From: https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-perfectionism-holds-new-teachers-back?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Winter+24&utm_id=Winter24&utm_term=winter+school+season&utm_content=perfectionism+problem&fbclid=IwAR2Qo0e6D4EBOnBLQvh8xbbix005MnRy-gc3Pwu9HZRkQkDHxnH6-KQiQZs
As a novice teacher, John Spencer set a lofty goal for himself. In his classroom, he planned to emulate the gifted and charismatic social studies teacher who’d inspired him as a young middle school student.
Very soon, he realized that this might be an unattainable objective.
“I wanted to be just like that teacher I looked up to. I might not have articulated it that way at the time, but my own perfectionism stemmed from that picture in my head of what ‘good teaching’ looks like,” says Spencer, now an author and associate professor of education at George Fox University. As those first weeks and months of the school year rolled by in a blur of late-night grading and lesson planning, the difficult realization set in that “I could never be that teacher,” and he said to himself, “I would only be a worse copy.”
Meanwhile, in Lisa Dabbs’s first kindergarten classroom, a similar storyline was playing out. “It all started with making sure that my room was painstakingly organized, down to the last color-coded crayon holder,” writes Dabbs, who eventually became an elementary school principal. “This carried over to the ritual of covering all my white cardboard box storage containers (no plastic for me) with decorative contact paper.” Bulletin boards had “perfect themed borders, selected by season or lesson focus.”
Lesson planning, of course, required similar attention to detail, eating up the fledgling teacher’s evenings and weekends. “I’d spend most weekends on the living room floor with curriculum tools spread around me,” Dabbs recalls. “I’d forget to eat at times, turning down social invites, until the perfect lessons were developed.”
Perfectionism, the insidious notion that we must not just be good, we must excel at everything we do—classroom management, lesson planning, color-coded classroom supplies, and picture-perfect decor—can be an especially powerful drive among new teachers. At its core, it’s the belief that “in order to be loved and accepted, we must strive to act and be the best at all times,” writes author and educator Elena Aguilar in a three-part post for Education Week. This harmful (and futile) tendency “consumes a great deal of time and energy because every time we feel shame, blame, or criticism, our response is, ‘I wasn’t perfect enough. So let me be more perfect next time.’”
Unchecked, perfectionism is “a career-killer that will rob you of your joy,” says Spencer. For new teachers, it drives them to meticulously grade everything, overprepare for class time, volunteer for too many extracurricular activities, and expend energy addressing every single hiccup or misbehavior in the classroom. It leads to burnout and an early exit from their career.
Is it just an artifact of time and place—a natural-enough inclination for new teachers, given their abundance of energy and hope? In search of answers, we spoke with teachers and dug into our archives to collect advice and strategies that might help novice teachers prioritize what truly matters and embrace their imperfections.
ACCEPT THE MESSY
If there’s one thing veteran teachers come to accept, it’s that kids and the day-to-day classroom environment are unpredictable and sometimes chaotic, even with extensive planning and oversight.
“When the wasp enters the room, when the brand-new assessment that the district purchased fails to load on the laptops, when the substitute list has been expended—there are multitudes of challenges that wait for teachers (and students) each day in the classroom,” writes Jason DeHart, a high school English teacher and author. But teachers aren’t “limited to the trajectory of curriculum or the next line of a script,” says DeHart. “Teachers are the scientists and artists who deal with the changing demands of the classroom.”
Starting from a place “where you recognize that you’re going to be imperfect, that teaching itself is going to be messy and there will be mistakes,” is key, says Spencer. Because when you always expect perfection, you lose “that sense of joy and accomplishment. That’s a huge part of avoiding burnout, the feeling that what we do matters.”
CLASSROOM BACKUPS
Delivering perfectly tuned lesson plans every day may be the goal, but it’s also unrealistic. To fill in the gaps, create and keep updating a set of backup strategies, a tool kit for when things get messy and don’t go according to plan—DeHart calls it having a Plan B (or C). Some of his favorites include a wall chart with ideas for early finishers or craft projects “that can be pulled out in a moment to continue the conversation about content in a new light.”
Collect a few simple graphic organizers, prepared question stems, or a “quickly drawn T-chart to explore a story or the plot diagram that could be traced on the wall.” During unplanned free moments, have students do sticky-note annotations or journal jots responding to a text they are reading or connecting what they’re reading to everyday life (the research suggests that this links learning to purpose and drives better academic performance). Developing an evolving set of these types of strategies—check in with colleagues for their favorites, as they’re likely to have their own clever go-to strategies—allows for quick adjustments when things don’t go according to plan.
“Freedom can be found on the other side of a panic-stricken moment to engage in some of the work that we’ve been meaning to get around to,” writes DeHart.
