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Exceptional Teachers: Identities and Involvement
Pat Sikes & Pam Cole
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Glamorgan, 14-17 September 2005
School of Education.
University of Sheffield
388, Glossop Road,
Sheffield,
S10 2JA
Exceptional Teachers: Identities and Involvement
Introduction
A great deal is talked these days about ‘work-life’ balance. There is widespread concern that people are spending increasing amounts of time working to the detriment of their physical, mental and emotional well-being and at cost to their relationships and family life. In the UK, the TUC, went so far as to designate February 25th, 2005, Work Your Proper Hours Day and encouraged workers to start and finish work at the ‘correct’ times, to take a ‘real’ break, and eat a ‘proper’ lunch.
Teaching has always been a job with the potential to expand to fill the time a teacher is prepared to put into it. In recent years though, the requirements of Ofsted, the literacy and numeracy strategies, statutory assessment, recording and reporting and other administrative, curricular and pedagogical innovations and demands mean that all teachers have relatively heavy workloads. Indeed, the workforce reform agenda officially recognises this by introducing statutory non-contact time for classroom teachers and by enabling Teaching Assistants to take on a wider range of roles and increasing responsibilities than has been traditional.
Life history research (e.g. Sikes, Measor & Woods, 1985; Sikes, 1985; Huberman, 1993) suggests that the time, energy, effort and commitment that a teacher is voluntarily prepared to put into their work depends upon:
- where they are biographically positioned;
- where they are in their lives and careers; their expectations and aspirations for their future;
- the meanings they attribute to and the satisfactions they gain from their work; and,
- upon the sort of teacher/professional they want to be and be seen as being.
And, of course, some people are simply energetic enthusiasts!
In this paper the emphasis will be on exploring and re-presenting the perceptions and experiences of a group of what would seem to be ‘exceptional teachers’ – exceptional in terms of their engagement with, and the amount of time they commit to, work and professionally related activities. These people (working in primary and secondary schools and FE colleges) are in receipt of Gatsby Fellowships which enable them to pursue projects aimed at developing teaching and learning in the fields of maths, science and design and technology. The personal and professional identities these teachers hold, within the framework arising from their biographies and their specific work situations, would seem to be important influences on how they make sense of, approach, do, and experience their work. Notions of identity as fluid, shifting, and as formed and informed through discursive practices and social interactions will be a key theme of the paper which makes use of data collected as part of an on-going independent, ‘illuminative’ evaluation (see Parlett & Hamilton, 1972) of the Fellowship scheme. This evaluation is being conducted by Pat Sikes and Pam Cole from the University of Sheffield.
The Gatsby Scheme, the Evaluation, and the Fellows
The Gatsby Teacher Fellowship programme was established in 1998 by the trustees of the Gatsby Technical Education Projects (GTEP), a separate charity set up by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which is one of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trusts. The programme aims,
to identify teachers of mathematics, science and design and technology who can make a significant contribution to the effective and inspirational teaching of their subject. The fellowships are for one year and provide an honorarium and support funding to allow the holder of the award to carry out innovative curriculum development and, where appropriate, gain further professional qualifications. (GTEP, 2004)
Up to 12 Fellowships are awarded each year. Applicants, of whom around 10% are successful, are required to submit a proposal detailing their project, explaining how it will contribute to their own professional development, making a case for its innovative and valuable nature, and outlining plans for local and possibly national, dissemination. Projects vary. Some focus on pedagogy, others on curriculum or subject content, others on ways of organising teaching and learning. However, in some respects most touch on all of these.
The overall aim of the evaluation that we are undertaking has been to gain some insights into the ways in which individual teachers experience being Gatsby Fellows. The emphasis has been on personal perceptions of what Fellowship means for teachers’ professional practices, beliefs and values, for their career development, and for their lives as a whole. In concentrating on the subjective, personal, idiographic and emic, our interest has been in exploring, collaboratively with the teachers concerned, whether and if so, how, they feel that their pedagogy and their views on teaching and learning with regard to their subject and more generally, have altered as a consequence of the Fellowship. The Gatsby programme seeks, in the first instance, to impact on individual teachers, to encourage them to identify and acknowledge their own personal areas of excellence and to enable them to pursue and develop innovative and effective teaching which they then will have the confidence to disseminate. Thus, a reflective, narrative research strategy is an appropriate means of eliciting the type of information that can indicate these sorts of effects. It also, inevitably, yields data pertinent to identities, self-perceptions, career motivations, personal aims, goals and how people report spending their time.
