A learning journey Reflections at the end of a career in education PART TWO

The sense-making years: 2010-2020

I call the third decade of my life as an educator the sense-making years. This doesn’t mean that the context or the changing nature of the work of the sector made sense to me; after all this decade started with Gove attacking teacher educators as part of the ‘blob’ who he described as ‘the enemies of promise’. By sense-making, I mean that this was the decade when the preceding years of experience and the opportunities that opened up for me helped me make sense of who I was as an educator.

There are three threads I will expand on here. They are three threads of many, but I cannot pull on them all. 

Thread 1 – Coaching and mentoring

I have now worked to develop and understand coaching and mentoring in education for almost thirty years, since taking on my first PGCE student right up to developing research and practice centre called CollectivED. It has been a persistent interest and one which continues to cause me both hope and concern.

Between 2010-2020, I developed Master’s level courses on coaching and mentoring, wrote many papers and chapters based on my research, supported and evaluated school improvement work driven by coaching, and worked to support mentor development. The data collection for research gave me insights into the lived experiences of educators whose work was shaped by coaching and mentoring. Completing my PhD by publication was concluded through an active synthesis of my research which allowed me to develop a new model for professional learning and practice development. 

I was fortunate to travel to the USA, Canada and Australia to engage with coaching and mentoring networks, and also to start to explore coaching through several Erasmus+ projects with European partners.

These multiple opportunities became sense-making spaces. I have become heavily invested in the potential of coaching and mentoring, but acutely aware of the pitfalls.

Thread 2 – Vicarious experiences of care

Parenting three adopted children at the same time as being a teacher educator, researcher and school governor often left me feeling exposed. With our teaching backgrounds, it was difficult for the children to accept that their parents would not automatically take ‘sides’ when we were confronted with issues that emerged involving them at school. We wanted to be their allies, but very often we could understand the frustrations that their teachers felt. 

Being care experienced meant that they had lived through multiple traumas, and without doubt, we were ignorant of the additional trauma of adoption. As their parent, I gained significant vicarious experiences from their experience of being in and leaving ‘care’. Sometimes this was directly related to our shared lives. Sometimes it was less so. 

I remember one governing sub-committee meeting when we were deciding whether to approve a permanent exclusion of a child in year 8 who was undoubtedly creating persistent difficulties for his teachers and peers. I listened to the arguments for his removal from the school, and I looked at the case notes. 

It was clear to me that his persona around school was one of visible resistance and it was hoped that a new setting would give him a fresh start. But it was also clear that he struggled to form relationships with adults for a reason; he had learned that on the whole, they were not trustworthy and that he would soon be moved on. This had been his experience through multiple foster homes, multiple social workers and multiple schools. His relationships with peers were also always tentative. He was often seen as an outsider, who occupied three states; class fall-guy and clown, victim of bullying whose patience grew ragged and impermanent class member, removed for intervention to help him catch up, removed for disciplinary reasons, or absent without leave when life crashed in.      

Every child’s educational journey is unique. Learning about school through the eyes of many children and their experiences was one of the most important sense-making lessons of my life. And not a comforting one.

Thread 3 – Beyond silos

In an early collaborative research project, our university team had the challenge of bringing together the professional learning and practice development enabled by action enquiry of teachers at all stages of their careers, from four corners of England and from early years settings to higher education. In the same way, once I developed as a teacher educator working on post-graduate, post-qualification courses my cohorts were always a medley of practitioners. These situations were always a little unpredictable and required us to think beyond the traditional silos and hierarchies that characterise much of the education landscape.  

They became more and more a feature of my work however, and one that generated genuine sense-making moments for me as well as the professionals who came together to learn and develop. There is something very reassuring and refreshing to have a space in which to be credited with expertise because no-one else in the room has ever welcomed a toddler to their first days in nursery, while also calming an anxious parent, and working in a free-flow open plan setting. Similarly, it is affirming to hear teachers from numerous schools across a city express their desire to work collaboratively to meet the diverse needs of the city’s students regardless of whether they will ever meet them in person.

I have relished working outside of silos, seeing the boundary crossing that I undertake and enable in others to create learning opportunities. When artists and teachers work together a strange magic happens in classrooms. When speech and language therapists and primary teachers share their specific expertise, they can co-create new communication rich opportunities for learners. When project partners from multiple European countries work together over several years, the outcome goes well beyond the project website.

Working beyond silos is something that has led me to found CollectivED, the research and practice centre which I host, in which we focus on coaching, mentoring and professional learning. This has become my true maker-space, a community of educators with a wide range of roles working in diverse settings who share a commitment to supporting the professional learning of others. This is where I naturally do most of my sense-making now.

The unravelling: the pandemic and beyond

I am now 55. I am confounded by the decades that have elapsed. Most days I still hope my best is yet to come, but occasionally I drift towards a sense that my time in education is almost done. I can now look back on the work I have done and see the ripples. I know that even some of my year 7 students from my early days as a teacher are now grandparents. I have supported postgraduate and doctoral students whose university study is the final piece of their professional jigsaw.

The education sector is growing less and less comfortable. I feel bruised by the current climate in education. Competition, business models and ego seem foregrounded where collaboration, community and humility might be much more valuable. The pandemic had a profound impact on families, children, young adults, teachers and lecturers and the clamour to return to a perceived normality is probably causing generational damage. 

I have now decided to re-shape my final working years, and I want to be able to deliberately influence the shape they take on. Some days it feels as if the education world is moving beyond me, but occasionally I acknowledge that my work still has currency. I am known as an agitator. The threads keep creating knots that I try to navigate for myself and others. I am frequently told that on social media I voice concerns others cannot say out loud. I am not sure how this became who I am, except that the more sense-making I do the more restless I become with the status quo.

As I look ahead, I can start to project my future as one of conscious unravelling; starting to disentangle some of the threads to be able to see them more clearly. I am consciously using discernment to explore what roles I want to play, and which I would rather leave to others. I am experiencing a genuine pull towards new directions and now feel that with just a little more courage I could make some radical changes. I could take my values, my work ethic, my growing capacity to balance work within life, my new relationships and my person-centred approach into a very different role in society. I can imagine being a novice again in a new sector but know that if I did so I would be working from the fertile ground captured in my memories, my sense-making and my agitation.