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Top advice from our education coach: Remember you’ve got a body… and listen to it
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Elaine Long
Welcome to The ECF Staffroom. I'm Elaine Long.
Mark Quinn
And I am Mark Quinn.
Elaine Long
We are programme leaders for the UCL Early Career Teacher Development Programme. Why are we in the staffroom? We are here because this is where the best professional learning conversations always take place. This is where problems can be aired bluntly and where solutions can be explored.
Mark Quinn
Over the course of this series, we will hear the voices of different colleagues as they come in the ECF Staffroom. We will hear from early career teachers themselves and from the mentors and induction tutors who support them. We will talk about all things ECF, the challenges and the joys. So why don't you enjoy a coffee with us, perhaps even grab a biscuit and sit down to half an hour of ECF Staffroom, chat.
Welcome to the ECF, staffroom Siobhan Goffee. It's lovely to have you with us. We should say to everybody that you and I are all friends. We used to teach together for several years in the same department, teaching the best subject out there, of course, which no prizes for guessing is history.
You're in our staffroom Siobhan, so you've got to drink one of our coffees. I'm trying to remember. Were you one of these cafeteria people? I think you might have been.
Siobhan Goffee
I was the cafetiere instigator. I brought the cafeteria into school.
Mark Quinn
And you take it black. You must take it black.
Siobhan Goffee
Depends on the time of day. Maybe a milky one first thing in the morning, but after 12 always black.
Mark Quinn
Very good, very good. That's the most important question out of the way.
Elaine Long
Welcome to the staffroom Siobhan. Mark and I are incredibly nosey, and we know our listeners are nosey too and one of the things we love to ask people is how they got into teaching and what their careers are like since then. So would we mind just telling our listeners a bit about that?
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah, absolutely. So, I was a reluctant teacher. I had an exit interview from my university with my tutor, which was probably the first time I'd ever spoken to my personal tutor. And she said, what do you want to do? And I said anything except for teaching because it seemed like such a cliche for history teacher to get a, you know, to just go straight into teaching. But I kind of went away and did a, some travelling, and I just decided on this trip, walking round a volcano crater in Bali that actually I thought I might want to do it.
And then as soon as I got into my PGCE, I've just felt at home. It was it. It felt like I kind of already knew what to do. And yeah, it felt like somewhere that I wanted to be and that continued for, you know, quite a long time. So, I was a history teacher and then I did middle management jobs, head of department, second in faculty. But that wasn't really the direction I wanted to go. And at that time, you could become an advanced skills teacher. So that's what I did. And that kind of for me kept me in the classroom, kept me involved in the teacher development side of things. That’s where I worked with Mark. So, because we were lucky enough as ASTs to be given a whole school kind of development remit, and that's probably the first time I did some coaching myself as a coach.
I kind of felt that I felt myself, could feel myself burning out. In teaching. I went down to four days a week and then I changed and moved to UCL and worked across teacher training routes for history and as a professional tutor as well.
And what was really interesting to me was, I'd always assumed that it was being in school that kind of made me stressed out, made my work life balance out of whack, but what I found when I got to university, where there was far more flexibility about how I spent my working day, I had a lot more autonomy, that I'd brought a lot of those things with me to the job. And I had a kind of let you know we're going to get like and we'll just start disclosing stuff now. But I had this moment in my office where I sat down and I was planning a lecture and I'd done the lecture before. It was not a difficult thing.
It was not something I'd struggled to do and I couldn't do it. I had a complete and utter mind blank, which really, you know, was pretty scary, and I kind of realised at that point that what I was experiencing was actually anxiety. I would never have known, never have called it that. I kind of at that point I realised I needed a big change. So, I ran away to South America for a year, learned Spanish, travelled around, lived in Peru for about six months of that. When I came back, I relocated to the West of England to Bristol and I knew I wanted to retrain. I didn't know what to do, so I was just thinking about like, what I wanted to achieve and the fact that I still wanted to work with people, I wanted to support people, maybe he's had a similar experience to me.
So, the skills that I already had were coaching skills. So I did a sort of intensive course over lockdown in fact. But simultaneously I went back and worked in the school, which was really interesting and had that wonderful experience that every every teacher who's been in their school for a while and has got it all sorted should have, which is to go to a new school where the kids don't know you. And, you know, I felt a bit like, do you know who I am? And the kids are like, yeah, yeah. You're the new teacher. We're going to treat you exactly the same as everyone else.
So, I'm kind of rambling now, but to bring it back together. I was quite convinced that I didn't want to work in education as a coach and for two years, I kind of went round and round in circles, but what I was finding is most of my clients privately were teachers, and the more I can't, and I was still working in, I'm still working in a school with kids. A great school and yeah, it kind of just. I couldn't escape it. I was just like, this is kind of where my teaching, my coaching skills need to be is with teachers because there's a profession, you know, particularly post COVID, but let's be honest, before that we're on our knees. Yeah.
