This post is a modified excerpt of Chapter 3 from Jess' book Planning to Stay: Burnout, Demoralization, Exploitation, and How to Reclaim Self-Care, Your Classroom, and Your Life... Anyway
Teacher Professionalization is Accidental—and Harmful
Joining a faculty is reminiscent of movie renditions of what it looks like to begin a prison sentence. There’s instantaneous sizing up. Various cliques bid to either recruit or reject the rookie. There are hazing rituals (for teachers, this looks like being given the crappiest room, the least survivable schedule, etc.). Battle lines have been drawn before the new recruit even arrives.
There are expectations of—and consequences for—the rookie educator, whether they grab a weapon, attempt to make peace, or stay out of the fray entirely. Faculty-to-faculty vitriol, sabotage, and general negativity is a painful, real, and predictable side effect of adults being managed by a psychopathic, resource-constrained system. It’s lateral violence; the way oppression perpetuates interpersonally. And it’s perpetuated because veteran educators who have been harmed by the system, who are surviving their own burnout,
demoralization, and exploitation (BD&E), are tasked with mentoring the new generation—without any additional training or meaningful support.
Mentoring is an essential, complex skill that requires instruction, modeling, observation, and critique in continuous-improvement cycles. Mentor teachers are not offered this support. Instead, they’re asked to usher in the next generation of educators by squeezing the task into their lunch breaks.
In the absence of the support the role deserves, mentor teachers do their best by teaching what they know. They do this, however, without embedded professional support to examine their own biases, weaknesses, and relationships to power. They do this without clear expectations nor goals from the districts that process their reports. And they do it without an obligation to help their mentees improve.
Beyond the formal-but-unsupported mentorship structures, many powerful professionalizing interactions occur in informal settings. What we’re told in passing in hallways, while waiting at the copy machine, or in line for the microwave in the teachers’ lounge can have significant impacts on the way we view our practice, our role within a school or team, even our relationships with our students, administrators, and colleagues. Like the rest of human interaction, dominant power structures are the default if we don’t weigh in intentionally to balance the scales. Leaving teacher professionalization up to haphazard interactions between harried, overburdened, under-supported colleagues sets up the system to perfectly replicate itself, building generation after generation of burned-out, demoralized, exploited “support.”
Many of Us Are Grown-Ups, Few of Us Are Adults
Growing up is inevitable. Becoming an Adult is a choice.
Many people confuse the two, as this isn’t a space our public, secular culture acknowledges
much, so we’ll explore the difference. From here on out, we’ll use “grown-up” to describe someone who is simply physically grown and temporally mature, and we’ll use “adult” to describe someone who has done the additional internal work of figuring out who they are, who they want to be, and how they’ll behave to stay in alignment with those truths.
Educators are structurally permitted, even encouraged, to skip becoming adults because they step immediately from the role of student to the role of teacher. By definition, the teacher is an adult, right? Unfortunately, no.
Many of us are just grown-ups. Being a teacher is a role, and only a role. Many educators confuse our roles for our identities without discovering who we are separate from our roles. This sets us up to have really high expectations of ourselves—or at least expectations that overly align with one part of our lives, often at high cost to the rest of our lives. It is also a setup, as our over-identification as educators usually corresponds with our wildly inaccurate expectations about how the profession will care for us—and we fall hard when our expectations are not met. When we’re let down, either by ourselves or the system, we’re vulnerable to burnout, demoralization, and exploitation. We’re just grownups , assuming that everyone around us is an adult, not knowing how they got there or why we aren’t with them.
Your Inner Child is the Part of You That Wants Things
Your Inner Child is the part of you that knows what feels good, what is fun, that is connected
to the moment. A healthy Inner Child allows us freedom and safety to feel emotions deeply and fully. Our Inner Child helps us tune in to living a life true to ourselves.
Educators who are more connected with their Inner Child, but who have not yet cultivated their Inner Adult, tend to do things like skip out on meetings (and fib about the reason why). Someone with a strong Inner Child tends to skew on the side that looks out at the world and blames the world for their problems. Someone with a vulnerable Inner Child is likely to internalize oppressive work conditions and turn them into messages about what a bad job they’re doing all of the time, what a terrible teacher they are, and how they can’t ever do anything right. That’s what unjust and cruel power systems sound like when they become integrated with your internal parts.
Our Inner Parent’s Voice is Loud
Our Inner Parent's voice is a compilation of our own caretakers’ voices, as well as cultural and societal messages about who we should be.
Educators with a strong Inner Parent, but who lack an Inner Adult, are less connected
to what they actually want and are more connected to what they “should” want, what they “should” do, and who they “should” be. Our Inner Parent is the part of us that is the most susceptible to internalized oppression with respect to our performance as educators.
Educators with strong Inner Parent voices are constantly berating themselves about what they should be doing instead of what they are doing and how everything should have been
better than it is. They experience a punishing sense of responsibility; when things go wrong for these educators, in ways that life never goes perfectly, they blame themselves.
Cultivating an Inner Adult
Cultivating an Inner Adult is how we bridge the gap from grown-up to adult. And it's a key step in healing from teacher burnout, demoralization, and exploitation.
All of us have access to an Inner Parent and an Inner Child, and it’s essential to recognize the voice of each—but it’s neither effective nor fun to let either take over. We cultivate an Inner Adult by helping our Inner Child and Inner Parent talk to each other; the Inner Adult serves as a mediator. It can sound like this: “Inner Child, I get that you’ve had a hard day and just want to watch TV. Inner Parent, we did have a rough day, and it’s not helpful when you call us lazy. Let’s listen to a guilty-pleasure podcast while we go for a walk to burn off some stress.”
This Inner conversation, while seemingly simple and even obvious, can feel nearly impossible to educators, particularly if we don’t yet know how to identify these different voices, let alone how to interact with them.
We see evidence that teachers haven’t cultivated their Inner Adults when we watch them in professional learning settings. Those of us who haven’t yet done this internal work will immediately turn into the very student that pushes our own buttons.
You’ve seen it, I’m sure. Colleagues who rage about students’ phones all day, then sit on their own phones through faculty meetings. Educators who police their own students’ social interactions then speak sharply to their colleagues’ faces and gossip behind their backs. If there isn’t an Inner Adult to run the show, it’s our Inner Parents who help us to act like teachers all day. When we’re not leading a classroom, it’s like our Inner Children have been repressed in the service of our Inner Parents; when the pressure of that role is removed, our Inner Parent is off the clock; we regress to that immature version of ourselves as our Inner Child takes over.
Beyond making us more functional and comfortable, cultivating an Inner Adult benefits our students. Without an Inner Adult, our Inner Parent can react with anger, spite, and power-obsessed words and actions. Acting from our Inner Parents can leave students momentarily paralyzed in fear and traumatized for life. Without cultivating an Inner Adult, our Inner Child wants our students to be our friends. While we certainly want to be friendly, being friends with our students is not our role. It’s unfair to burden our students with the responsibility of managing our feelings. It’s unfair to task students with figuring out how to safely field our inappropriate over-disclosures. Educators with an unchecked Inner Child feed off of the admiration, idolization, and fawning that students can offer teachers; educators ruled by an Inner Child can explain all manner of damaging, inappropriate, and dangerous educator-student relationships.
Supporting students to become who they’re becoming is a sacred obligation. Because you have chosen to accept this beautifully challenging work, you have a responsibility to both your students and yourself to cultivate your Inner Adult.
Your Inner Adult is the grounded, reliable part of yourself that will allow you to teach in connection with your values through grace, humor, and well-supported high expectations for your students. Your Inner Adult is your vehicle to become the teacher you want to be—and to stay that way.