A veteran teacher once told me that the secret to a long and happy teaching career is to have a major change every seven years. That advice came to me just after I decided to leave the school I had been at for the last six years and move to a brand new school that was about to open. I needed the change. I needed to do something new and different. Little did I know that I would not only be opening a new school, but that just a few months later the whole world would shut down from a pandemic. It certainly wasn’t the change I was expecting, but it was definitely new and different.
As human beings, we don’t always love change. It’s easier to keep things the same because it’s familiar and predictable. However, change forces us to grow and growth is what makes our lives purposeful and satisfying.
When water stays in the same spot without any change, it stagnates. It starts growing algae and mosquitoes and often smells foul. When we go long enough without change, we stagnate as well. We can become dissatisfied and negative.
The good news is that there are many ways to change up your career. While you can make a major change like switching schools, changing the subjects or classes you teach, or even changing careers entirely, you can also introduce smaller changes over time to keep you growing and improving.
At some point you’ve probably heard someone say that there is more than one right way to do anything. When I’ve heard it, it’s usually referring to different people doing things in different ways. Maybe you do something differently than I do, but that doesn’t mean your way is worse or better than mine. We can also apply this idea to ourselves. You can find more than one right way to do something, and sometimes just doing things differently than we normally do can help us to learn things we wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
At the beginning of every year, I think through my classroom procedures and what I want to change. I always end up doing something differently, whether it’s how I pass out and collect music, how I seat my students, or the routine I follow in class. Small changes like that keep things feeling fresh.
Teaching can be a solitary career, especially when you are the only teacher at your school in your subject area. Talking to other teachers and exchanging ideas can be so inspiring and motivating. We tend to stick with teachers who teach our subject, but we have so much we can learn from teachers in other subject areas. I recently asked the physics teacher to help me teach my students about the science of sound, and she came up with an amazing slideshow that explained things so much better than I could have. Early on in my career, a science teacher taught me lessons about classroom management and pedagogy that I still think about often. A lot of how I assess my student in my music classes comes from what I learned from the Spanish teachers at my school. If we think our subject area is unique, we need to think again. If we only talk to teachers who teach our same subject, we lose out on a lot of valuable insight.
Don’t discount your own insight, either. You have so much to share, and sometimes sharing what we know helps us to refine the way we do things. For the last few years, I have created a presentation about some part of my teaching that I have struggled with and improved and then applied to present at a conference. Whether I get accepted to present or not, creating the presentation makes me reflect on what I do, look for more information, and learn more about best practices. Becoming a mentor teacher has helped me stay sharp as well. My student teachers come with new ideas they want to try, and I have learned new ways of doing things from them.
When I was a student teacher, my mentor teacher warned me that teaching is like a black hole. It will take all the effort and time and emotional investment you can give it and still want more. I’ve found that to be true. I could work on school stuff all day every day and always find more to do, so I put boundaries on my time. Once I leave school, I’m done. I don’t take work home, and that frees me up to do other things. I listen to podcasts on a wide variety of subjects. I quilt and do crafts. I read and travel and gain as many different experiences as I can. Not only do those experiences enrich my life, they make me a better teacher. Some of the best parts of how I teach came from my experiences outside of education.
None of us deserve to stagnate. We all deserve to have a fulfilling, purposeful career that helps us become our best selves. To have that, we need to embrace change. We need to initiate change. Whether it’s changing jobs or changing the seating chart, those changes will keep teaching fresh.