Elaine Long
Yeah, it's, it's such a fascinating story and I'd love to ask you more about South America, but I fear we won't have time till I have to ask you that after the podcast. But I I'm really interested in and I'm sure our listeners will be interested in hearing a bit more about the coaching program that you've started because we know you run a coaching program called Partners Enjoy, and I think the title of that first of all is something that really interests me. Could you just talk a bit more about that coaching program that you run and why you called it Partners Enjoy?
Siobhan Goffee
Well, Partners Enjoy is the name of me and another coach in education, Maureen Bows, and she works mainly with primary and head teachers, and I was working a lot with secondary middle managers. So, we kind of had got the gamut and the work that I had been doing before I gave in and realised I needed to be coaching, and education was around, it was around wellbeing, but specifically around joy and that kind of came out of the pandemic and that's how we met. So, partners in joy, which she's had seen, we had a mutual friend. She'd seen my work and she was just like, I feel like we could really do something together. So that was what we called it ourselves because that was our common interest.
What we both found was that teachers head teachers and senior managers that we were working with, the thing that they came to us saying is, “just like it's not, I don't really want to leave teaching like I love it, but the joys gone out of it. I can't seem to get to the bits of the job that bring me joy anymore.”
So that's when we set up first the podcast, and now the program starting in January of next year, which is called ‘Joyblockers’ and how to get rid of them because it was really clear to us that there were certain key things that were blocking joy from the job for teachers, and actually, you know, I think a lot of the stuff that we've talked about friends outside the profession have said that's the same in my workplace too. So, yeah, that's how it kind of all came about. Finding joy in your job again and getting your work life balance and the way you feel about your work.
Mark Quinn
We're going to talk a lot about that as we chat Siobhan.
One thing I wanted to talk about before that though, is this whole thing about teacher identity and why that, why that might be so particular about, you know, in teaching and I'm going to invite you to tell a story that you talk about when you stopped teaching and you got into a cab.
Can you tell us a little bit about that and what is this thing about teacher identity which rips hold of us so much?
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah. So, I've been teaching, I think, 17 years. But when I changed the move to the university, and it had all been in one school. Because it was a great school that had you know, a senior management with the vision that I could get on board with and they provided opportunities for you to go where you wanted. So I had my leaving drinks, I left at Christmas. That's one of those weird ones where it was, like, not even a proper, didn't even feel like a proper leaving do and I went out with all my teacher friends at, had a lovely night, and I called a cab to go back home and the cab driver, when I got in, you know, cabby conversation said to me. So what you do? And I just started crying because I was like, oh, my God, I don't even know what to say to you now. I don't do anything. If I'm not a teacher, who am I?
And there's something, there's a couple of things about that identity. I think one is that you, you're so in it that you're so involved in it. Everything about it is relational. both with staff, other staff and particularly with students and parents, especially in primary. So, I think it gets under your skin in that way, but I think also I think it's still fair to say that you wouldn't join teaching if you weren't doing it for a reason because you wanted to make a difference.
Mark Quinn
Yeah. Well, I was going to ask, I mean, I still, I'm still in the habit when I'm talking to teachers of saying we.
Siobhan Goffee
Oh yeah.
Mark Quinn
You know, I haven't been teaching in a classroom for over 6 years, but I can't get out. I can't break that habit because it is so much, actually, it's not just part of my identity. I'm just very proud of it. So, do you have a word? I mean, you know, your career has moved on, but do you still relate to yourself as a teacher?
Siobhan Goffee
100%. I don't think it says it at the moment, but my Instagram account that I set up for my coaching business, you know, you're only allowed a couple of, you know, if you characters to describe yourself. And I've got something about being a coach. And then the second sentence was teached to the bone because like that, it just it's in you, isn't it? It's I would always. I would always think of myself as a teacher, same as my sister who is a nurse and still calls herself a nurse even though she's the bed manager.
Mark Quinn
You can't defrock a teacher, can you? But it is problematic, isn't it? I think there's this identification. It can be a problem I think, which I think you'll be able to tell us a bit more about it in the future, in a in a few minutes.
Elaine, you want say something more about?
Elaine Long
Yeah, well, I was. I was just going to identify with that, actually, because I left teaching a year and a half ago now to work at UCL. But you know, I had that same sense of identity crisis and the first thing was when it got to Sunday and I wasn't sat down doing my lesson planning and work, I was like, my goodness, I don't have any hobbies. What boring person I am. So that was the first sort of identity crisis. The second was I had a real feeling of guilt, had a real feeling of I'm not in the thick of it.
