by George Suddaby
Wellbeing: the one word all teachers strive to perfect in their practice. But, what is “wellbeing”? Simply put, this surrounds work-life balance. I think we can all agree that wellbeing is something we all struggle to maintain (apart from in the six-week holidays when the pendulum takes a dramatic U-turn). Wellbeing is high on the agenda across the whole of education - numerous news articles discuss how we, and the government, can help to shift the pendulum to a more sustainable work-life balance. Yet, how can we save ourselves from being swallowed up by the trench that is workload?
I think it’s suitable to start with a story from last year. This was a big year for me for a number of reasons: not only was it my first year in teaching, but it was also my first year in the Academy. My training had taught me that my first year would be full of ecstasy, but also dire lows. Not just in terms of my teaching (which is a whole blog post in its own), but also in terms of how much work I would have to do. My training set me up for 5:30am starts and 6:30PM finishes - the longest days I had ever done since a summer job working in a factory whilst at University (the less on that, the better). At this moment, I knew something just didn’t feel right. Perhaps it was the exhaustion settling in (and that came about from just one week of being in a school!). But, there was one thing I was certain on: I could not sustain a “normal” life and a consistently strong performance at work with being this exhausted.
Fast-forward a few weeks to my first term. The “puppy” energy was as high as ever; my excitement was soaring as I stepped foot into my first lesson. “I’ve got this!” I thought to myself. Then came the first set of marking. I’m not going to lie, I was as nervous as a child on their first day at school because I had very little idea how to mark a book, let along grade assessments. I remember sitting in my living room trawling through some KS3 benchmark assessments. Hours passed. Tallying the books left: 15; 14; 13; 12. By this time it was gone 9PM and I was completely worn-out - never mind the frustration I was feeling with still having books to finish marking.
I discussed this in depth with my mentor. We spotted that I was marking in far too much detail, partly because I was picking out SPAG in every single line. But, my books looked super colourful! All joking aside, I was missing the actual point on marking. It needed to guide students to make progress, and picking out every single little error would not help them. My mentor said something that resonated deeply and still does to this day: “Work smarter, not harder.” This is something I have taken through the past 18 months of my teaching career, reaching a point now where I truly feel I have hit a happy medium with my work-life balance. But what does “work smarter, not harder’ actually mean? Simply put, and this is my thought-process I must add, when it comes to marking, think about what the students actually take out of it. Will they honestly read every single missing piece of punctuation, or correct every single spelling? Also, don’t reinvent the wheel. Someone has already designed the resource you want; you have probably designed the lesson you want last year. Re-use it, and adapt it depending on the needs of your students.
How else can you improve your work-life balance?
1) Give yourself a working day - and stick to it! In any other job, you would turn up at 9AM and leave at 5PM with no work. Yes, we get fantastic holidays, but that doesn’t mean we have to expect ourselves to work every hour of the day.
2) Don’t be hard on yourself. By this, I mean don’t feel guilty if you finish early. Sometimes you will have no work to take home, and you may finish at the end of the school day. Take advantage of this! Maybe even save one day a week where you can leave earlier, and this is a day where you take no work home.
3) Prioritise time for you. This could be something small. For example, I like a cup of coffee when I get in. I will literally sit on the sofa drinking this coffee whilst cuddling my dog with something (maybe even rubbish) on the TV. But this is time for me to unwind after the latest stressful day. Some of you might even want to go out and visit friends or family. Do it. Don’t feel guilty.
We all dream of a utopian society where we work 8:30-15:10; one where we have the perfect work-life balance. Of course, we are always going to have something to do, and we are all aware of that. However, that doesn’t mean we have to stop prioritising our own wellbeing by suffering the fate of the ever-deepening pit of extra jobs we have to do. I’ve managed to go some way on that journey, and I know you can too.