Soft and fluffy – reflecting on the workplace

Soft & Fluffy

Reflecting on the Workplace

Clare Drury

After four years as a teacher, I’ve developed a teacher identity which I’m finally comfortable with. In my training year and NQT year I felt a need to behave in a way which didn’t come naturally to me and I felt the need to perform the role of a teacher, rather than bringing my authentic self to the role. In this blog I will reflect on critical incidents which have shaped my identity as a teacher and the impact this has had on my practice.

I have been described as soft and fluffy and too emotional. It has been remarked that I ‘always get all the green forms’ (safeguarding disclosures from students). These experiences and comments have not been made with malicious intent and are often made by people I am close to. I initially laughed them off (I do not want to be called a snowflake after all!) but they have been problematic for me at times and have led me to question my professional integrity. They have encouraged me to consider how my students perceive me as a teacher and the impact that this may have on their learning. In this reflective piece I will analyse how these perceptions have affected my teacher identity and pedagogy and affirmed my professional practice. 

As a Drama Teacher, my subject itself has preconceptions which certainly have an impact on how I am perceived as a professional. It is a fun subject where we, of course, run around, make a lot of noise and develop soft skills like teamwork … Any Drama teacher reading this will know that questioning the integrity of those skills and the disparaging ‘vocational/academic’ argument is unhelpful at best (Samuels, 2019). “In England, the education system focuses on academic achievement of a particular kind.” (Select Committee on Social Mobility, 2016). The label of ‘Drama Teacher’ alone carries a satirical archetype of Mr G-esque proportions, but this is compounded by my unapologetically empathic personality and student-centered approach. In my third year, I took on the role of PSHEE Coordinator too – I just can’t help myself! My gender identity as a woman may also impact these perceptions of teacher-caring. I am curious to investigate the following questions. Why is it that embedding a pastoral approach into my teaching style can be perceived as a sign of weakness? Why is it that being primarily focussed on the wellbeing of students can be perceived as off-topic? And finally, what is the role of a teacher and how has it changed? 

Too emotional? You need to be more of a bitch …

The criticism of me being too emotional was remarked when I was found crying at the end of a particularly rough week. I would always try to hide this from colleagues and my students but I was finding it difficult to conceal my emotions. It was not uncommon for me to cry or experience intense joy, disappointment or frustration when I would reflect on the day. This could be about students, procedures or deadlines, for example. I would feel a compulsion to be professional at all times, to put on a show, to appear in control. For me that had become about suppressing negative emotions. I had learnt both directly and indirectly to place value judgements on my emotions. When I’d burst into a colleague’s office exclaiming my delight for a student who’d made excellent progress this was met with praise and encouragement, including a notable absence of criticism. When I would become frustrated, upset or hurt by the day’s events this was met with a shared sense of disappointment. This reinforced the view that expressing positive emotions is seen as desirable behaviour (Brophy and Good, 1986). 

Another critical incident which shaped my practice occurred in my training year. Behaviour management was by far my weakest standard according to formal observation feedback. I felt uncomfortable when dealing with poor behaviour and the pressure to improve was intense. Colleagues advised me that I needed to be ‘more of a bitch’. At the time I interpreted this as needing to adopt a behaviour management strategy which was intimidating, quick-witted and zero tolerance. I felt conflicted. Why was it that I was being advised to motivate children through fear? Would this phrase have been used if was a male trainee? I tried a plethora of strategies suggested to me, which were primarily about ‘putting children in their place’. I knew that I needed to improve my behaviour management, but also knew that I would not be able to sustain this method. A lot of the time, the strategies were not effective at improving my behaviour management in the classroom as I did not agree with them and as a result, I was not executing them with confidence. Ironically, behaviour management is now considered to be one of my strongest areas as a teacher according to feedback from learning walks and observations. I am curious to investigate this transition. On reflection, both of these menial comments have led me to consider wider issues in education and have shaped my teacher identity. 

 If teaching is a performance, it should be easy for a Drama teacher, right? 

Immediately after the incident of being called too emotional, I felt more compelled to hide my negative emotions, pretend I was OK, to stay quiet and get on with the job. The idea of teaching being a ‘performance’ could well ring true to many educators. Teachers may be conditioned, directly and indirectly to ‘fake’ their emotions whilst at work and abide by “emotional-display rules” in front of students and colleagues (Burić, 2019, p12). 

Teachers may often have to hide emotions (e.g., disliking of a student), pretend ones that they actually do not experience (e.g., a thrill because a student has succeeded), or invest effort in trying to feel an emotion they are expected to feel (e.g., love and caring for students in spite of their rude behaviour).
Burić, 2019, p13.