So does that even give me a right to comment and then a sort of realisation that I very unhelpfully was living off adrenaline to the extent that I didn't realise and actually, then weirdly, I think I've become addicted to that adrenaline and then I kind of missed it, you know, not that working with Mark wasn't sort of exciting enough. Obviously it was a huge rush, adrenaline all the time. The excitement there.
But you know, I had that. I really missed that because I think one of the greatest things about teaching is that sense of camaraderie. You know, the Friday night drinks, the sense that you've done it as a team, but you know, it's a bit of a double edged sword and can be incredibly healthy and then you know, there's slight crisis that comes with identifying that, you know it just it just really chimed with me what you were saying about your feelings about that as well.
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah, it just the intensity of it, I think isn't it? And yeah. I mean, I was just thinking about, now I'm going have to say it now, aren't I? But I was just thinking that sometimes teaching can feel like a bad relationship. Like when it's exciting. It's really good. But like, actually, sometimes it could be a bit abusive and like you know, like you're like, you're stuck in something that you know is not good for you. And like nobody, nobody wants that. And I'm really interested in learning what you were sort of saying about that kind of feeling of adrenaline addiction, because what I realised for myself where that anxiety was coming from, even when I'd left teaching, was that you are physiologically stuck in survival mode because there's, in teaching there is a constant sense of threat.
So and I don't, I don't say that to be you know, to kind of be dramatic. I genuinely think that is how we as teachers exist. There's the, you know that you all you're keeping to a really strict timetable, everything has to be done at certain time but more than that, there's just a pervading sense of toxic, what's the word I'm looking for? I've lost. Completely lost the word.
Mark Quinn
Toxic productivity, is that your thing?
Siobhan Goffee
Yes, toxic productivity that you must always be doing whatever the cost. Sometimes I definitely that comes from the system and the sense of accountability that there is, especially since COVID. I mean that has been ramped up and for senior leaders, I mean like that level of accountability, they’re frontline workers, year heads as well frontline workers. So but yeah, there's that kind of that sense that if you aren't always doing you are being lazy.
I think that that, the impact of that is that our brain is seeing that as a threat. So we're constantly in survival mode and all the adrenaline and cortisol and stuff that's going around our body that that includes and I imagine teachers as they're like massive heads dragging this like limp little body around that like barely exists because that constant alert means we exist in our brain and our body is telling us things all the time. Like you need to drink of water, you haven't been to the loo for four hours. You know, those kinds of things, and we ignore them and we say to ourselves, I haven't got time to do that, which is obviously not true. It definitely feels like you haven't, but, you know, everyone can drink some water.
Elaine Long
Yeah, and the sense to which it's normalised, I think is interesting because you know if I ever said to my husband come and meet us at the pub at the end of the day and sit with a group of teachers, his response would be no thank you, because it's really unpleasant for people that are not a teacher, most of the time to sit with a, with a grief of teachers because I don't think you realise how sort of normalised that is and how those conversations leak out into to even your social life and your time and it's very hard for people outside that world to understand it, which you can often cause problems with relationships as well for teachers. I think in terms of well-being because it becomes so consuming and it's very difficult for people outside that world to sort of understand how stressed you are and why, you know.
Siobhan Goffee
And there's no stepping back and getting perspective and one of the things you asked me when we were talking about doing this podcast was, why do people come to me for coaching? And all of the above that we've talked about are reasons and many others, but the main reason people come to me for coaching is because to admit that you're struggling or that you want to make a change within that teaching environment is really, really hard, and there's some great like coaching that goes on in schools around, you know, kind of how to be a better teacher. You know, I think that can be done really, really well, but there are some things that if your line manager is coaching you and it's like ohh, do you need some coaching, right, you know, we'll organise it with the line manager. You might not want to tell your line manager that I feel a little bit like I'm about to burn out. There's this whole thing of being seen as being worried about being seen as incompetent or weak and you need an outside ear to be able to admit that, we're not even admitting that stuff to our good friends at work sometimes because it feels like too much.
Mark Quinn
You got a great tagline for the podcast series Siobhan; Stay well, rediscover the joy in the job you once loved, and stay motivated to change the system. You've got good naming game. I have to tip my hat to you.
Reading some of the episode titles you have, What's good enough in a system where it's never good enough? The loneliness of the teaching profession, The virtue trap, the honour of self-sacrifice. So there's a lot of clues there isn't there about what you talk about in your program and what you've talked about in the podcast, but the listeners to this podcast are mainly in their first or their second year of teaching or they're supporting teachers, at that stage in their career.
So what would you say, would mean are new teachers, especially vulnerable to this kind of overwhelm that you talk about? What is it about being a new teacher today maybe that makes them susceptible to poor mental health and poor well-being?
