Get Your Mind in Shape to Teach

Teachers need to keep their minds in shape if they are to successfully shape the minds of the students they teach.

This week in the first of series of article about getting mentally fit and healthy,  we tell the story of Jane, a successful teacher who was unprepared to meet the emotional challenge of a class that came onto her timetable after six years in the profession. 

And we ask if Jane had been offered some exercises, tools and resources to help her keep her mind in shape how might her story, and the story of those she taught that year, have been different?

Jane versus 10X

Jane was a successful teacher.  

She had a Master’s degree in English Literature and knew more than most about Macbeth’s motives, King Lear’s grief and where Hamlet might find his father.  She had taught in the state school system for about six years.  10x were like many year-10 groups in the state system in London; challenging home environments, low reading ages, low attendance, low confidence.  Like Jane, they had been in the system for about six years. Although Jane had been a successful teacher, 10x were not, in the context of school, successful learners.

 Jane moved schools and found herself in North London teaching 10x.   A year later, Jane left teaching forever.  

 However, I believe if she had been given regular access to emotional support, including a framework for understanding how and why emotions can overwhelm and sometime devastate our efforts to teach, things might have been very different.

 There are Many Teachers Like Jane

 How many teachers leave teaching due to stress?  Although workload is cited as the biggest reason for teachers deserting the profession, the emotional heft of leading a classroom, comes pretty close. 

 You will know, if you have read my blogposts, that I am an advocate of making emotional support part of the fabric of teacher training and practice.  It’s at this point that you might be tempted to turn the page because, unlike the clarity of a maths problem or the safety of decoding a quote from Macbeth, emotions feel chaotic.  Please don’t. 

 Emotions are formless and visceral rather than linear and concrete. As such, we expend a lot of energy both individually and institutionally denying their influence.   Anyone who wants to talk about how they feel is labelled as having ‘mental-health issues’.  

 But we all have minds, we all have an emotional compass and just because we might want some help re-orientating that compass at times, doesn’t mean we are on the verge of mental collapse.   However, if time and again we find no opportunities to test our inner preoccupations against external ‘reality,’ as you might in a structured group, the more we can become convinced that our inner reality IS real and so act on misguided misconceptions. 

Get Your Mind in Shape Exercise One: Label Your Feelings and Rewire your Brain

Just acknowledging and labelling how your emotions might affect your behaviour is a great place to start.  If you have no group to do this in, simply journaling can be really helpful.

Studies have shown that simply talking about our problems and sharing our negative emotions with people we trust can profoundly reduce stress, and strengthen our immune system. (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988).

We can also experience a healing effect by simply noting and labelling our emotions (sad, angry, confused, ashamed, scared).  By naming our more negative feelings, we can watch them fade from our minds. We can become more mindful, centred, and at peace (Lieberman et al, 2007).  

Neuroscience studies have found that labelling our feelings reduces activation in the amygdala, our brain’s alarm system that triggers the fight-or-flight reaction.  When we give words to our emotions, we move away from limbic reactivity by activating those parts of the brain that deal with language and meaning in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (Lieberman et al, 2007).  We become less reactive, more mindfully aware and more able to think clearly.

Of course, friends can support one another in this way and do all the time.  What I’m suggesting is that this support be formally structured and offered as part of school CPD.

Jane Again

Unfortunately, Jane did not have this opportunity.  Instead of being encouraged just to say how she was feeling and having that acknowledged in a structured environment she was greeted by well-meaning but ill-equipped teachers who were busy navigating their own busy lives. 

When I first started teaching in a busy London Secondary school, I often got the feeling that even though colleagues wanted to support me, they had no time and were already ‘full up’ with helping students and themselves.  

I began to wonder whether I would have to actually lie down in the corridor and block the way to the canteen before anyone would actually acknowledge that I needed help.  Studying and applying some simple relationship psychology helped me but for many teachers, rather than lie down in the corridor, they isolate, self-blame, self-shame, stay home or, like 35000 last year, leave the profession for good.

What happened to Jane isn’t unusual.  

Her continued struggle with 10x was attended to with practical solutions. Nothing wrong with that except, it didn’t really matter what Jane did – it was who Jane was in the room that was in conflict with the students demands.  And who she was in the room was being driven more and more by the emotional overwhelm she was feeling going into the room day after day. 

Everything she tried communicated her shattered confidence.   

 Get your Mind in Shape Exercise Two: It’s Not A Blame Game

To blame pupils or individual schools would be to fall into the existing trap of blaming individual teachers for lack of insight or fortitude.  Schools always do their best in my experience and teachers likewise.  

With no tools to deal with negative emotions, we revert to our innermost solutions – denial and projection.  We pretend that emotions aren’t important(denial) or that if individuals, like Jane, were ‘better’ or more on top of things then they would be able to cope. (projection)

 The Challenge is Systemic.

 Systems bring together individuals to work towards a common goal.  But humans are emotionally sensitive creatures so systems need ways in which to channel this emotion rather than deny it.   

 When systems repress emotions, they don’t disappear, they go underground and find a way out in anti-system behaviours; cliques, fruitless meetings, hostile relationships, overblown reactions to simple disagreements, difficulty finding consensus and forward momentum, high staff turnover, departments struggling to work together etc.

So rather than blame or feel shame, what can be done. What can YOU do for yourself?

Get Your Mind in Shape Exercise Three: Teachers Need Clear Minds

Teachers, possibly of any group on the planet, need clear minds.  They enter the classroom as the conduit between the students and the learning.   They share themselves as much as they share the learning. To deny or repress our emotional selves is to cut off so much of our potential to connect, teach and grow.

So, some simple structured tools to help individuals share their emotional selves on a regular basis can free up our attention.  We can refocus by can getting beyond our difficult feelings and get on with what really needs to be done.    

 Studies show that acknowledging and recognizing others at work does more to boost self-esteem and morale than even a pay raise, as an incentive. Feeling acknowledged, being recognized and valued is integral to retaining employees. Exit polls and surveys show people change or just leave jobs simply because they did not feel seen, valued or appreciated.

So, how can you appreciate others around you? How can you take steps and make time to listen to them? How can you teach yourself to listen with more intention rather than jump in to offer advice?

Get Your Mind in Shape: FREE tools and resources from A Mind to Teach

 If you would like to access some FREE tools and resources that will help you think more clearly about the impact of emotions on teachers, teams and organisations, choose from the menu below. 

 1.     Some suggestions on how to begin a peer facilitated support group, get in touch here.

2.     Receive a simple exercise on how to listen to colleagues more actively and helpfully get in touch here.

3.     Learn more about the psychological dynamics going on in any classroom and how to overcome them. Access to my FREE 25 video lesson ‘The Big Present; Psychology’s Gift to Teachers” here

4.     Access my series of three FREE short you-tube webinars on dealing with the emotional impact of the unknown here.