How I survived career failure and learned to love teaching again. Part Two: Bouncing Back from Career Failure

Post by Kristian Shanks

A version of this blog was presented at New Voices 2019

After my fourth unsuccessful interview for a responsibility post, and knowing that the dreaded formal capability letter was imminent, I resigned without a job to go.

This was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders – now I could focus on what I needed to focus on which was finding a new job.

It took me a long time to process the fact that I’d probably have to look at a mainscale teacher post – I honestly found this a humiliating setback and a clear sign that I was a failure, that I hadn’t performed or hadn’t coped.  The massive drop in pay wasn’t great either – thankfully my wife was incredibly supportive even thought it meant potential changes or delays to her plans to significantly reduce her hours and so on.

I got offered a position on my first interview for a mainscale job at an RI school – but was really impressed with the Head’s vision and ideas which chimed with my own, and with the Head of Department who spoke a lot of sense.  They were also able to look past my struggles at my previous school and could see the wealth of experience and success as a teacher that I could bring which was reassuring.  I also liked the idea of being part of the challenge of helping to improve a department.

The best thing was the fact that I could really re-engage with my subject again, and I think this was another big problem with the SLT job.  A big part of my teacher identity had been built on being a History teacher, a guy who loved his subject, was really passionate and nerd-ish about it – and being on SLT meant I had to move away from that which I found really tough to accept.

Now it wasn’t smooth sailing at my new school – there were still some issues that the school was working through, and coming into a department where there had been huge amounts of supply cover was really difficult.  You can’t just turn that around in one year, especially when learning new specifications on top of this, and the results after Year 1 were the worst any GCSE class of mine have ever had by a long long way.  Again my confidence took a bit of a hit although thankfully my results were similar to those of our Head in a different subject and overall we’d had a really poor year as a school.  Thankfully in Year 2 – the first on the new 9-1 GCSE qualifications, our departmental results skyrocketed and this really helped make me feel like – ‘Oh yeah, I’m actually OK at this teaching lark’.

Again I also felt like I could do more with the experience that I possessed.  That frustration and a sense that I was at a crossroads again led me to apply to my current school in a Head of Department role (having been unsuccessful for a similar job in a different school).  At that point, my feeling was if I don’t get this – I’m out.  I had an interview lined up for a role at TeachFirst which sounded interesting, and a couple of other education-but-not-teaching type jobs that looked interesting.

As it happened, I think feeling like that really helped me to be really candid in my interview for my current Head of Department post and I was successful.  I’m now in a school where I’ve been able to move on, develop my practice, be fairly autonomous in my role and continue to immerse my love for History.

What has helped me to bounce back?

·       Firstly, it goes without saying that having a supportive family and friendship network was massively important and I couldn’t have done it without them.

·       From a purely professional point of view, it was re-connecting with what I enjoyed about teaching which was actually my subject.  I love History and I came into teaching as a way to continue to be engaged with my subject.  I’ve joined the Historical Association, I get to go on network meetings with other History professionals and talk History, and I’m part of a Teacher Fellowship programme with the HA on the Korean War (where I got to go to Athens for a few days) and basically my job and my hobby are really able to collide.

·       I think the online education world has been massively helpful.  I was always fairly traditional in my views about teaching and have always tried to shy away from doing independent group discovery learning tasks on the sly, even if I knew in certain observations making sure I was not seen as the sage on the stage was important.  Having engaged with twitter and blogs I’ve now come across loads of people who think similarly to me, but articulated all those ideas really clearly and had some evidence behind them as well.  People like Tom Sherrington, Stephen Tierney, Ben Newmark, Becky Allen – their blogs were the gateway drug into the Twitter world for me.  It has helped my practice so much, and helped me to firm up what I believe about teaching.  A recent example has been the fabulous work by Matt Pinkett and Mark Roberts called Boy’s Don’t Try.  I’d always hated that ‘boys like competition’ and ‘boys want to learn about war’ rubbish in terms of how we should teach boys.  I’ve always been pretty good at getting boys motivated to do well in History, and I think that’s more because I’m an absolute swot and just try to pack lessons full of interesting content rather than silly games and tasks which just didn’t feel appropriate for that age range and cohort.  It seems that those guys kind of support that view too.  Rather than not having the courage of my convictions, possibly I veer too much the other way when confronted with aspects of teaching that I disagree with (for example, the obsession with made up data, our harmful accountability regime, and weakness over issues of behaviour management).  Managing this is an internal battle I am trying to win.

·       I’ve also sought some outside coaching from a non-teacher – and I highly recommend this if you’re stuck at a crossroads.  Teaching can be a profession where people get trapped because the pay and security are pretty good compared to other professions.  Going to see someone outside of our ridiculous job might help you to have confidence you can do other stuff if that’s what you want to do.

·       Now, I feel like the direction I want to go in is to eschew the traditional management type route and really become a more active part in my subject community and helping to develop other teachers.  We have an NQT in the department this year who is fabulous, and I’m trying to do what I can to reach out where possible to other History networks and our local university History ITT providers.  I’m not sure I can do another 45 years in the classroom or however long Iain Duncan Smith wants us to keep going for, and therefore trying to build a side portfolio of ‘other stuff’ may provide some opportunities. 

