I wrote a book before the pandemic.

I wanted In Search: reimagining what it means to be a teacher to be an optimistic and necessary book for all teachers.

This matters. Before Covid-19 and over the past four years, 1.3 million days were lost to stress and mental health issues. A Google search on “teacher burnout” returns 8,520,000 results. We should worry.

A long journey

I started teaching in 1984 at 23, and it was ever thus. I really was the teacher in Roger McGough’s poem, for whom “Chaos ruled OK in the classroom as bravely the teacher walked in”. 

But I wanted more. Like so many vibrant, creative, entrepreneurial teachers and educators excited by new ideas, I was on a mission to make a difference, supported by the belief that teaching is essentially an act of curiosity.

Like others, I asked whether this is really it, teaching in a reductive world where the whole never becomes more than the sum of its parts. And in answer to my own question, to thrive and not simply survive for 33 years, I’ve clung to a set of core values.

Now more than ever, the notion of journey and uncertainty are critical.

The walk towards

I take direction from Freire who invites us to adopt, “a spirit in which we are certain by not being certain of our certainties. To the extent that we are not quite sure about our certainties, we begin to ‘walk toward’ certainties”. 

For me, and my students, this ‘walk toward’ manifested as a social process over an extended period where we learnt to let go notions of certainty to discover anything long-lasting. Now, as it is clear that all certainties are uncertain, we must begin our journey once more.

To begin, let us reimagine our core values as teachers, school leaders, and policymakers. Let’s answer US author and coach Tony Robbins’ question: “But if I were to really design my own life, if I were to create a set of values that would shape the ultimate destiny I desired, what would they need to be?”

It will take, first, the willingness to be vulnerable: to resist the temptation to create a new present based on the past.

How might it be done, then? Our core values will take us to a series of fundamental requisites. The requisites are my attempt to articulate a satisfying answer to the often-asked question: “How do you do it?”

Craft, not career

I couldn’t find the answer in my career, only in my craft. Sociologist Richard Sennett has much to say about the process of craft. In walking towards, we progress from career to craft.

Sennett demonstrates that craft begins at the mechanical level of getting things to work. Yet as craft, “people can feel fully and think deeply about what they are doing, once they do it well”.

Only as I reached this stage could I articulate the requisites that make for deeply satisfying experiences in our private and public lives.

A question to answer

So here’s a question. As you return to your classroom, what are your requisites for creating deep, long-lasting experiences with your craft, your students and your colleagues?

Make a list and see where it takes you. Here are mine, grown organically from what education academic John Hattie describes as, closing “the classroom door” and performing “the teaching act”.

• Building community
• Growing expertise and empowerment
• Creating experiences
• Knowing oneself, knowing the child
• Building an inquiring classroom
• Fostering a process of resilience
• Growing wrap-around services of pastoral care
• Creating one-to-one conversations
• Connecting the wider school culture

Look at my requisites through the lens of the pandemic. The building of community, expertise, considering ourselves and others, social resilience, creating different experiences, encouraging enquiry, and being part of a wider nurturing culture.

These have all been fundamental in sustaining us. At the centre of everything lies wellbeing.

‘The untold story’

This idea is supported by proponents of positive psychology, such as Martin Seligman, who believes that “the gold standard for measuring wellbeing is flourishing”. For teachers and pupils to flourish once more, we need healing to release us from Maya Angelou’s cage that knows “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”.

To do this there are places we can revisit or discover new pedagogy. Maslow’s Expanded Hierarchy of Needs and Prochaska and DiClemente’s Cycle of Change are two such places that will allow us to heed the Canadian physician Gabor Mate’s advice that we pay compassionate attention to not only, ‘what’s happening on the outside, but also to what’s taking place on the inside’.

As we see those around us struggling to live, we must ask ourselves what we’ve been doing, and what are we going to do? Covid-19 has created a series of seismic shocks to the system that require us to answer hard questions:

• How do we confront ourselves in the face of complex, irrefutable challenges?
• How do we tap into our own unrealised resources?  
• What questions do we face, and how do we want to face them?
• What’s the point of it all?

These shocks and questions may overwhelm.

Existential questions

The resulting paralysis may induce what philosopher Kierkegaard described as sticking one’s “finger into existence” only to find “it smells of nothing” or raise the questions, “Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world?’’

In the inner-city environment where I spent most of my career, many of my hard-to-reach students asked themselves the same questions, even if they didn’t know it directly.

It made them extremely vulnerable, at an optimum age for grooming by drug gangs, at risk of being excluded and leaving them “200 times more likely to receive a knife-carrying offence”.

When asked what might be done, the police and Somalian mothers of an estate in North London talked about a solution requiring “ambition”.

The same reimagining  is now being asked for across education

Just get on with it?

Of course, some may call on us to just get on with it, citing children’s resilience.

They may want us to readily agree with the educationalist Ron Berger’s assertion: “We can’t first build the students’ self-esteem and then focus on their work. It is through their own work that their self-esteem will grow.”

However, what isn’t in doubt is the warning from Barry Carpenter, professor of mental health in education at Oxford Brookes University, that the overall impact of the pandemic cannot be underestimated and could cause a rapid erosion in children’s mental health. The injustice of the exam system will only have brought this into sharper focus.

To address this, then, schools need a new “habitus”, which will in turn, produce what philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “durable dispositions” - ways of acting, seeing and making sense of the world.  

In his book Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy, the philosopher Bernard Williams talks about “steadiness”. For Williams, our sometimes senseless private and public lives, full of “episodic feelings and thoughts”, become a search “of stabilising the self into a form”.

In doing so, we can “create a life that presents itself to a reflective individual as worth living”.

The new walk towards

Does this mean the challenge for education - before trying to attempt any catching up - is about stabilising the self into a form, so that we can help students and teachers create a life that’s worth living? Are we all now in search of this steadiness?

To find this kind of balance, we need to reimagine what sustains our private and public lives. Why else teach, if not to live?

I did indeed find a way to live within teaching for 33 years. I also found a way to live through the pandemic.

Since retiring, I continue to reimagine myself as an ethical cook with a new craft. Producing meals for marginalised communities, using rescued food. I’m on a new “walk toward” but I take the requisites with me in my continuing search for deep and lasting experiences.

In a world of constant change and shifting priorities, never has the search for craft and meaning been more necessary.

Daniel Shindler is the author of In Search: reimagining what it means to be a teacher (Grosvenor House). He was a teacher of drama, wellbeing, oracy and project-based learning within inner cities and internationally. He now works as an ethical chef for The Real Junk Food Project in Brighton