Siobhan Goffee
I think in some ways, yes, I think it goes across all teachers, but I think there's some particular kind of qualities of overwhelming that exist for new teachers. So I think and it also depends on what route you've taken in as to where you will be with that. I think it can be equally overwhelming, but in different ways. So I think you know, you've come through a university based route then that move to taking on more classes, teaching hours, going up, being by yourself in a classroom, being in a new school., hat you haven't had time to bid into, those things can be hugely overwhelming. I think if you've come through a school based route, you might be ahead on some of those things, but actually you might be burnt out from that first year because your teaching load was so much more and on some of those routes should be doing study as well as working through the ECF.
So I think that, you know, it's kind of swings and roundabouts but I think at that point in your first sort of full year as a trained teacher, there's that kind of idea of total kind of imposter syndrome of like, who's letting me be, had a friend talk about this, about taking a baby home the moment when you’ve had a baby and you put the baby seat in the car and it's your first child and you take the baby home. You're like, Why is someone letting me taking this baby back to my house? I don't know what I'm doing.
I kind of imagine, you know, why don't you imagine? I know because I remember it. There's that feeling of, like, impostor syndrome every hour I'm in charge of another 30 students. You want me to write a unit of work but like, I really know what I'm doing. So, yeah, that kind of, that the impostor syndrome and then that real conscious incompetence where you realise all the things you can't do, rather than acknowledging all the things that you can do.
There is some brilliant mentors out there that are really good at putting those things up the agenda, in mentoring meetings and so on. But I think as a system, we again, we're just looking it like, I mean, that's how we're talk to as teachers, isn't it? Like this kids, their grades aren't where they should be. Not. Well done for all those other kids whose grades are. That's how we operate and I think the impact when you're already overwhelmed because you're doing something new and really massively challenging, I think that's huge.
Elaine Long
Can I just ask a follow up questions to that Siobhan? I remember the weight of responsibility really well, that feeling of being an early career teacher shutting the door in my class and thinking, my goodness, I'm responsible for making sure these year 11 students get good GCSE English results. And if I don't do that, if I fail at that, then I'm messing up their lives and that weight of responsibility was probably that the heaviest thing on my shoulders. I think the sense that I would be responsible for failing young people and I'm just thinking about what's changed now since I was an
ECT many years ago?
And now we know more and more about how students learn, and that's a good thing. So, we have a more research informed culture and that can only be a good thing. But I sometimes wonder whether that has unintended consequences and can be a bit of a double edged sword if you like. Because along with that comes, I think more of a moral imperative of saying, well, if we know more about how students learn and there's more of a moral imperative to draw on that research, to make sure that those year elevens are teaching whatever subject you're teaching it and getting good GCSE results.
I wonder sometimes if rather than helping early career teachers, which is definitely what we want it to do, we want it to support them in their confidence and identity. Sometimes it can add to that burden and have an unintended negative effect on their well-being. I wonder if that's something you'd seen as well or shared.
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah. I think to me that kind of links into the idea, so like we're all striving for excellence because we're doing it for those kids. We want every kid to have every opportunity. I'm not saying don't strive for excellence, striving for excellence is a wonderful thing to do when you strive for excellence, you fail and you learn from it and you feel good about that, right. But I would argue that for most teachers, certainly that I work with and I think in general, it's very hard to resist this.
What they're actually striving for is perfectionism. By its very nature perfectionism has to be errorless, and so that means all the times you fall down and you fail, which oh my God, like I remember my first year of teaching I mean, not just the normal failures, but really stupid things that I did of which I will not go into. But you know, like mistakes you made. Those things then, you are so hard on yourself about them because the expectation is that you will be perfect. Every single child that you teach will be reaching their target grade and every single child by the end of the lesson will have reached all their learning outcomes. There’s nothing wrong with striving to be the best you can possibly be. But that is not the same as trying to do everything perfectly.
Mark Quinn
There’s external and internal drivers there isn't there, so there's the system telling you that you've got these targets, the flight path at the child is on you must reach. But I'm wondering if there's more to it than that. There's perfectionism, is internal, isn't it? Maybe even part of that identity you talked about before.
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah. And I think when you have a kind of moral imperative for doing your job, then that at which teachers do, then the likelihood that you're going to fall into those traps and get just stuck in the pit of them. So absolutely Mark, there are external factors that drive it, but there are also internal ones that we do have some control over.
Elaine Long
It's interesting, because when I've spoken to ECTs on our program and they said well, we've been getting very stressed out about self-study and obviously Mark and I as programme leaders, we really care about the well-being of every ECT and we certainly don't want them to feel stressed out. We don't want to have a negative effect on their well-being and you know what we say to ECTs is review, tailor, tick, so you know review it, spend longer on the stuff you need to spend longer on and shorter on the stuff, never spend longer than an hour.