Robert Bullough (1998) has noted that ‘when seeking to explain why something happened in a classroom, increasingly the road to understanding takes a biographical turn, not a detour….. the public and private cannot be so easily separated in teaching….. the person comes through when teaching (pp. 19 - 21). We share this view and, consequently have also taken an holistic, life history type of approach (see Goodson & Sikes, 2001), being conscious of the potential significance of Gatsby Fellowship for career plans and wider life experience.
Since our emphasis has been on the Fellows’ own perceptions and experiences, our data collection has been largely unstructured in that we have not used rigid schedules of specific questions on the grounds that these would tend to lead to specific answers, thus narrowing the scope of the information obtained. We have, however, worked around themes and have followed up shared and highlighted issues and areas which have emerged from the accounts people have given. (In other words, we have taken a ‘grounded’ approach.)
Gatsby Fellowships are intended to help teachers change and develop their classroom practice. Fellows, who work on a particular project they have designed, receive a bursary of £3,000 which they can spend on materials, equipment, supply cover, or training (as appropriate), and an honorarium of £1,000. During their Fellowship year they are required to give presentations at an event held at the Royal Society and at Gatsby’s own conference at the University of Warwick in June. This last is attended by the next year’s cohort and past Fellows.
There were ten Fellows in the 2004 - 2005 cohort, distributed in terms of subject area and sex as shown in Table 1 (N.B. names are pseudonyms and are given to allow readers to track comments).
Table 1 – 2004 – 2005 Cohort
FemaleMale
Design & TechnologyRebeccaSam
SarahJoseph
ScienceZoeJohn
Carol
Karen
MathsAshrafPeter
Our strategy was to collect information from all of the Fellows over the course of the year. This took the form of:
- Email communiqués sent to the entire cohort
- Face to face and telephone interviews with six fellows
- Participant observations
Email communiqués sent to the entire cohort
In October and November, 2004 and February and April, 2005 we sent emails to all Fellows which contained ‘directives’ in the style of the Mass Observation project. That is, we asked people to write discursively in response to prompts, with the exception of the April communication which asked people to complete an activity log, detailing the types of activities they were involved in during a working week of their choice (see Appendix 1). We timed our communiqués to fit into the sorts of timetables and workloads Fellows had, both with regard to Gatsby events and project progress and in the light of SATs, GCSE and A level commitments. Thus: in October we invited people to tell us the stories of how they became Gatsby Fellows, how they came to hear about the scheme, what prompted them to apply and what their experiences had been so far. Nine out of the ten Fellows replied. November’s communication asked for reflections on how the Fellowship project was working out in practice, what was working well, what was less successful, and sources of satisfaction and frustration. Seven people replied. In January Fellows gave presentations about their projects at a gathering at the Royal Society in London. February’s email focused on this experience, on what people had done, on how they had prepared for it, and on how it had impacted upon them as teachers specifically and in a more general sense. There were nine responses to this. April’s activity log elicited six replies. Two Fellows replied to all four communications, six replied to three, and two replied to two.
Face to face and telephone interviews with six fellows
On the basis of their subject area, sex and geographical location (for ease and economy of access) six Fellows (see Table 2) were selected for more in-depth work.
Table 2 – In-depth Informants
FemaleMale
Design & TechnologySarah
Rebecca
Science ZoeJohn
Karen
Maths Peter
We visited these people in their schools in the second halves of the autumn (2004) and summer (2005) terms, and spoke with them on the phone in March/April. Face to face interviews of between three quarters, to one and a half, hours were tape-recorded and transcribed and notes were taken during and immediately after the telephone call.
The autumn interview was fairly general in that it sought information on such things as: how the Fellow had come to Gatsby; where Fellowship fitted into their career to date and into any plans they had for the future; what their project involved in terms of content, pedagogy and expenditure; how things were going so far and expectations/hopes/concerns regarding development; how the project was received within their department, faculty and school, and its reception by and impact on, students and other staff; whether the teacher had been involved in any dissemination outside of school; and, their relationship with Gatsby and other Fellows. The spring telephone call focused on: their experiences of the RSA presentation and event; an up-date on how their project was going; observations on how Fellowship might be impacting upon their career development and trajectory, in terms of how it might have influenced their professional practice, beliefs and values, and with respect to responsibilities and positions they might apply for or be invited to consider; and, how Gatsby related activities fitted into their life as a whole. Summer interviews took the form of a recap of, and reflections on, the Gatsby year.