This process can be operationalised as emotional labour. Hochschild (1983, p7) defined emotional labour as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display”. Grandey (2000, in Yin, Huang and Chen, 2019, p. 2) added, “At the individual level, the core of emotional labor [sic] is individuals’ emotion regulation”. These definitions help us to understand that emotional labour refers to the way we manage our feelings (with a conscious awareness of how they are perceived by others). 

Many service industry careers such as hospitality require an amount of emotional labour to be undertaken by employees to function effectively in their role. For example, you may have had an awful night’s sleep and be filled with lethargy and sadness, but if your role is a waiter, part of your role is to welcome customers and present positive emotions. Emotional labour is arguably a fundamental part of the teaching profession. It may be necessary and advantageous. 

(Hargreaves (1998). Hochschild (1983) defined two main behavioural manifestations of emotional labour – surface acting and deep acting. Surface acting is the process of hiding your true feelings or pretending to feel a certain way, even if you are aware that you are not feeling that way at all. Deep acting refers to when an individual aims to manifest desired behaviours – to feel the way they are ‘supposed to feel’. It has been found that students’ levels of perceived teacher caring and enthusiasm (whether genuine or not) has a positive impact on student outcomes. Meaning, that if a teacher is outwardly appearing to be passionate and excitable about their subject or the topic, the student is more likely to engage and learn. This is known as the theory of emotional contagion (Frenzel et al., 2009; Kunter et al., 2008). 

Although genuinely enthused by my subject and the students, I was becoming more and more exhausted from pretending in other aspects of the role. Teaching was OK, but it had not been the dream job that I imagined it would be right away. It was hard and required me to be patient with my development. I knew it was what I wanted to do but there was a nagging doubt in my head which told me that maybe I just wasn’t cut out for the teaching profession. Maybe I couldn’t be the bitch I needed to be to get the class to listen? Maybe I was too soft? I did not know how challenging and intense I would find the role and, unfortunately, I suffered poor mental health due to work-related stress. At times, I found both the practical and emotional demands of the job to be overwhelming and considered alternative careers. This raises wider questions about the teaching profession. If teaching is a role with high demands on emotional labour – how are we preparing and supporting staff to cope with this, particularly in their early career? I find Howard’s sentiments on this particularly poignant:

Once I had completed my training, the spaces of time where I felt like I fit were few and far between. Somewhat anticlimactic, although I was afraid to admit that at the time. I was pulled between gratitude at being able to do what I loved every day and a sense of embarrassment that I found it incredibly challenging. More so, I didn’t understand how I could simultaneously love and dread the ventures of each new day. There were so many aspects of the day-to-day that had a real sense of disconnect.

(Howard, 2020, p. 26). 

Hoschild’s research into emotional labour strategies (surface acting and deep acting) has since been developed by researchers to include a third emotional labour strategy – the expression of naturally felt emotions. This strategy has been found to be the least likely to lead to teacher burnout and exhaustion (Yin, Huang and Chen, 2019, p6). By refusing to engage in excessive surface acting or deep acting it has been found that teachers’ job satisfaction is higher (Burić, 2019, Yin et al., 2013; Yin et al., 2019). This can be linked to the widely accepted job-demands-control-support (JDCS) model first proposed by Karasek and Theorell (1990), which details that when staff have high demands accompanied by high autonomy it can lead to successful outcomes for the employee and the employer. 

This is certainly true of my personal experience. When I had made the decision to embrace the caring aspects of my teacher identity and value my pastoral focus, I did not look back. I adopted behaviour management strategies which were focussed on core values, rewarding positive behaviour, restorative conversations and relationship building. These all proved more effective and allowed me to be authentic in my approach. 

Teaching staff may well express their naturally felt emotions in front of students and colleagues whilst simultaneously fulfilling the expectations of their institution (Fried, 2011). Being professional and expressing your naturally felt emotions are not mutually exclusive, as I once believed. When using naturally felt emotions as an emotional labour strategy, it must be accompanied by emotional intelligence to ensure that the timing of conversations and expressions of emotions are appropriate. Emotional intelligence is a form of human intelligence in its own right and is defined as “the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s own thinking and actions” (Salovet and Mayer, 1990, p. 189). Mayer et al. (2008, p. 507) more succinctly define emotional intelligence as “the ability to carry out accurate reasoning about emotions and the ability to use emotions and emotional knowledge to enhance thought”. 