But actually what some ECTs are saying is, no but I need to do it all and I need to write it all down and I need to have everything written down and it's really interesting that that those well-being pressures are coming internally from exactly what you said about this need ,that that sense of perfection rather than externally from the program, and often actually, particularly from what I've seen sometimes in female ECTs as well, that need, that drive for perfection. I do see that that trend there as well, which is sad and interesting at the same time but it's definitely something I recognise. If there is something I recognise from working with ECTs in schools as an induction tutor as well, that often, though, that sense of well-being, those pressures came from them rather than something externally.
Siobhan Goffee
So it's really hard and it's hard for most to teachers to set boundaries for all the reasons that we've just described but particularly as a new teacher, you don't know what boundaries you're allowed to have. And that also depends what's being modeled to you in your school as well as like what you know but internally, if you are boundaryless, then you were going to be overwhelmed and burnt out extremely quickly. So, there's, there's definitely some stuff there that you can do for yourself. So, one of the things is about, is the idea of comparison and if you are comparing yourself to anybody else apart from just you, then that is going to lead you into a really difficult place.
And again, I'm not saying don't do your best, don't strive to get better. Of course. Do that. But you can only compare yourself against yourself, the minute you start to compare yourself against other teachers, that way madness lies. I remember that very distinctly both as a new teacher and training teachers in school and at university, you're comparing yourself to people who've been teaching 5-10 years, but of course you won't manage a class in the same way that they do. Of course, you, you won't have that kind of the same vision for planning that someone with all that experience has. So, I think that would absolutely be one of the things that I would say is really important is only compare yourself to yourself in terms of boundaries.
But the other thing is, what drives us to be boundaryless is that we want to do the best for the kids and we want to be seen to do our best just generally. But the choices that we make when we are boundaryless often have the absolute opposite impact on the students. So if you are asked to, you know, if you're about to take on something new, have you seriously considered what the impact of that will be? Yes, there may be some good impacts, but what on the other side might be happening, you know, whose books aren't getting marked, who's lessons aren't getting planned because you do this new thing? So I think that is super important and on a similar kind of vein, as a teacher, you are there role modelling what adults look like in the workplace and this kind of absolute subjugation of self and toxic productivity is being modelled to a group of students. I kind of got my secondary hat on at the moment, but it equally applies to primary, who have just been through a pandemic and a lockdown. Something we could never have predicted. So, we then model to the potentially most stressed generation that has ever existed.
Like how to have no boundaries and work ourself into the ground and it’s super important that we model ways of having good mental health to those students because I work with these students and you know, a lot of students are really unwell as a result of what they've experienced over the last three years.
Mark Quinn
Is there a message here as well for mentors and the often young new teachers that they're also that that they're working with because, you know, I know, I've heard you talk elsewhere about millennials and about how that they're also maybe unusually susceptible to, because they're, maybe because of how they've been raised to tune into their emotional selves more than the old sort of, you know, old dinosaurs like myself who never looked at his naval once. Is there is there a message here for mentors about how they also model?
Siobhan Goffee
I was just thinking about that I before I came on, about how challenging it would be to mentor an ECT around their own well-being because the best way to be successfully in that is to do the things you think they should be doing and what we often do as we mentor people is we see their stressed and we try and suck it up for them so they don't have to do it and that, you know, it's absolutely well meaning. I have 100% been that person doing that myself, but what you are modelling is something unsustainable.
All the all those things that I said for ECTs are obviously important for any teacher.
Elaine Long
Can I just ask the question about boundaries, because one of the things we talked about is it's so hard to recognise when you, you're sort of got into that cycle of toxic productivity. You know, I would say there's times I definitely did that and I wouldn't have been able to sort of step outside myself at the time and recognise that even when people told me, actually, you know, it was very easy just to mask it and say no, no, no, I'm fine and you know, you do that.
So what advice would you give for ECTs to sort of tune in to their well-being and make sure that doesn't happen. I mean, how can you know whether you're going too far down that road or not?
Siobhan Goffee
I think the clues of all there in your body and if you have to, at least these little increments of time can be really small like something as small as recognising Oh my God, here it comes. I can feel it like my stomach, my throat's tight, my stomach churning like everyone has their own signs of overwhelm. I think I go through quite a long list of them in the podcast on overwhelm, but you need to get back in touch with your bodies and feel when it's coming and know that that is a moment that you have to take a step back. It might be for two minutes, it might be taking three or four deep breaths and like the difference, the things that can happen in a few breaths like going for a difficult conversation you're going in totally keyed up, like fists clenched, stomach churning, like adrenaline high. You stop for 2 minutes before you go in and breathe. That could be the difference between a disastrous conversation and one that is much easier to have.
