When I was at university, I met a student who remains a good friend today. She is an American with a wicked sense of humour. When learning German, she was taught the phrase, “Germany is the size of California.” Analiese, being Analiese, changed this to say, “Germany is ONLY the size of California.” With the addition of that one word, she changed it from a fact to a boast. She was just playing with words and never used this phrase to upset any German friends (to the best of my knowledge!). But she showed that one word has the power to change the entire tone of a sentence.

Perhaps the same is true in education, and we can dramatically change what we say by adding or removing a few words. Indeed, devilment aside, we can add words to give a positive spin on events and learning.

A positive mindset

As a maths teacher, I am most familiar with the power of positivity that growth mindset can bring. Pupils who have been exposed to this philosophy enjoy adding the word “yet” to just about any phrase. No longer do they say, “I haven’t done my homework.” Now they tell us, “I haven’t done my homework - yet!” (Obviously, I will reply along the lines of, “I haven’t called your mum about this - yet.”)

Growth mindset provides good examples of how schools’ engagement with the media can be approached in a different way. On a national level, we read really positive stories, such as, in Aberdeen, three entire subject areas have been fully booked in initial teacher training. Or should we read that as only three subject areas have been filled? It depends on your mindset. Maybe we will, one day, talk about our pay rise being “only (actually, any number greater than zero here would be nice) per cent”. The optimists among us may say, before there is even any inkling of an announcement on salaries, “We haven’t had a pay rise this year - yet!”

A school community really is a wonderful thing. It isn’t just the teachers and pupils - you also have the non-teaching staff. Add in the parents, the local police, the local politicians, shopkeepers, business owners and volunteers in the community, and the school community grows vastly. Every single one of these people wants a school to do well. The local paper is, then, a vital outlet for shouting good news from the rooftops. In return, local papers need schools to share their news - I only ever buy a copy if there is likely to be school news involving my own children. We do sometimes hit a national paper with good news, and I was recently involved in one such article: world champion curler Eve Muirhead talked with our science pupils about friction and technological advances in her sport (a curling brush doesn’t even look like a brush now, it seems). It was great to see that reflected in positive news in a national paper, which showed how pupils seeing science’s impact beyond the classroom can be potentially life-changing.

Politicians do seek headlines in national papers, obviously, and there is sometimes friction between unions, acting on our behalf, and politicians which results in negative news. There has been talk lately of negative media reports putting people off becoming a teacher and driving away some who were already working in classrooms; to be honest, a lack of meaningful pay rises is more likely to be a factor than negative headlines.

It is true, though, that teachers don’t always get portrayed positively in the media. Parents read “strike” and think “childcare disaster”, so when a work-to-rule on workload was announced, headlines like “Teachers to strike” seemed to paint the profession in a bad light.

Share your success

Maybe, as a profession, we need to get more proficient at sharing our positive news more widely than just with the local papers. Maybe national papers would benefit from listening to our positive news, too. So many people will only buy a paper if there is something covered that they are particularly interested in. If teaching and learning was of higher media value, not merely filling the gaps just before the classifieds, there could be a critical mass gained of enthusiasm for reading about school successes. This could lead to more schools sharing positive news. More papers would be sold as well. Wouldn’t that feel great?

For now, most of us probably have a few social media outlets. It won’t take long to add in one word here or there to make our news about school even more positive, or take out that word which makes it too negative. All you and I, the people at the chalk (or pixel) face, can do just now is keep fighting the good fight and showing that the job is great (and perhaps even worthy of a modest pay rise before I retire in 25 years’ time). Let’s share all the great news - in as many ways as we can.

Eddie White is a maths teacher in the east of Scotland, as well as a theology student, husband and dad