I can’t believe this was controversial but my last two posts were about how to grow as a teacher by improving your skills to teach more students or to get better results for your students.

And I was really surprised was that the overwhelming response was:

“It’s OK, I’m good.  I want to stay just where I am”

Which is understandable.  Homeostasis is a powerful human emotion.

But there is a problem!

In that if you want to be exactly the same this year as next year,  teach exactly the same amount of students or get the exact same results,  that target is such a fine, fine line that you’ll invariably miss it.

And unless we actively put in extra energy to make things grow, what invariably happens is that things get worse.   (It’s the law of entropy.)

It’s always small things like we let the kids get away with some pronunciation errors or we don’t get quite as many students as last year.

It’s the same with all human systems.

For example governments and central banks set inflation at 2% because they know they’ll never exactly hit the exact target of being the same but they want a little leeway on the growth side.

And the magical thing is that just 2% growth per year compounds.

So over 10 years you don’t just get 20% growth,  you get 22%.

And over 30 years, say your teaching career, that’s am 80% improvement!

We lead by example and I’m sure we can all agree that growing as a teacher is very, very important!