But we don't even give ourselves that. So, I'm not here to say, just manage your time better. You know? Like. No, no, no, definitely not that. We’re talking about finding tiny things, tiny moments, and then the really small boundaries like stuff when you're going home, you know, just saying to the people that I know it's not. If you've got kids, you might need to actually sit in your car before you go in the house and have your 10 minutes taking a breath, like doing something before everyone needs you. Just having that moment to go, I'm going to take 5 minutes, I'll be with you.
Or like, if you're in the middle of a task and someone comes in and they want something from you. Oh my God. I mean, we know that happens in schools. Poor year heads with a queue of people waiting to talk to them. Just saying to people, I just got to get this finished, I'm just in the middle of it, what times good for you after three because I'll be done by then?
And in terms of mentoring those kinds of things are really important when you're trying to carve out your time with your ECT.
Elaine Long
It's really interesting that you say that because I just reflecting on this, one of the best pieces of advice I ever had from a mentor was, Elaine, lower your shoulders when you're in the classroom and actually, you know, it wasn't, you need to give better questioning or, you know, maybe don't plan a drama activity on a Friday afternoon. That was a disaster.
It was actually just honestly, it was lower your shoulders and I didn't realise until a year in that I was clearly walking around the classroom because I was so stressed with my shoulders hunched up like that and actually, the act of my mentor feeling about that and lowering my shoulders, I suddenly relaxed. I suddenly it was like an epiphany for me. It was suddenly like, ohh no, I should be relaxed in the classroom and if I model that, I'm relaxed. That's going to have a impact on my students. So it's really interesting what you say about drawing our attention just to how we physically feeling in the classroom can have a big impact.
Siobhan Goffee
Lunch, stopping to have your lunch. How many teachers do you see eating their lunch at 4 o'clock? Like I know there's masses to do, but even 10 minutes eating your lunch and actually or what you're doing is eating your lunch. Like, that's massive. So, at the school that I now coach at, I did supply there, I mentioned before and I had a really difficult timetable. I was teaching across 8 rooms and it's on different floors. It was a nightmare.
They still have a staffroom that's well used in that school, which to me is a sign of a good school. And at the end of my second week, my head of faculty came up to me and said, I haven't seen you in the staffroom, what's going on? So I said I just can't get up there. I've got, you know, like all these rooms and she was like, fine, we can't have that. Like, you have to socialise and you have to have time out and you change my timetable and she changed the rooms.
You know, and I'm not saying that like everyone, every school has a capacity to do that, but to prioritise that made such a difference to me, I felt so valued.
Elaine Long
Well, that leads me on to my next question, which you know, there's a lot of criticism about well-being initiatives in schools such as, you know, you're a bit stressed, here are some cakes for you. So, you can eat your feelings or, you know, do a yoga class after school when you haven't got time to do a yoga class. But then you kind of alluded to this, what can senior leaders in school do that has a more meaningful impact on well-being? And that that was a really good example you gave just in terms of thinking about rooming.
What would your advice be to senior leaders who really want to support ECTs and teachers more generally in school?
Siobhan Goffee
What I would say is or I would clearly say this, but having someone external to be able to do some of your wellbeing stuff makes a massive difference because it gives people permission to talk about things they don't want to talk about. So I think that is absolutely money in the bank, but clearly I would say that.
I mean it's the same thing again about boundaries, isn't it? It's like what will be the impact of adding this thing on. You know both positive and negative, that's one thing. I don't know anything that brings people together and allows them to actually talk. Do you know what I was thinking of? Maybe this is more for mentors and senior managers, but asking how are you twice?
We're English, aren't we? We say well, no. So I beg your pardon. We are not English.
Mark Quinn
Wash your mouth Siobhan Goffee
Siobhan Goffee
So sorry, Mark. Forgive me, but you know that whole kind of polite. How are you? And everyone just says. Yeah, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that. And then, you know, at the beginning of your line management report or whatever. Right and also, how are you and people will smile ruefully and then they they're much more likely to tell you.
Those tiny increments of time are worth their weight in gold.
Elaine Long
The being quite proactive about that well-being check in and making it more than just that superficial, How are you? I think that's really important and recognising how difficult it would be for people to tell you if they're not OK. So reading the signs on that.
Siobhan Goffee
Yeah, no, I will. I'll. I'll leave it at that because I'm rambling on now.
Mark Quinn
You said you spent 17 years teaching in the one school, but in the years subsequent to that, you've been in lots and lots and lots of schools in your ITE role and talking to lots of teachers of course, who work in lots of different schools.
I know you've talked about elsewhere that you feel that certain things have changed since the time that you were maybe first teaching or in that first school you worked in and you talked about sort of a lot of creativity, as we centralised lesson planning that opportunity for a teacher to express themselves individually through their own and also just express what they know about the children in front of them by planning the lesson for those for those children that somehow we've kind of reduced that somewhat.
