‘In order to keep up with the world in 2050…. You will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again’ Yuval Harari.

How Do You Keep Yourself Motivated In The Classroom And In Life?

You study, you evolve, you learn. Some of the best teachers we know are the ones who keep adapting, they find new methods and new ways to inspire themselves and others around them. They continuously evaluate their practice and are open to new initiatives, they cultivate diverse networks and use them to enrich their pedagogy.

Why Should You Diversify Your Experiences?

Diversifying your experiences and potentially your income can be an incredible way to expose yourself to new ways of working, more radical ideas, transformative tools and effective practices. All of which can sharpen you as a teacher and inject you with a renewed impetus to improve student learning.

However, there can sometimes be a stigma attached to individuals who want to explore side projects outside of their day-to-day school work. We have heard stories from a number of self motivated teachers who have been criticised for investing time in exploring new movements far ahead of the curve drawn out by the traditional paradigms of education.

We have listened to teachers who have built large followings on social media through their innovative practice upset with Headteachers dismissing such activities as ‘showboating’, at the expense of their students.

We have met teachers who have volunteered for non profits or set up their own businesses frustrated at being overtly scrutinised and hounded by senior leaders blinkered by their relentless pursuit of exam results. The reality is however, that we should be encouraging classroom practitioners to delve into these extracurricular pursuits. No teacher should be made to feel guilty for investing in themselves!

Teachers Must Not Get Left Behind

It’s crucial to remember that as we move into the ‘future of work’ with increasingly non-linear careers, upskilling and reinvention will become necessities. You must not get left behind whilst your counterparts in other fields work for organisations with cultures that actively encourage new ideas and capabilities. Consider for a moment a future in which teachers might be supported to take a ‘sabbatical’ in a different sector and then ‘loop’ back to education at a later date; emboldened and refreshed with new ideas and an increased capacity for creativity and innovation.

Exposed Your Students To The Best Tools And Advice The World Of Work Offers

When we set up Did Teach our purpose was to help teachers looking to diversify their income or develop skills and experiences with part-time work. We also sought to create a platform that would support those teachers who needed a new challenge after dedicating time to the classroom.

What we hadn’t anticipated were the plethora of new skills and increased knowledge we acquired along the way, a positive ‘by-product’ of our journey. But the powerful bit came next, as our students were exposed to the best tools and advice that the world of work could offer. Suddenly our students were becoming familiar with Canva, Slack, Padlet and Trello boards; technological tools that other teachers in our schools had never even heard of!

Enliven Your Classroom

Through creating our unique startup we were able to utilise our new experiences to enliven our classrooms and provide students with expertise previously unattainable to us as educators. Lessons such as ‘How to write a CV’ went from a dull PowerPoint presentation to a dynamic discussion on how to succinctly articulate key skills and achievements to guarantee an interview. Proofreading of UCAS personal statements became a refining and honing process that eventually culminated in a number of University Admission Officers remarking to our students that their applications were some of the best they had ever read!

Support sessions for A level students on Extended Project Qualifications (EPQ’s) were rebranded as business mentoring, with pupils going on to create products and launch their own virtual start-ups. Students studying vocational subjects were now designing marketing funnels and using platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite to schedule multi-channel social media campaigns to engage their target markets.

We made our lessons fully immersive using virtual reality and Google Expeditions and shared these with other departments in school. All of a sudden students were being transported inside volcanoes or the paintings of Vincent Van Gough! All of these developments would not have come about through the traditional and more predictable channels that most teachers are directed towards to develop their professional skills and knowledge.

Do You Have The Time?

Other case studies from teachers that we have worked with include the Deputy Head who moonlighted as a voice actor and inspired her students with the confidence to speak out on the important issues facing Generation Z. Or the English teacher who volunteered for a community interest company and has now built an amazing rapport with the local community and was promoted to Head of Year.

You probably all know someone who has stepped outside the teaching box and been reinvigorated. Some of you might be thinking you don’t have the time or energy outside of teaching and that’s ok too, but some of the skills you could learn could make you more efficient in marking, planning and researching. Our experience is that if you are doing something you love, you will always find ways to use leisure time as an investment.

What we can experience outside of the school environment can have a profound effect on our own teaching, our lesson delivery and our wellbeing and happiness. All of this most importantly, increases our students’ awareness of the rapidly evolving world in which they will one day work. Ultimately what all of this means is that young people will not only be  ‘book smart’ but will have real world savvy.

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their own.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

This article first appeared in Fusion Magazine UK’s January Edition. Fusion is a community focused education magazine based on 4 pillars;

Education

Technology

Culture

Lifestyle

Check them out on Instagram @fusion.mag.uk

Our article How Volunteering Might Help You Land That Dream Job will give you some other ideas about how and why to upskill, some teachers who volunteer have found permanent paid employment. After all, if you are passionate about the organisation you are volunteering for, why not work for them to help make a bigger impact?