The problem of 'Passion' in teaching

If ever a concept has had its meaning pounded pallid by overuse, it's 'passion'. In education, it's everywhere, being dragged out in any number of contexts as a magic ingredient in successful teaching. Witness John Hattie's lauding of 'passionate teachers' at the LFE a couple of weeks ago, and the liberal sprinkling of references to passion throughout Visible Learning. Daniel Willingham in Why Don't Students Like School? asserts that many teachers join the profession in order to enable their students to 'feel the excitement and passion for learning' that they felt in their own education. And at the recent Guardian Innovation in Education conference, we were given the following prompt for discussion: 'Think back to when you first started teaching: what made you excited and passionate? How can you rekindle the joy of teaching?'.

Frankly, all this passion talk is beginning to get on my nerves, resonating as it does so feebly with my own experience and, I would suggest, with that of more than a few others. The problem with the assumptions made above is that they contribute to a fallacious stereotype of a typical career path in teaching. It suggests that, typically, teachers enter the classroom positively brimming with energy and belief, altruistically motivated to 'change lives' and 'light candles in dark minds'. And fair enough, I'm sure for many new teachers, that may well be the case. But the darker side to this stereotype is the linked assumption that somehow this passion and drive is inevitably stamped out of teachers by the dreadful crushing drudgery of the job; that early energy and fire and spirit is doomed to be lost under a slow moving concrete avalanche of inspection and reports and marking and behaviour problems and overwork and accountability and scrutiny and useless initiatives and poor leadership and pushy parents and exams and … all that.

It wasn't like that for me. In fact I'd view my career as an almost perfect reversal of the above. I did not join the profession because somewhere in my soul I could feel a burning passion for education – I'm sorry but I just didn't – I joined because I was 23, I liked books, I needed a job, I liked kids, I didn't want to work in any sort of business environment and thought it seemed like a good option. Even now, sometimes when students ask me when I decided I wanted to become a teacher, I tell them frankly that I still don't want to be a teacher – I still want to be a professional footballer, but the talent scouting system in this country is proving itself woefully inadequate, letting both myself and the world of sport down very badly indeed.

And early on it was hard work. I've blogged about my first few years in teaching elsewhere, but in summary, and even with strong support in a very good school, lessons were difficult at times, the marking was a nightmare, behaviour was very patchy (mine and theirs) and the kids didn't learn half as much as they should have done. An honest answer to the Guardian's 'what made you excited and passionate'? OK: snow days. Staff football. Lessons when you realised that the two most difficult to manage kids were away. Unexpected frees, like finding out five minutes before the start of the lesson that year 8 had a Biology talk in the gym or whatever. That time the boiler broke down. That time we were allowed to watch the World Cup. Friday nights. Saturdays. NOT Sundays. Definitely snow days – I am, I think, optimistic by nature and between the start of October and the end of March, would feel a tiny tingle of anticipation every morning before flinging the curtains open, just in case.

Now, that's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I did, and learnt a lot. The kids and staff were great, I loved being in school, loved the buzz of the place, made some life-long friends and look back on it all with genuine fondness. But passion didn't play a big part, and here's the reason why: teaching is hard, especially so when you haven't yet learnt to do it terribly well. These days, I think I would see myself as a 'passionate' teacher, at least in the sense that I absolutely love it, I believe in it, I take satisfaction and fulfilment from trying to do it better (although it's still hard, and I have to admit my admiration for snow days still lingers on a tiny bit even though it shouldn't...). 

In my experience, the most passionate, and often happiest teachers with highest morale and sense of satisfaction in the job, are those who have been helped to develop a highly-attuned sense of technique in the classroom – they know, with precision, what they are trying to do and how they are trying to do it. I think this is important, and something we should push as teachers and as leaders; with a strong awareness of technique, when something goes wrong in a lesson, the teacher has a much enhanced capacity to reflect and improve. Without a strong sense of technique, it feels, or felt to me, more like I was just a crap teacher, or the job was just too hard. These days, when lessons go wrong, I am much more aware of why – maybe I got my success criteria wrong; sometimes my model doesn't quite fit with my success criteria so is confusing; often I (still) try to fit in one activity too many and would have been better off just letting them get on with it for a bit longer, creating more space for feedback. And when I try something, or refine something, when I consciously learn about, improve and apply technique and it works, it is absolutely the best job I can imagine myself doing. THIS is what makes me passionate, or allows me to feel passionate rather than anxious – because I am aware of technique, I am more in control of my practice, and this gives me belief, and this gives me hope – a sort of 'evidence-based' passion which works for me.

So – to conclude this passionate pro-passion / anti-passion rant; let's not expect passion from newer teachers as a default. Let's reject the assumption that passion is something that starts strongly then fades. Let's show them that there is passion and joy to be had in this job... but there might be a lot of learning for a teacher to do before really feeling the power and life-affirming benefit that teaching brings.