And the other thing you talked about is and you've mentioned already today is this whole you know staffroom loss, that there's been a trend we think hasn't there, of away from a room just about big enough to squeeze every teacher into it, to a proliferation of phase or departmental workrooms, with the emphasis on the word work of course.
Are you just a sort of old history teacher who just lives in the past, Siobhan or is there something real here? Is there something that we should be mindful of here?
Siobhan Goffee
The casualties of a culture of toxic productivity are joy, creativity and community, because it's this idea that those things are soft, they're, you know, they're not measurable. We can't tick them off to show we're doing a good job. You know, you should just push on, you know, like we're doing this for the kids. You must give every, you must sacrifice every bit of yourself for the kids. I just think some of the reasons that we joined the profession were things like being able to plan creatively for your individual students with the knowledge of your class.
What we haven't mentioned at all is the teacher retention crisis, which is huge. So things like, you know, kind of, off the peg units of work that everyone uses and you just pick up and go, can be really welcome when you're struggling, but they're not going to bring any joy into your teaching and they're not going to help you to be a good teacher because they're not, you're not demonstrating your understanding of the way that kids learn,
So, I mean, you know me Mark, I am an old lefty and I would definitely say that, you know, there's a sort of a feels, there's a kind of a marketisation and accountability, if we want everyone to be accountable, we want make it easy to make them accountable. And so we do things in a way that makes that easy, but the soul then leaves.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, there's a reason we call this podcast ECF staffroom. It's not accidental. You know, Elaine and I are both wed to this notion that, you know, staffroom is a great place to, actually the community, absolutely the community but also, frankly, it's a great place to learn, you know, professional learning. I hope I would be remembered from the staffroom, I spent, I was kind of a staffroom guy. I spent a lot of time in staffroom. I always had my lunch in the staff room.
I spent a lot of time obviously working with new teachers, because that was my role more laterally and part of it was, I wanted them to see that you could do that, no matter how busy you were, and I was a pretty busy assistant head. I would sit in the staffroom as well. I’d take my little box of sandwiches out and eat them and I think that's pretty important. But it's so it is a bit modelling, but it is that community, but it is also about learning and you don't go to the staffroom for a hug necessarily when things go back, you want you want the hug and then you want the, and you know, you might try this or you might try that or, and it might be research informed, or it might just be the oldest teacher in the staffroom, we've seen it all before, and I want to listen to that person.
Siobhan Goffee
It might be something that you where you celebrate where someone comes in and goes. Oh my God, I tried this new thing. It's amazing and someone goes ‘are you doing it again?’, ‘Can I come and see it?’ That stuff, that should be organic. That shouldn't need to be organised at a certain point and then everyone feels under pressure. Oh my God. I got to teach this amazing lesson because this person's coming to see it. Those things need to be organic, and when we set, we're setting up our programme, we had that exactly what you've described in mind. The idea of bringing people together for support for accountability, but also for all, for learning. All of those things are hugely important.
Yeah, I don't know. When you're stuck in your work room in your faculty where you know, hopefully everything's going well, but where there might be some difficult relationships that is not a place for fertile learning about education.
Elaine Long
I would say when I was a ECT there were two things I learned from the staffroom. One was to laugh at myself because it's such a great group of comics, but I would go in and say oh, I did this lesson. I bought play dough in because I thought I'd teach the kids about imagery and actually what happened was I just spent 20 minutes picking up the leftover pieces of play dough from the carpet, and no one learned anything. And you know, I've learned to sit there and laugh and then people would gently mock me for that. But actually, it wasn't just laughter that I was learning and that's healthy as well
You should be allowed to make mistakes in your workplace and should be allowed to learn from them. What I learned was how to fail well and I think you need to be able to learn how to fail and I learnt not to take myself too seriously. Actually what was normalised within that staffroom, what I learned was that it was a safe space for people to go in and say, oh, I can't believe you did that or you did that and it wasn't that we had low professional standards. You know, we all care. We cared passionately about the students that we taught, but it actually normalised for me that it was ok to make mistakes and learn from them, and that's what that staffroom culture did.
I think the other thing that staffroom culture gave me was a sense of debate, because we'd sit there and have lunch, but we'd also debate things, you know, and I would kind of, I think, shape my teacher identity against that because, you know, I'd almost be playing with the different hats and identities in terms of what I thought. But that would be quite healthy for me to hear a range of opinions within the staffroom.,
Actually that it didn't all have to be the same, and that actually one person could go off into their classrooms and teach like that and still be a great teacher and another teacher could teach like that and still be a great teacher. think that they're two very healthy things that were normalised for me within that staffroom culture, that there are important as part of the growth of an early career teacher in a way.
