Teachers, are you a cup or a Lego set?

When a potter creates a cup, a lot of care and attention is given to the process. Choosing a final design, selecting the right clay, throwing it onto the wheel, shaping it with hands, adding water to achieve the right consistency, pulling it, stretching it, guiding it into the shape of a cup. Then it is set aside to dry, left to harden. Then the glazes are chosen and the decoration is considered. Upon application, the colour of the glazes are different to how they will appear after firing, so a fair amount of skill is required to know just how much of each glaze is needed in order to achieve the final result as desired. Once fully decorated, the firing takes place. The kiln is stacked carefully with the dried and glazed cups, it is brought up to the appropriate temperature and the cups are left within for a specific amount of time. Once complete, the kiln is allowed to cool, the cups are removed to cool and the process is complete. The cup is created. Then the life of the cup begins.

The customer visits the shop, sees the beautiful blue and ochre cup, buys it and takes it home. The customer has become the owner of the cup. The owner of the new cup becomes thirsty and considers the range of cups available in the cupboard and chooses the new one, fills it and drinks.

This happens over and over again. But then, after a party, one of the cups goes missing and one falls from a table and smashes. New cups are purchased. These are different. Bigger. Lighter. A more pleasing shade of blue.

Over time, and after many parties, the cupboard becomes full of different cups. Some good for coffee. Some good for beer. Some good for tea. Some are chipped. Some are cracked and broken, but because they remind the owner of a particular time or person or place they remain. No longer useful as cups, yet still useful for sentimental reasons, they linger on the top shelf at the back.

In my experience, an all too commonly held view by schools and by teachers, is that teachers are like cups. They spend time at college and are created like cups in the pottery shop. Care and attention is taken. They are shaped and pushed and pulled. They are decorated and designed and then put into the fire of the kiln, the “teaching practicum” of their final year of college. Then they are presented to the world waiting for a customer, or school, to select them from the shelves of rows and rows of other, newly created teachers.

Once selected, they go on a journey to their new setting and are placed in a cupboard, or a school. They join a whole mix of different cups who are slightly older, more or less chipped, larger, lighter, more voluminous, etc and begin their job of being a cup, or a teacher.

Now in the school, in the real world of teaching and learning, the cups and the cupboard begin to realise that sometimes they are not big enough to hold all they need to hold. They realise their cracks allow stuff to leak out. They realise that they are too brittle or thin and break easily or are big and heavy and difficult to use. They realise they need to change.

But they are cups. Cups can’t change. You just need a different cup.

Here’s another analogy.

Teachers are like a Lego set and schools are like a Lego Shop. College is the Lego factory. 

The factory assembles all the pieces into the box and includes the instruction manual. It decorates the box with bright colourful images of what the finished design will be - a new teacher, but it also shows a couple of smaller images of what all the same pieces can create if assembled differently. It is sent to the shop and is lined up on the shelf with a whole lot of other same size and shape boxes, but all with different bright colourful images on their sides. All recognisable as Lego sets, but all different and individual with different combinations of pieces within and with different bright images on the outside. 

The customer enters the shop and chooses a Lego set and takes it back to the school and opens it up and begins to put all the pieces together to build the teacher. All the pieces and the instruction manual are there, but the school decides to change the design a little and reaches into its own set of Legos and adds a couple of pieces - a custom designed teacher for the school. As the years continue, the school adds more pieces to each teacher. Teachers give some of their own pieces to teachers who arrive with pieces missing. If the lego set is not big enough or is too brittle or has cracks, the teachers and the school reach into their collection of Lego pieces and strengthen or lighten or fill the broken areas to redesign the teacher. The Lego sets can go and find their own new pieces and add them into their own makeup. They can bring in new pieces for other Lego sets at their school and give their colleagues new capabilities and functionalities.

Is your school the Pottery Shop or is it the Lego Shop? Are you a cup or a Lego set?

Is there a culture of your colleagues giving of themselves to help and support and build you up? Does that come from the administration or just from the teacher next door? Do you give of yourself to help and support and build the capacities of your colleagues? Is that encouraged by the administration?

If you have listened to any podcasts lately or read any books lately that address the topic of how to most effectively reach the students of today, then you will recognise that the more we can build a culture of schools as Lego Shops and teachers as Lego sets, the more effective we will be.

Let’s embrace the possibilities that become limitless when we approach the profession of teaching with the mindset that colleagues are also students, that we can teach each other and learn from each other and that it is our professional responsibility to do so.