Whereas three years ago I was a jibbering wreck and had no confidence I now feel, whatever happens next, I’ve got a bit of a plan and ownership over what I’m doing, and that has been really important in keeping me going and helping me to bounce back.

How I survived career failure and learned to love teaching again. Part One: The Anatomy of a Career Failure

Post by Kristian Shanks @HistoryKss

A version of this blog was presented at New Voices 2019

In April 2015, things could not have been better in my teaching career.  I’d spent five wonderful years at an outstanding secondary school in West Yorkshire, been part of a fantastic History department that consistently gained superb results, I’d been acting up on SLT there for the previous year, and had just gained an Assistant Head’s position at a nearby school as Head of Sixth Form, a job I’d wanted to do pretty much since entering teaching.  To boot, I’d just got married and was soon to find out my wife was pregnant with our first child together.

By May 2016 I’d resigned from that position without a job to go to (a case of jumping before being pushed) and had gone back down to being a main-scale teacher – I’d been badly burned and it felt like I was being relegated back to square one.  To compound matters, I’d bounced round the interview circuit looking for posts with responsibility and failing at that too (and deservedly – I did not interview well at all).  My mental health was probably not in a good place – not ideal when you’ve got a newborn on the scene as much as anything else!  As much as anything I felt like an absolute failure and that it was humiliating to go back to a position I’d not been in since the second year of my teaching career.

Now, I’m a Head of History in a good school in North Yorkshire, and really enjoying the job again.  I now feel in a position to reflect in a more analytical way about what went wrong, what lessons I take from the experience and to hopefully share my story to help others who may find themselves in a similar situation.

What went wrong?

This is a question I’ve thought a lot about most days since handing my notice in for that job.  I identify four key problems:

The weight of responsibility

·       I was not prepared for the weight, or burden of responsibility that SLT brings.  Frankly, I was too inexperienced to live with it, especially in a school context that for various reasons was not as favourable as the one I left.  I’d just live and die with every mistake or problem that came up (and there were many).  I’d get massive ‘Sunday dread’ and work every hour going and it still didn’t feel like I was doing enough – especially as things would proceed to go wrong during the week!  I was just not really prepared to feel this way, and I think a lack of experience was problematic here.  I’d done a range of different roles in my previous schools – but was looking for something weightier.  On reflection, I should have been looking at Head of History roles (a position, crucially, I’d not done before) as I think that would have been better preparation for dealing psychologically with the challenge of leadership.  I was at that time fairly ambitious and wanted to move up the ranks, as it were – in hindsight I should have been more patient and thought much more about what I wanted to do rather than what I felt like I should have been doing.

Lack of experience

·       In addition, I hadn’t worked in enough schools of different types.  When you stay for a while in one school, especially one that’s successful, you can become institutionalised.  That makes it harder to transition to a new context, especially one that did not have a history of success.  I was joining a school graded Inadequate six years earlier (but ‘Good’ when I started), with some financial issues and a school roll that had cratered – affecting the Sixth Form numbers I now had some responsibility for.  I was not prepared for staff who fundamentally mistrusted SLT and seen a revolving door of them come and go (4 heads in 7 years).  I was not prepared to inherit a Sixth Form where previous colleagues running it had both hated each other and both resigned at once and there had been a bit of a void in the direction and leadership and where students, who’d gone through the full gamut of problems, felt a bit betrayed.  Also I hadn’t realised how hard just being new is – you’re nothing when you move school.  It’s not like football transfers where a new player carries a reputation with them.  In a new school, especially one with high staff turnover, SLT or not you’re just another new face that’s probably not going to last very long.  When you then all of a sudden can’t control the behaviour of your class because the personality and systems you’d relied on before were no longer present or didn’t work, you had a problem!

Having the courage of your convictions

·       I don’t think I really knew what I thought then, or at the very least my beliefs were tentative.  For example, I knew at that time I didn’t really feel comfortable with grading lesson observations or work scrutinies.  I wasn’t sure why I didn’t like it – it just didn’t sit right with me.  Now my employer also happened to share that view, which was good, however we were in partnership with another school Sixth Form that didn’t share that view.  We used to do joint QA work and as part of this they did grade some work of our staff, which was then fed back to some of our colleagues directly by that school.  You can imagine the emails of outrage from those colleagues and rightly so.  Why hadn’t I said something?  Why hadn’t I said – “We don’t this here?”  As the only member of our school involved in this QA exercise and as SLT I got a pasting for that one from all corners – and not undeservedly.

Alignment

·       This was a big one – I fundamentally at that time did not share the same view of where the school was and where it needed to go as did my colleagues.  That becomes impossible to sustain when you’re being asked to do things you don’t really believe in.  In particular, it seemed to me that the school felt that the issues were faced were to do with teachers and their effectiveness.  To me, the issue was that behaviour was extremely poor and that fixing this would be the route to improved outcomes.  When my Deputy Headteacher and line manager said to me that basically it doesn’t matter how good the system is, it’s about the individual teacher’s relationship in the classroom with the students, I thought we had a bit of a problem.

Ultimately, I was essentially ‘managed out’ of my position with the informal support plans that aren’t very supportive.  Resigning before anything worse could happen was, in the end, a massive relief.  I could now focus on starting again and rebuilding without trying to cling on to this job that I didn’t like and didn’t seem to be very good at.

 

In Part Two – I’ll explain how I did that!