The Lives of Teachers

Citation

Oplatka, I. (2012), "The Lives of Teachers", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 50 No. 2, pp. 252-254. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231211210602

In a report written recently by the international consulting group McKinsey & Company, it was ardently claimed that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, i.e. that the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction. With the commonly held understanding of the teacher's critical role in school effectiveness and improvement, Day and Gu's book is a welcome and important contribution. This book provides fundamental insights into the lives and careers of schoolteachers from a holistic perspective of what it is like to be a teacher in our time of accountability and standardization. Specifically, the authors pay attention to the emotional aspects of teaching in terms of anxiety, fear, passion, enthusiasm, and so forth, and portray a career story that is far beyond content and pedagogical knowledge solely.

The book is divided into three parts and ten chapters. The first part – the context of teaching – contains two chapters. The first chapter provides an international, research‐informed view of the new teaching environments in which governments across the world tend nowadays to intervene in the classroom life and curriculum of schools, which is accompanied by decreasing public trust in teachers' professional judgments about what and how to teach. The reader is also exposed to the political and historical processes that have brought about major changes in schools and teaching (e.g. proletarianisation, intensification and emotional uncertainties), and becomes acquainted with universal features of education reforms, the most relevant of which for this book is governments' propensity to pay very little attention to teachers' identities, emotions, well‐being, and commitment.

In light of this public perception of teachers, the authors devote the second chapter to stressing the importance of understanding the person behind “the teacher's gown”. They discuss contexts and conditions which impact positively and negatively on teachers' lives, including the organizational learning cultures and their key role in teacher professionalism, teachers' professional identities (who they are, their self‐image, the meanings they attach to themselves), and emotional wellbeing (e.g. job satisfaction, intention to leave, tension, anxiety). The authors rightly conclude that “teachers at their best combine their professional craft expertise with their personal selves in their work … ” (p. 38), i.e. that one cannot understand the professional without the personal, as these two dimensions are inexorably linked in the teaching profession.

The second part of the book, ’the professional lives of teachers,’ composed of four chapters, displays key factors which critically influence the capacities of teachers to teach at their best. Chapter three sets the stage for the division of the teacher's career cycle into distinctive professional life phases that cause variations in teachers' tasks, career issues, and effectiveness. A teacher's career trajectory is divided into six phases according to length in post (e.g. 0‐3, 4‐7, 8‐15), beginning when the teacher first steps into class and ending in retirement. In light of this view, the authors employed a critical incident technique through which they could trace “turning points,” critical influences, and transitions that sustain or hinder teachers' commitment in the stories of schoolteachers from three different professional live phases. For example, from the story of Chris, a teacher in early career stage (4‐7 years in teaching), we learn about the strong impact of collegial support and workload‐related tensions upon a new teacher's career advancement and resilience, while from the story of Laura, a very senior teacher, we learn about the importance of people‐sensitive leadership in times of change, especially for late‐career teachers. The authors also highlight the need to gain a holistic view of the teacher's professional live in that understanding of teachers' work and lives over time requires examination of the multiple contexts in which teachers work and live and the critical influences that affect their commitment and well‐being.

The next three chapters elaborate on the analysis of the teacher's professional life phases. In each of these chapters, the authors discuss the major issues concerning teachers in a particular professional phase (e.g. novice teaches are in need to develop a sense of professional self in their interactions with their colleagues, pupils and parents; mid‐career teachers face stagnation vs. growth), and identify the factors sustaining and hindering teachers' commitment in every phase. As far as beginning teachers are concerned, four stories of teachers from this phase illustrate the effect of leadership and supportive staff community on improved self‐efficacy and greater sense of belonging, particularly among those who strive to survive and succeed in schools serving highly deprived communities. After all, it is widely accepted that novice teachers' support and empathy from their superiors and colleagues are of critical significance for their survival in their highly stressful job in our time.

In contrast, mid‐career teachers have to sustain their commitment, resilience and capacity to teach to their best after working many years in the classroom, which makes the teachers at this phase very vulnerable to stagnation and decline. Based on past research and on their study, the authors emphasize the different responses of teachers to this phase; some tend to sustain engagement and strong sense of self‐efficacy, while others feel a sense of detachment and diminishing motivation. There are also teachers that increase their motivation and commitment as a result of career advancement and good pupil results. Here again, four stories of mid‐career teachers are brought up to illustrate the internal processes they experience at this period of their professional lives. They tell us that mid‐career teachers experience a critical transitional phase in terms of their commitment and growing work demands.

Most illuminating, and in my view, innovative, is chapter six in which the authors analyze the lives of veteran teachers in a phase usually termed as “late career,” on which our knowledge in the context of teaching is very meagre. The authors pose a very interesting question: how and why do veteran teachers continue to fulfill their calling to teach? After letting us know that approximately half of the teachers in this phase sustain a strong sense of motivation while the other half tend to hold on but lose motivation, and following the stories of four teachers, the reader becomes aware of the importance of the provision of an appropriate and responsive support in their work contexts. It is likely, then, that the veteran teacher's educational values and sense of vocation are important but are insufficient for his/her ongoing high levels of commitment, motivation and resilience. The emotional contexts of life in schools and classroom, as the authors concluded, are the main source of positive job attitudes for teachers in the later phases of their career.

Part three summarizes the condition for success in teaching across different career phases. The first three chapters in this part discuss different aspects in the teacher's life, such as the place of teacher commitment in the success of teachers and the plausible effects of changes in the external environments of the classroom on growth or decline in professional lives, the effects of leadership, and the significance of resilience. I enjoyed reading chapter eight as it connects between two seemingly different sorts of literatures; that about educational leadership and that about the teacher's career. Through personal stories of teachers and a thorough analysis of the literature about organizational trust, the authors highlight the salient role of the school leader in the success of teachers, their well‐being and continuing commitment. Briefly, the leader should be trustworthy, flexible, committed, passionate, and participative in that he or she should create a shared school vision with the staff and build “a school culture that promotes teachers' collective agency, efficacy and professional learning and development” (p.155) that are necessary conditions for teachers' ongoing capacities to teach most effectively in all professional life phases.

The last chapter brings together the main issues discussed in the book chapters and examines possible distinctions between teachers who lived and worked in the previous century and those of our time. Of the many insightful parts of this chapter some conclusions worth highlighting: experience of teaching does not necessarily lead to expertise, support is critical to maintain teacher capacities to strive always to teach to their best during the professional lives, quality teaching is not related to knowledge and skills solely but also to the passion teachers bring to their work and to their resilience and commitment. In a time of standardization and accountability that glorify measurement and numeric outcomes, this conclusion ought to be taken into consideration if the decreasing of teacher stress and distress is prioritized.

The text is well organized and well‐structured enabling both scholars and practitioners to benefit from the host of ideas, insights and empirical data arising in the book chapters. This is a book the reviewer found very useful and illuminating as it provides an international point‐of‐view to what seems to be the characteristics of teacher's career that cross national boundaries. The authors very wisely devoted a substantial part of the book to emphasize the emotional component of teaching and the yearning of many teachers to voice this component in their career story.

Despite some weaknesses (e.g. a lack of reference to work about the teacher's life conducted in non‐English speaking countries published in recent years in English, the overlooking of literature about midlife and late career in vocational psychology and developmental psychology), the book is highly recommended for instructors who work in teaching training and professional development programs for teachers, who are interested in gaining more holistic knowledge about the teacher's professional life, as well as for policy‐makers and superintendents.