My first year of teaching was disastrous by every observable metric. Classroom management, academic rigor, relationship building, parent communication, and relationships with colleagues all suffered under the weight of my fear of failure and reluctance to ask for help from the veteran educators in my small, rural middle school. Eighteen years have passed since then, but I still feel a cringe of shame when I think about those early years.
At the end of my fourth year of teaching, I was on my way to becoming yet another early-career educator to leave the profession when I enrolled in a master’s program that introduced me to the Iowa Writing Project (IWP). IWP uses a reading and writing workshop model to engage teachers in professional development around literacy practices while also nurturing teachers as writers. The teacher-writer approach allowed me to start viewing my work in the classroom as a craft rather than a career. A craft that I could revise, hone, and shape to grow better in gentle and forgiving ways, without the baggage of feeling as if I was failing at this career. With an artist’s lens, I was able to approach teaching as something I could exert unlimited imagination upon, so long as I had the guts to swing big and embrace failure in the pursuit of growth. I became a better teacher, then a good one, and each year I continue to strive toward becoming a great one.
Now, as a teaching professor in an educator preparation program, I use the hard lessons from those early years to prepare preservice teachers for careers that will honor their humanity while providing a pathway for improvement. Each semester is a new draft in the professor I am becoming, and I constantly experiment with how to mentor preservice teachers in a career that often pressures them to feel as if anything short of perfection is unacceptable. Sustaining young teachers requires cultivating environments where they can embrace the pitfalls of early-career teaching and reframe setbacks as places of possibility. My ongoing stumbles at preparing preservice teachers have illuminated a few ways school leaders can provide space and framing for new teachers to try, fail—and try again.
The Perfectionist Problem
At the beginning of each semester, I ask my preservice teachers to reflect on their student identities. Time and again, the majority self-identify as perfectionists. Many proudly share that they will not stop their work on an assignment until it has reached perfection. They are often disappointed when one of my first pieces of advice for long-term success in the teaching profession is to free yourself from the curse of perfectionist thinking before you enter your future classroom.
A focus on perfection implies that there is an attainable way on the first attempt to make the messy endeavor of working with young humans into something neat and tidy. In her work on culturally responsive teaching, Zaretta Hammond (2015) outlines common social triggers that teachers need to be aware of so we can manage our emotions in the classroom. New teachers who identify as perfectionists are susceptible to feeling threatened by the certainty trigger that creates “feelings of being out of control or unable to be safe because of venturing into the unknown with new teaching practices and unfamiliar ways of organizing the classroom” (p. 65).
With an artist’s lens, I approached teaching as something I could exert unlimited imagination upon, so long as I had the guts to swing big and embrace failure.
Every aspect of the teacher role is unfamiliar for early-career teachers, and school leaders need to set the tone for how to help regulate this fear of uncertainty. One way to help new teachers move past perfectionism is to encourage experimentation and risk. As M. Colleen Cruz explores in Risk. Fail. Rise: A Teacher’s Guide to Learning from Mistakes (2021), a “video game” approach to teaching and learning can keep us excited to fail and try again because in playing video games, we experience a “world of low-stake risk and skills learned by repeated practice” (p. xix).
In a video game, players learn to not repeat the same mistakes by attempting new ways to approach a problem. Similarly, new teachers can learn to embrace experimentation with their lesson planning and professional growth, and thereby chip away at the urge to do something perfect the first time. The video game approach allows early-career teachers to understand that getting better at any skill requires practice and the willingness to keep trying.
Crafting a Culture of Vulnerability
A rough draft is a place for writers to gather their thoughts on paper without attending to quality. I emphasize the word rough when I talk about draft writing because a perfectionist mentality tends to skip the messiness of a rough draft and attempt to jump straight to a polished piece. In the same way, a perfectionistic new teacher may think they need to immediately do everything right in their classroom. But every day of the first year of teaching is a rough-draft version of lesson planning, delivery, content engagement, relationship building, and reflection. If new teachers believe that perfection is attainable at first attempt, they will miss the opportunity to refine their practice into something better over time.
School leaders have to create an environment where vulnerability is the norm in professional conversations. They can set a foundation of embracing mistakes by encouraging teachers at all career stages to share stories of recent teaching failures (and modeling by sharing their own leadership failures). Yes, I said failures. As a young teacher, I often felt inadequate when the only stories I heard from my colleagues’ classrooms were about the successes—the engaging lessons that kids just loved, the parents who supported their teaching, the “aha” moments that happened daily in their classrooms. The only time I was allowed to observe peers was when they had a special lesson planned that they knew would be a success. All of this solidified my feelings of shame and embarrassment over my own missteps in the classroom and made me fear that asking for help would expose me as incompetent.
