THE JOY OF SCHOOL – #LOVEWHEREYOUTEACH

When you’ve been teaching for over 25 years, it’s very easy to lose your mojo when it comes to school life. I think it can happen anytime in your career but I was definitely struggling just before Covid struck and since then, there hasn’t been any sort of rebound. It’s never about the classroom though. I love teaching but it’s just everything else and post-Covid, it has only got worse due to the amount of additional work that schools have been asked to do.

I’m still trying to find a way out of my current mood and in that respect, I recently read ‘The Joy of Work’ by Bruce Daisley, who has a hit business podcast called ‘Eat Sleep Work Repeat’ and is the ex-Vice President of Twitter. I found it very interesting and started making notes that I thought might be useful for applying some of the research and knowledge in that book to schools. So here goes, I hope it might be of interest. Obviously my reflections relate to the school that I teach in, which is by the way, a great school to work in but I’m a Kaizen man…always looking for continuous improvement!

1. Staff Lunch Club – one of the big things I’ve noticed over the time I’ve been a teacher has been the death of the staff room. This has been due to workload issues but also the way new buildings have individual staff rooms for departments. This means you don’t bump into anyone anymore and you lose connection with your colleagues. Silos form and before you know, the bonding that you need for schools to work has disappeared. It has also been the case at my school that eating in the dining room along with the students has disappeared. The staff table has very few people in it where previously it used to be a hotbed of conversation across departments where you got to learn about little tricks that you could use with different students or at least appreciate that we were all in the same boat when it comes to the more interesting characters in lessons. So what can you do to bring about these really important informal discussions? Well…is it possible to offer a free sit down meal once a week to staff? Can you arrange a staff lunch club once a week? Or encourage trips to the staff room by offering free tea and biscuits one day of the week? It might be costly but if it leads to more well connected, happier staff, then it pays for itself.
2. Walking Meetings – one of the changes I made to make myself happier was giving up being Head of Faculty, mainly to avoid Heads of Department meetings. It sounds a bit odd to give up pay for that but I just hated those meetings with a passion. In ‘Joy of Work’, there is a lot of talk about meetings and how to get the best out of them. Most of the time at the HODs meeting, you are discussing an issue and then feeding back. The problem is that there are often too many people and certain voices dominate. To improve this, I think the idea of walking meetings is a good idea that’s worth trying. Randomly pairing up HODs and telling them to walk around school for 7 minutes discussing it. Apparently it’s very good for creativity and problem solving. They can then feed back after that time. Also, being creative and solving problems is much harder to do after working long hours and being stressed. Why are so many meetings that are hoping to solve problems held straight after school? Can you switch to morning meetings (if you need a meeting at all…this is another thing the book discusses) or at least build in an obvious break before beginning the meeting? Most of the time staff are rushing straight from their classrooms. School days are stressful…SLT should really expect no good ideas to be suggested in after school meetings.
3. Buddy Systems – The social side of school, as already mentioned, is vital for staff wellbeing. One way of connecting people is to have a buddy system for new members of staff. I’m sure this happens at many schools but does it happen across departments? I think it would be really good that a new member of staff should have a buddy from the other side of the school, so a new Maths teacher would have a History buddy or a new Science teacher would have an Art buddy. Not only will they see a different side of school life but they will both collect different information from other areas of school to pass back to their own department. Another idea that could be taken from the book is getting members of staff (pick 3 at random) to just talk about themselves at a staff meeting – how long have they been teaching? Why did they get into teaching? What have they been most proud of as a teacher? What are their hobbies outside of school? What’s their favourite joke? It might be a bit embarrassing at first but if it is done regularly it becomes the norm and staff will connect more.
4. Invite a Random – When you work in a team, it’s very easy to get into groupthink mode after a while. I think a really interesting way for SLT to avoid this is to invite a different member of staff to SLT meetings each week so that you can get an alternative viewpoint on things. It can be quite easy to forget what it’s like to teach a full timetable and have a form. It will also enlighten the member of the staff to see how decisions are made at a senior level and how tough it can be. It’s a win-win on both sides. It’s very important though that the chosen member of staff feels free to speak openly and is asked to comment without judgement. The book suggests some ways of doing that, such as using a visual to depersonalise the conversation.
5. Hack Week – Giving staff time to do their own thing is really important when it comes to motivation. We have done this on training days before and we call them Fed-Ex days. This is good in terms of what Daniel Pink talks about in Drive – autonomy, mastery and purpose. Teachers have been allowed to choose their own focus for a CPD day and can visit anyone they wish or do anything, as long as it links to improving themselves as a teacher. No marking allowed! But a ‘Hack Week’ seems quite different and you can imagine it working quite well in school where for a week, you drop all regular meetings and you just focus on one area of school life and at the end of the week, you all get together and celebrate the ideas that that could really improve the school – themes could be behaviour, school site, communication, social side, T&L…anything really but there has to be an openness to discussion and framed in a way that it’s a problem that everyone is trying to solve.

What do you think? Are these good ideas or not? Are they workable? Does your school already do some of these things? If these were introduced, would you find yourself writing tweets that included the hashtag #LoveWhereYouTeach? Hopefully most of them make sense without reading the book but if not, read the book! The key takeaway for me is that schools should be trying to create an environment where staff bump into each other more on a regular basis to create a ‘positive affect’ and that all members of staff know that they can speak up on issues and feel ‘psychologically safe’ in order to create that ‘buzz’ (as Bruce Daisley defines it) within their school.