Teacher Morale and Attitude

Teachers live in an environment with a lot of emotions (children's, parents', and perhaps their administrators')! I believe most teachers started their career with enthusiasm and energy to spare. I will bet that every teacher spends their personal money for things for their classroom. Teachers often start a new year with hope for improvement. They give new practices a try. They join committees intended to make improvements. But as the year wears on, frequently hope withers and teachers look to just get through the year. I will bet that every teacher has felt the failure of not getting some students to achieve, and those failures hurt the teacher personally. I will bet that every teacher has been lied to by students, parents and administrators during their career. In fact, if they noted down every incident where they believe lying happened, we might be very depressed by the frequency. I will bet that every teacher feels unjustly condemned (without opportunity to defend) a number of times each school year. I will bet that every teacher has many experiences when their best judgment for students and teaching was arbitrarily squelched. I believe that the number of negative experiences for teachers is greater than the vast majority of us experience in our jobs.

What would you feel in such a job? My answer would be angry until I was numb and stopped caring. I would become helpless and hopeless. I might adopt a protect myself at all costs attitude. I might manipulate the system and people to get what I want.

How common does the voter think these teacher attitudes are? I would guess voters would say more than 50% of the time. Are the voters right? I believe so.

Will such an attitude improve student achievement?

What can any of us do to change it?

I think it will take changes inside ourselves that affect our actions in ways we haven't been willing to make. We have to think more about all people in the schools, cool our own angers, frankly expect honesty from ourselves, and sacrifice time, effort, and resources for the schools. The "we" here is parents/voters, teachers, school leaders, and students. Perhaps we need to think of this challenge as "the moral equivalent of war".

by Allen Wilkinson, Cleveland Heights