Too many times the prerequisite of working to improve practice for the school was in contradiction to working for the achievement of the individual child. As a result of this clarity for me I believe my dilemma was turning into my first professional ‘knot’ as I have identified in figure 4 (page 31). I was caught in a knot between my values and the responsibilities I had in my tasks as an assistant head teacher in both writing the timetable and developing learning and achievements of the individual child. Nias (1989) draws our attention to the tensions and contradictions of a teacher’s role caused by the conflict between the values, which inform the teaching of children, and the institutional requirements to teach a group to externally established …show more content…
how did I relate to others at the time and to the world around me?
I think this is an opportunity to consider not only those questions posed by Cuncliffe but also the questions I have posed to guide my study (page 10). I have combined these and attempted to answer them below.
So who was I and what kind of person did I want to be and in what way did self and identity change during this period?
I was ambitious but not in a, ‘I want to be a head teacher’ kind of way, just I was excited to be part of the senior leadership team. I would be in a position of power to do the ‘right’ thing. I was also anxious that I may embarrass myself not being as intelligent as others but I liked the idea of my new role. I wanted to be good, I wanted to be useful, I wanted to be able to fix things that were not ‘right’ in a wider arena. There were times very early in my appointment that I could see a simple way of dealing with things that others were making far too complicated. I could see a way through. I did not consider that my ‘self’ changed until much later but even then I still felt the same person who I had always been. Looking back at the question now I would say the change was there and it was incremental. My identity changed according to need, experience and
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The leader in me emerged due to the contradiction to my values. A disturbing consequence of the clarity of my personal and professional identity was the situation I found myself in as a member of the senior team with a focus on attainment it would seem at any cost. I saw and still see myself as an honest, reliable and loyal professional and due to these values I was beginning to find it difficult to go along with the vision of the school. This was because it was not a learning vision it was more like a game using strategies to move up the ladder of league tables, it was not about education. Pragmatically I believe that this was an enforced vision generated by the political leaders of the time. It is not something that I understood or gave credit to the head teacher at the time. I know that now because the challenge has not changed indeed the ‘game’ has now much higher stakes. So powerful are the politicians of today that the mantra is “UNDER-PERFORMING schools will be taken over with below-par heads being sacked under sweeping reforms announced by the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan” (2015 17