Changing Hats

Complete the interactive activities in the Seneca app to work towards your CPD certificate.

The Different Roles that Teaching Involves

In most positions within a profession, the multitude of roles is not as prevalent as in teaching, where there are so many that we may not pay full attention to some of the lesser-used ones.

The different roles of teachers

We are advocates for children, service providers to parents, employees, colleagues, managers of people.
However, aside from a hierarchical system of management, we still bring several different agendas to different people.

Example: science teacher roles

A science teacher with teaching and learning responsibility for STEM:
- Delivers a teaching and learning group with information to present back to the department.
- Attends a STEM club and oversees a technician in an assisting role.
- Attends peer coaching with a colleague in English.
- Attends whole-school meetings with actions for their own CPD.

Transient of hierarchy

In the space of one working day, the teacher has become transient of power of hierarchy because they have been utilised in a way that fuels their confidence. This means they have to re-evolve according to context and conversation.
In the best schools, this teacher won’t have encountered an issue around hierarchical power in all scenarios. That is what we should expect of our staff if we want them to effectively switch between one role and the next over the course of the day, every day.

Kosar, Yalcinkaya & Myatt

According to Kosar and Yalcinkaya, ‘as the level of confidence of the teachers in the institutions and the colleagues they work with increases, the citizenship behaviour increases’.
A culture where colleagues are simultaneously learning from and imparting knowledge to other colleagues ‘creates a virtual circle of goodwill, of safe space, where it is neither cheesy nor corny to say what you value about another person’ (Myatt, 2016).

Creating a sense of ownership

The most effective organisations are ones where people feel a sense of ownership.
This is a dual-layered process, crafted by leadership but taken by teachers. If we want to work in an organisation where colleagues share knowledge, work collaboratively and make a consistent, considered effort to collectively improve, we have to be honest and think about how we contribute to that.
- Is staff voice encouraged and welcomed as part of the orchestration of what are fundamental micro-transformations?

Space for staff voices

By strategically creating spaces for staff voice that aren’t perhaps part of a formal structure, but simply enabling people to speak through various channels about how to improve, this makes for an incredibly healthy workspace.