Teachers with high levels of emotional intelligence have the potential to create a learning environment where emotion regulation is modelled to students both implicitly (through the hidden curriculum) and explicitly (in PSHEE lessons, for example).  Coinciding with a decline in the mental health of teachers has been a decline in the self-reported mental health of students (Ross, 2017; Harding et al, 2019). Yin, Huang and Chen (2019, p.1) remark that “teachers assume increasing responsibilities for not only students’ academic results, but also their mental health and social emotional learning”. A key aspect of this could be modelling emotion regulation to students. 

For context, I will share a personal example that worked well with my class. I was rehearsing a play after school when I had a call from reception with some bad news. I had a choice to cancel the rehearsal in that moment, pretend everything was fine and carry on, or something else? I decided to stay. I shared with the group briefly that I had had some bad news but was enjoying and committed to the rehearsal and wanted to carry on. I decided to call a break a little earlier than planned. When we recommenced, students suggested that we play a drama game to get ready and ‘help Miss Drury vibe’. In that moment, I realised that I had made a great choice. I did not take the ‘easy’ option to keep calm and carry on. I did not share personal details with my students as this wouldn’t have been appropriate. Instead I shared my very human reaction to some bad news and they responded with kindness and understanding. I believe that this kind of interaction is central to my teaching and should be across education institutions. I am not just teaching content and knowledge but modelling emotion regulation as part of my role. 

Keeping it real!

Perceived teacher caring and authenticity can lead to strong teacher-student relationships, which improves academic success and emotional adjustment for students (Roorda et al., 2011; Thapa et al., 2013 and Wentzel, 2009). In my adolescence, I found my teachers and drama lessons in particular a mediating factor in maintaining good mental health. This was one of the key factors which motivated me to become a teacher in the first place. The emotional labour involved in teaching and relationship building can be advantageous to teachers and is arguably what makes the job most rewarding to many (Ramberg et al, 2019). 

If teaching is a service or a role where we must perform, should it be? Who are we serving? Who is the customer? The students, their parents/carers, our boss? Although there is certainly a place for emotional labour strategies like surface acting in education, there may be value in moving towards the strategy of naturally felt emotions. Hebson, Earnshaw and Marchington (2007) explain that the teaching standards agenda, particularly in English schools, has led to a decline in space for emotion work in teaching. Teachers and students are batting a cognitive dissonance between the institution’s increasing demands of them and their personal needs and emotions, their own sense of self. They are in a sense becoming “displaced” (Ballin, 2016). This has been compounded by neoliberalism, government policies like academisation and institution specific policies contributing to high workloads (Rasheed-Karim, 2020). Capability procedures have focussed on the aspects of teaching which are easily measured. There are many other aspects of competency that a teacher can possess. “Good teaching is to do with teacher’s values, identities, moral purposes, attitudes to learning (their own as well as those of their students), their caring and commitment to be the best they can at all times and in every circumstance for the good of their students. It is about their enthusiasm and passion.” (Day, 2004, pp. 15-16). The emotional side of teaching has become devalued (Brown, 2020; Mahoney et al., 2004, p.435) and replaced with tokenistic gestures. Bolton (2004) summarises that pecuniary emotion management is no substitute for philanthropy given as a gift. In order for staff and student wellbeing to be meaningful it must be sincere, practical and values-driven (Howard, 2020). 

In light of this critical incident and my reading, I can reflect that in my early career I was certainly engaging in both surface acting and deep acting. I was also yearning to use the expression of naturally felt emotions as an emotional labour strategy. In my second year as a teacher, I was more confident in developing my teacher identity; I had more space and time. I decided to give myself permission to allow my genuine emotions and caring for students to be central to my style and this is something that I aim to develop. I believe that if teachers are encouraged, provided space and time to express their negative emotions appropriately and allowed to craft their own teacher identity in the workplace then their mental health can be protected (Wyer, 2020). It is not the emotional labour itself that is the problem, but that if the emotional labour strategies aren’t implemented early and made manageable for early career teachers then this can prove overwhelming. This could be partially responsible for the recruitment and retention crisis in education (Ofsted, 2018; Education Support Partnership, 2018/2019). Negative emotionshave a right to exist and should be embraced. They should not be feared as they are a healthy and normal part of life. Negative emotions are not directly associated with negative behaviours and can be a helpful source of information, leading to useful cognitive processes such as self-reflection (Schwarz and Clore, 1996; Clore and Huntsinger, 2007). In the context of teaching this may mean considering questions like: Why am I feeling upset by this? What was and was not in my control? How may I shape my practice in light of this experience? This fulfils Teaching Standard 4 in particular for staff to “reflect systematically on the effectiveness of lessons and approaches to teaching” (Department for Education, 2011).

Reference List

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