Headteacher’s Blog 25.11.21
“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”
Khalil Gibran
I have been thinking a lot recently about two particular interactions with colleagues and what each made me think about the topic of love.
I will start with the most recent interaction, which took place a couple of weeks ago in one of our Wednesday teacher development sessions in school. Miss Evans was presenting to teaching colleagues on the process we call learning walks. Learning walks are regular drop ins where senior staff in school check in on teachers and collect information about key areas of their teaching, the curriculum, how they are managing students at different stages and how they are giving feedback for example. This is a part of the profession that some colleagues find very stressful or worrying. In her explanation of the process, Miss Evans described learning walks as an ‘act of love.’ We love learning, we love our jobs, we love seeing the children in our care make progress; checking in on teaching is a way of ensuring that teachers are supported to be the best they can be, that students are able to be the best that they can be, therefore it is an act of love.
The other interaction happened almost a year ago, I was interviewing a prospective colleague who was at that time working in a faith school. When I asked her what she thought she might struggle with if successfully appointed to Bohunt Horsham, she thought for a while and answered, ‘love.’ In explaining her answer she told me that in her current school it was commonplace to talk openly about love, staff were expected to love their students and expressing that was within the teachings of that particular faith. She was worried that in mainstream schools such as ours, love was taboo.
This really gave me pause. I remembered moments across my almost twenty years of working in schools where students had told me they loved me and recalled that I would answer with something decidedly vague or unspecific such as, ‘I love all of my students.’ I recalled talking about this in the early years of my career with my own mother and how shocked she was, ‘All children need to be loved, why can’t you tell them you love them?’ What I don’t remember however is ever being told, expressly, in teacher training years or at any other point that it was ‘banned’ just implicitly knowing it would seem inappropriate.
So where does love belong in a mainstream secondary school? Well, I believe that here at Bohunt Horsham love is tangible everywhere. A love of a particular subject, a love for education as a transformative vehicle that changes young people’s lives and expands their minds, a love of the privileged place we have in our students’ lives as we help them to navigate the world around them and yes, it is love, in the form of compassion, respect, belief and challenge that is the glue in the relationship between our students and our staff.
The Sutton Trust’s report in 2014 on What Makes Great Teaching, identifies a list of the six components of great teaching and, although not explicitly named, love makes it in at number three under the guise of ‘classroom climate’, something the report describes as ‘quality of interactions between teachers and students, and teacher expectations: the need to create a classroom that is constantly demanding more, but still recognising students’ self-worth.’
Teaching is a vocation, great teaching is an act of love.
