching more difficult for me and sometimes put me off. I feel increasingly cornered and heckled.
I know of quite a number of experienced teachers who retired earlier because they could no longer stand the constraints to which they were subjected to and the difficulties of their profession. Wouldn’t it be possible to win many of my colleagues back to teaching if they were finally freed from this unnecessary ballast? And wouldn’t many young people once again find joy in this profession, which an experienced psychologist once described as the most beautiful of all, if they were again properly trained and allowed to enjoy building relationships with their pupils?
(Translation "Swiss Standpoint“)
2 Jochen Krautz. Images of Education. For a Renaissance of School. Munich 2022, p. 27
3 Ibid. p. 37
4 Ibid. p. 137
5 Michael Felten. “With the whole bunch”. In Praise of Classroom Teaching. Gesellschaft für Bildung und Wissen e.V., University of Cologne, 2022, p. 18. https://bildung-wissen.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Flugschrift3_digital.pdf