Seven people came on Thursday. Back in March it was twelve. The class itself was decent; the pacing worked, and the student with the frozen shoulder found something like ease for the first time since Christmas. And still, somewhere between locking up and reaching the car, the verdict landed: not good enough.
Two things happened that evening. The class, and the marking of the class. Teachers train for years for the first and inherit the second without ever looking at it. Most of us are running a definition of a good class we never actually chose: a full room and a faultless hour. On those terms, a wet Thursday in February wins every time.
The definition can be rewritten, so that a good class becomes something you can actually deliver, on terms you chose. That rewriting is what follows.
When to use this
- Driving home flat from a class that was, by any fair reading, fine
- When tonight’s seven keeps getting compared with spring’s twelve
- When a quiet month starts to read as a verdict on your teaching
- End of term, before the next one gets planned on the old rules
The rule underneath the feeling
The flat feeling after a decent class is a rule doing its work. At some point, usually early and usually without noticing, every teacher writes a private definition of success, and it runs in the background from then on. If the definition says a good class needs sixteen mats down, then eleven mats is a failure, whatever happened on them.
The inherited version usually has fingerprints on it. A training course that prized flawless sequencing, or a feed full of packed workshops. None of it was chosen, and most of it was never true of the teachers you actually admire.
Psychologists who study locus of control draw a useful line between outcomes you can influence directly and outcomes set mostly elsewhere. Attendance sits mostly elsewhere, with the weather and with other people’s diaries. Whether the room felt held for an hour sits with you. A success definition built from the first column guarantees regular failure that has nothing to do with the teaching.
And the misses aren’t neutral. Research on self-efficacy, the working belief in your own capability that the psychologist Albert Bandura spent a career mapping, shows that confidence is built mostly from mastery experiences: clear, repeated evidence of doing what you set out to do. The evidence only lands when the goal was yours to meet. A teacher marking themselves on attendance can teach beautifully for a decade and still starve the confidence that decade should have built.
Conditions that are yours to set
The rewrite moves the bar onto land you own. The height can stay exactly where it was. If anything this is the stricter deal, because conditions you control are harder to hide from; the weather makes a generous excuse, and you’re giving it up.
A workable condition passes two tests. You control it on the night. And it can be observed, in things done rather than things felt. ’I arrived settled and taught the class I planned’ passes both. So does ’every student was greeted by name and seen at least once during the hour’. ’The room loved it’ fails the second test, and ’twelve people came’ fails the first.
Keep the list to two or three conditions; longer and it turns into admin. Write them as things done, because on the nights your mood lies to you, and there will be those nights, the record of what you did stays readable when the feeling doesn’t.
Self-compassion research, much of it led by the psychologist Kristin Neff, adds a finding worth building in: people who assess their own work the way they’d assess a respected colleague’s stay steadier and are less derailed by a poor night than people who self-attack. So borrow the colleague test. If another teacher told you seven came through the rain and the shoulder that had been stuck since Christmas finally let go, you would not call that a failure. You’d call it an evening well taught.
Action steps
- Today, on paper, finish the sentence honestly: ’a class counts as good when…’. Keep the clauses you’re not proud of in; they’re the ones doing the damage.
- Cross out every condition that’s set by the weather or by anyone who isn’t you.
- Write two or three replacements that are yours to meet and possible to observe.
- Put them at the top of your class plan and read them before teaching for a fortnight, without scoring yourself against them. The definition works by being in the room.
- At the end of term, review the rule the way you’d review a sequence: keep what served, rewrite what didn’t.
Related resources
- After the class that didn’t land
- The question you teach from
The profession already measures teaching careers in years taught and hours logged, never in how full the room was on one thin evening in February. That’s how YogaPros records a teacher’s standing too, and it’s a fairer mirror than the head-count.