Working To The Bell

Teaching requires a precise moment of beginning and end to a lesson; the profession works to timetables and bells all day long. There is the start of the day bell, start of the lesson bell, end of the lesson bell, start and end of food break bells, and the end of the day bell.

When we work to the end of the lesson bell, it is common to feel in a hurry to deliver all the required content; and in the case of high school teaching, this can extend to being in a hurry to move to the next classroom. 

Students can arrive to the next part of the timetable with behaviours that require settling by the teacher. Timetable transitions contribute to a myriad of reasons teachers feel anxiety or stress at the beginning of a lesson; additional factors that can impact the overall quality of a teacher and how they feel at these times can include but aren’t exclusive to, feeling unprepared with content, unruly students, feeling tired, outside work situations, reporting and marking deadlines.

Arriving to a lesson with these stresses on the body has a great impact on teachers, students and how the lesson unfolds. In the busyness of teaching life, it is easy for teachers to override an awareness that the students in the classroom are also feeling the state of teachers, themselves, and other students alike.

Before we as teachers arrive to a lesson, it is supportive to check in with our bodies to get a sense of ‘what’ arrives to the lesson. That is, what quality does the body arrive in? Having strategies to momentarily pause to check in and then resettle our own bodies can have a tremendous impact on what happens next.

These strategies can include bringing a focus to our footsteps as they land on the ground; dropping our shoulders to release tension; straightening our neck and spine; feeling our chest rise as we take in a full breath; releasing any tension in our jaw; being aware of holding any tension in our stomachs and letting it release. These small movements take a microsecond to perform but can have a tremendous impact on settling the body.

A teacher arriving in a quality of steadiness naturally supports to settle the classroom before the learning begins. The teacher’s quality of being becomes the barometer that sets the tone for the lesson. This foundation then offers a natural propensity to connect to the students first before the lesson and content is delivered. This is gold. If a teacher remains in some anxiousness, there can instead be an emphasis on getting the content delivered at all costs without connecting first to the students.

Understanding that the significance of the quality in which we arrive to a lesson holds equal importance to preparing resources and knowing content, is key to any preparation for a teaching day.

This is particularly relevant when lesson preparation can often be disrupted with other matters to attend to which can cause us to not feel as prepared as we would like. However, bringing attention to the quality of how our body feels, offers an opportunity to be freer of the static noise of stress, providing a clearer mind to confirm ideas and content for the lesson.

As teachers, we are acutely aware there is much more to a lesson than the lesson content, and attending to the quality of how we are feeling is one way we are able to work beyond being impacted by the bell.