Fire up your teacher engagement

Richard Endacott shares his game-changing tactics and techniques to help teachers, educators, head teachers and coaches embrace and engage with change in order to motivate.

How do you engage the disengaged teacher is a question being increasingly asked within education. We all know a handful of teachers that are within our organisations – indeed there have been a number in every organisation that I’ve been with – who perhaps are coasting.

For me, these are the teachers who are your biggest risk and red flag markers. These individuals are the ones who could make or break an Ofsted inspection, impact upon a school’s performance tables and more often than not can have a real negative impact on the people who surround them.

Whilst no teacher intentionally sets out to be apathetic or difficult, it has become a frequent issue that needs to be solved. Personally, from a management perspective, the starting point is needing to understand the backbone and ask why is it that this teacher is disengaged?

“A teacher needs the opportunity to sit back and reflect upon a particular lesson that they’ve taught.”

As a head teacher, it is vital in the success of your school that you clearly establish what it is that you are trying to achieve. The key question here is whether your teachers do too?

You will have written your school development plan, various different brochures and documents outlining the school ethos and mission statement and everything else to showcase a clear understanding of the school. But do your staff know this?

We know that external people know this. We know that potential students, potential new recruits, know this. It may be uploaded for reference on your application process for a new role in your school, but do existing staff have access to it? Ultimately, if your existing staff don’t know where you are going and aren’t on-board with the mission statement, then they are very unlikely to follow you in your lead.

In a classroom, you understand the barriers which are the barriers to learning. It could be that a student has a difficult home life. It could be that they have certain difficulties with learning. But for each of those students, you know, as a classroom teacher, what each of those barriers are. It has to be the same for teachers.

Teachers I have spoken to feel as though they’re a hamster on a wheel. That they are running as fast as they can, but they’re not getting anywhere. A teacher needs the opportunity to sit back and reflect upon a particular lesson that they’ve taught.

If we can build in time to reflect, if we can give that opportunity to the teachers to review their own practice, not only will we get better practitioners, but you’ll also find that the relationships between teaching staff and senior staff begin to improve.