If I had worked in a culture that prioritized vulnerability, I would have learned earlier in my career that “the most powerful thing we can do to create a culture of caring is to allow ourselves to be seen as human beings” (Hammond, 2015, p. 80). Instead, I was comparing my rough-draft year of teaching to colleagues who had honed their skills over years of practice and revision.
The Power of Peer Response
As a first-year teacher, I had an assigned mentor in my building. My mentor was kind, experienced, and respected by administrators and colleagues. Despite this, it was not a successful mentoring partnership. I did not feel comfortable sharing my failures with someone who seemed so far removed from what I was experiencing in the isolation of my classroom. How could I be honest with someone who made teaching look so easy?
In their work on teacher identity, Gilmore and Kramer (2019) identify “demystifying the profession” as a shared experience between veteran teachers and early-career teachers that is important to recruiting and retention. Demystifying the profession means veteran teachers, mentors, and instructional leaders share their own early-career struggles and how they navigated them. Sharing these “horror stories” can disrupt the fear and isolation early-career teachers experience when something doesn’t go as planned. It can also model the specific strategies and resources veteran teachers use to improve their skills.
Rather than observations focused on evaluation and correction, instructional leaders and mentors can approach their work with new teachers through a craft mindset. In writing workshops, we use peer response as an opportunity to gain feedback on rough drafts. In this model, peer response is very different from an evaluative practice like peer editing, which prioritizes correction. Response provides a space for readers to share their reactions and ask questions of writers, with the writer maintaining control over how they use that response during their revision process. Successful feedback should be supportive, instructive, and not induce stress (Hammond, 2015).
Using reflective conversation starters with early-career teachers can help build the skill of revision as conscious teaching moves: What went well? What didn’t? What will I change the next time I use this strategy? By focusing teacher talk on the assumption that there is room for continual improvement, teachers can view the process of becoming a stronger educator as something they have the capacity to work away at over time.
Disrupting Martyrdom Narratives
As a first-year teacher, I spent most of my required professional development meetings listening to the conversations of the veteran teachers in my district. Common themes about teacher work ethic centered on martyr narratives: who stayed in their classroom until 2:00 a.m. grading papers, who came into the building on weekends to prepare for the week ahead, who sacrificed their personal lives to the profession, who came to work even though they were ill, who spent their own money on items for their classrooms. Their conversations echoed in my mind, leading me to believe that even though I worked on planning and grading on nights and weekends, I was never doing enough. To be a good teacher meant I had to sacrifice any self I had outside of the job.
Martyrdom narratives create unhealthy expectations for early-career teachers.
Martyrdom narratives create unhealthy expectations for early-career teachers, and if left unchallenged by building leaders, they can result in conflict between veterans and first-year educators who are in survival mode. A career that requires unpaid labor and sacrifice outside of long working hours is not one where people can thrive. As Cruz explains, “When educators give so much to their students that they are feeling empty, they do not have the ability to do the high-level thinking and creative work, let alone have the physical stamina to be the excellent teacher their children need” (2021, p. 30). To disrupt martyrdom requires fighting against a long-ingrained societal view of teaching. Our current systems are set up to encourage martyrdom: Schools benefit from teachers working outside their contract hours—until that chronic overwork leads to teacher burnout (Gilmore & Kramer, 2019).
Early-career teachers need instructional leaders who prioritize and enforce time management, sustainable practices, and the vital role of work-life balance in creating a lasting career. Building leaders can disrupt toxic teacher martyrdom practices by setting firm boundaries for communication and work outside of contract hours. A simple check-in with early-career teachers to make sure they are not staying late to work every night can also counteract martyrdom narratives.
Works in Progress
Support for early-career teachers means providing space for honest conversations and working to hone teachers’ potential through feedback and a culture of vulnerable risk taking. The care and nurturing we put into our new teachers has a direct relation to the environments we create for our students. If we want schools to be learning communities where students feel encouraged to stretch their intellective capacities, then we must first live it in our compassion and support for early-career teachers. Once they experience what it means to approach their teaching with a workshop mindset, their classrooms can flourish as places where students will also embrace the art of learning.
Reflect & Discuss
➛ How can school leaders intentionally create space in professional development conversations for sharing recent failures or classroom struggles?
➛ How can they model vulnerability? What questions can we ask during mentoring conversations to reframe new teachers’ struggles as spaces for revision and growth?
➛ What can we do to disrupt martyrdom narratives in our school?