Participant observations
One or the other of us attended all of the Gatsby Fellowship events held throughout the year, starting with the Warwick conference prior to the evaluation actually commencing in September. We were able to meet, talk with and get to know the Fellows and to watch their presentations. All of the face to face interviews were held in the Fellows’ schools or colleges so we were able to see the environments in which they worked and gain some, albeit limited, sense of what sort of a place it was and what the students were like. Classroom observation did not prove to be a practicable option.
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In the space available here we can only dip in to the extensive data we have begun to amass. Our intention is to try and communicate something of our impression of the ‘specialness’, the enthusiasm and drive of these teachers, with whom we feel privileged to have worked. Of course, speaking with us, responding to our directives and replying to our telephone calls was yet another demand on full diaries that was, characteristically, embraced as yet another opportunity to contribute, share experiences and collaborate in what they, and we, see as the joint educational endeavour of the present time.
Exceptional Teachers?
‘You go to a new hairdresser and she says ‘what do you do?’, and when you say you teach she then expects a lot of moaning. You then chat about what you do and 9 times out of ten people say to me you do really like it don’t you?’ (Zoe)
I’m having a big party on Saturday because I’m turning 30 next week. My mum said to me the other week, ‘you’ve fitted so much into your life and you’re not even 30 yet!’ Married, two children, then divorced and done so much with my career already! Gosh!’ (Karen)
As we have already noted, teaching has always been a job with the potential to take up as much time as someone is willing to give. When talking with Gatsby Fellows it very quickly becomes apparent that these are teachers who are prepared to give a lot. Without exception these people are extremely enthusiastic, highly committed, conscientious and hard working with regard to their work in general, the specific projects they are involved in, and life as a whole. Karen commented that,
‘I think I involve myself in too much really. If something crops up I tend to put my name down for it and then think how on earth am I going to fit that in?’ (Karen);
and much the same could be said of most of her Gatsby colleagues. Analysis of the Activity Logs (see Appendix 1) which we asked the Fellows to keep during a ‘typical’ week of their choice, showed that this was indeed the case. Six Logs were completed and returned and, bearing in mind the usual caveats about how people might respond to such an activity, they revealed that, in the course of the week, Fellows were involved in work related tasks for an average of 53 hours and 45 minutes, with the range being from forty two to sixty six hours. (This is an increase on the (already substantial) 51.36 average hours for all teachers and lecturers reported in the Labour Force Survey published in 2005.) Not surprisingly, the greater part of each person’s time was spent on activities related to their jobs as teachers (including teaching, lesson preparation, marking, administration, attending meetings, pastoral responsibilities), with the average time being 47 hours and 45 minutes, and the range from 35 to 57 and a half hours. Extra curricular activities and personal study for Masters degrees (which 3 of the informants were taking) were counted separately but this is really an artificial separation since both extra curricular activities and personal study are likely, in some ways, to inform and impact upon one’s work as a teacher. We asked people to note how much time they spent on Gatsby related work within their various activities and this came out at an average of 7 hours 20 minutes, with the range being from 4 to 10 hours. Of course, such figures can only serve as relatively crude indications but they do give some idea of the amount of time Gatsby fellows are engaged in what they (and we) consider to be, and have designated as, work related occupation.
Gatsby Fellows describe themselves as well organised workaholics, eager for new experiences:
I am a bit of a workaholic, very rarely would I go home and not do something for school. Obviously there are things you have to do like the marking and so on, but new initiatives, starting new things, that’s the stuff I find most rewarding. When I write myself, I’m a very big list person so I write myself a big list of what I need to do and ticking off that list gives me loads of satisfaction. So yeah I do work a lot, through choice. (Sarah)
A nice way to describe it is that I have excellent time and management skills. And I think if I was looking at it badly, I think I’m obviously a complete control freak… Underlying that yes, I am quite obsessive about getting everything done. But I’ve always been like that. I’m very, very well organised. And I don’t know whether that’s always a positive thing. And I’m quite good at doing lots of things at once. I s’pose it keeps me interested that way. (Rebecca)
It seems that they see themselves as different from some of their colleagues in that they have retained their enthusiasm (which teacher life cycle research suggests is somewhat unusual see, for instance, Sikes, Measor & Woods, 1985; Sikes, 1985; Huberman, 1993) and in their willingness to grasp opportunities
I think it’s the outlook and not a job being a job, it’s a career, and that enthusiasm you had in the first few years has never gone away and you still want to do it. That’s what I feel. Meeting people at the conference last summer that’s the impression I got, everybody was still enthusiastic. I think some of the men were quite competitive, I was quite surprised about that, but basically its people who grasp opportunities. (Sarah)