Siobhan Goffee
There’s one more thing that came to me that I was thinking about. One of the things that's a really common thing, that features in the podcasts and in the program because it is something that comes with teachers to coaching sessions so often. That is that idea about the way you talk to yourself and I was just thinking in the staffroom, you're taken out of your own head out of that inner voice that can be so critical and so cruel.
If people could see, I think Maureen mentions it in one of the podcasts. What you said to yourself in your head appeared in as like a think bubble and people could see it, you would not want them to know what you'd said to yourself and when you are sitting alone in your room, you're workroom, your classroom, whatever. All you're doing is funnelled into your work. That voice can get out of control,
Your brain doesn't know the difference between someone saying that to you, like someone shouting in your face and calling you an idiot, and you doing that to yourself in your head. So the physiological response is exactly the same.
Elaine Long
That's really interesting because I think if I hadn't have gone to the staffroom after that play-doh lesson, I might have sat in my own classroom and thought, I’m a terrible teacher, and I had those moments as well. Why am I doing this? I'm not helping anyone. I can't do this. But in the act of going to the staffroom, in fact, I started off like that but I came out with well, I made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. I can see the humor in it. It's ok and actually we're agents of our own classrooms and I can put it right tomorrow. So this is this is ok, you know.
Siobhan Goffee
And someone will almost certainly go. Oh, do you remember that time I did this? And the other person would go Oh my God. Yeah. And then you'll realise you're not alone.
Mark Quinn
Yeah, the pritt-sticks are still stuck to the ceiling from the last time I handed them out, yeah.
Elaine Long
Mine would never good enough to stick to the ceiling. In fact it I could never find any. You must have worked in a very affluent school, Mark.
So, we have one final question for you, Siobhan, which is, we give all I guess the post it note on which to write some advice on and it's up to you what advice you would like to write on this post it note and where you would like to stick it, but keep it clean, please. So could you tell us I'm going to pass over the metaphoric post it note through the screen here. Could you tell us what you would like to write on your post it note and where you'd like to put it?
Siobhan Goffee
So many things, I know where I'm going to put it. I'm going put it on the mirror in the toilets, in the staff toilets. That's where I'm going to put it. for all of the toilets that are needed.
I actually haven't decided, but I think. The one that made the most difference to me that I would have always ignore is just remember you've got a body and listen to it, it's telling you stuff. So, listen to it and take some action, even if that action is 2 seconds long, it's better than no action.
Elaine Long
That’s a great one, I think, and leads back to what you said earlier about teachers being these big heads just pulling, pulling their bodies around, which is in the image that has stuck with me. But yeah, remember you've got a body and listen to, which also gives us a great title for this podcast, doesn't it, Mark?
Mark Quinn
Yeah, and. And talking about listening, I can hear that bell going in the background, that bell, which tells us it's time to clear out of our staffroom, put down our coffee. I don't know, Siobhan. I remember you as the sort of person who just put your dirty coffee mug in the sink and let somebody else to clean it up after you. I remember that.
Siobhan Goffee
So untrue. That is lies. Absolute lies. I used to help Daisy on unload the dishwasher.
Mark Quinn
Ohh ok, so was it you or was it not you that you used to steal their drama teacher's lunch from the fridge. That wasn't you either, was it?
Siobhan Goffee
Definitely wasn’t me. I wouldn’t have dared
Mark Quinn
We both know we're talking about.
Look Siobhan, talk about watching a great teacher. I had the huge privilege of watching you teach many, many times and I always came out thinking, well, I might as well give up the game now because I would never be as good as Siobhan Goffee as a history teacher. But I did take some great tips away, so you probably did make me a better teacher along the way.
Thank you so much for coming in to spend this hour with Elaine and me. I know for a fact that we're going to mine this podcast for all sorts of tips that you've been filling the air with for the last hour because our ECTS really need to hear From the things that you've been saying and I would unashamedly would direct them towards your podcast series, Joy Blockers and how to get rid of them and maybe even dip into your program as well with you and Maureen because I think they would learn a lot from that. So, cheers.
Elaine Long
Thank you very much.
Siobhan Goffee
Absolute pleasure. Lovely to be here.
Mark Quinn
Our thanks to our friend and Partner Enjoy, Siobhan Goffee for sharing her cafetiere of coffee with us this week in the ECF staffroom. Siobhan and Maureen Bows are hosts of the podcast series and coaching program for educators, Joy Blockers and how to get rid of them.
Elaine Long
Please do get in touch with us, if you would like to talk to us about your ECF experience, we especially want to hear from a range of voices and lastly, we hope you'll join us next time for a biscuit and a chat with another colleague in the ECF staffroom
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