6 signs that you are in need of teacher boundaries
Teaching is one of the best jobs in the world. It is a job full to the brim with purpose, helping others grow and can lead to great job and life satisfaction for you.
Nevertheless, it has a sneaky habit of becoming more than a job. It can take over all of your time and energy as you strive to do everything you can for your students.
When you become a middle leader, this habit worsens. You find your to-do list has grown, your dedication to your job has increased as you begin to have an impact beyond your classroom. However, your time and energy have not expanded to meet your new demands.
At this point, boundaries become vital. Boundaries are the red tape you put around yourself to promote and protect your wellbeing and health. In order to remain at your best for your school and students, you must have clear boundaries.
Yet, how do you know if you have clear boundaries in teaching? Check out these 6 signs that you may be missing your teacher boundaries.
1) Your emails are queen
One sign that your teacher boundaries are a bit thin on the ground is that your time and energy is often hijacked by your emails.
You may be in the middle of a task and then, “ping”! You excitedly check to see what has dropped into your inbox. Or, even worse, you check your emails as a form of procrastination or even as a result of FOMO (fear of missing out).
These habits are caused by dopamine, which is a chemical in the brain that causes us to “seek”. According to Psychology Today, “Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search.” In the context of your emails, the dopamine seeking system motivates you to respond to the audio or visual cues of your emails, thus satisfying the need to know what someone has to say.
The result of this? Distraction from your original task.
Distraction leads to your original task taking longer to complete. One study by the University of California Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back on task.
Not only that, the study also found that to compensate for the distraction, individuals will try to work faster, resulting in “higher workload, more stress, higher frustration, more time pressure, and effort. So interrupted work may be done faster, but at a price.”
The boundary that is needed here is compartmentalisation of your emails: schedule in time to check them as you would schedule in any work task. Emails need to work for you, not the other way around.
2) Your school work takes as long as it needs to take
The beauty of teaching is that you can, up to a point, give it as much time, energy and focus as you want. There is a baseline quality expectation required but the majority of teachers will go far further. The phrase “above and beyond” is apt here.
One way that this habit can manifest itself is in allowing parts of our job, particularly ones that we enjoy, to take longer to complete than they actually require.
For me, this habit manifested itself in my lesson planning. I love content creation so this was my jam. First, I wanted to make sure that I had all of the information I needed to be the expert in the classroom. I wanted to be prepared for ANY question the students could possibly think to ask me about the subject (and yet, there’s always that one student that asks you a complete curveball that leaves you going, “Errrrrrr…”.)
Then, I would research all of the different ways I could present the information to students. This would involve watching numerous videos on YouTube, reading articles and reviewing recent activities in lessons that I’d want to avoid to keep things “fresh”.
Then, and only then, would I think about actually planning the lesson and creating the resources. This part of the process took the least amount of time.
This process could easily take up my whole evening and leave me going to bed late, having not created boundaries around my time and need for a good night’s sleep.
What this scenario demonstrates is Parkinson’s Law, which states that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. So, if you haven’t given yourself a time deadline for a task, or a time to finish school work each day, it will take all of your time to complete.
3) A brain dump counts as a to-do list
Overwhelm is a common feature of teaching and to counter this, you may create a brain dump, where you verbally vomit everything in your head that you think you need to do onto paper.
This is a good step to take. However, the common error here is assuming that this is now a to-do list to be completed. This then creates a second spiral of overwhelm!
Instead, priorities need to be taken from the brain dump and completed.
You will never get everything on your brain dump (or even to-do list) done in teaching. There is simply too much. This leads onto the fourth sign that you may not have boundaries in teaching…
4) You can’t say no
Even when you really don’t want to, you find yourself saying yes to students, colleagues and parents.
“Yes, I can forego my need for sustenance during my lunch break and help you with your homework right now.”
“Yes, I can also create individual, bespoke revision resources for Timmy each week to support their progress.”
“Yes, I can also organise a school trip for our sixth formers to broaden their understanding of Aristotelian ethics.”
There may be a voice in your head shouting, “I can’t do anymore! Please let me rest!” but you choose to ignore it for one of three reasons:
a) You fear letting others down and fear that saying no will disappoint them.
b) You fear that you will be judged as unhelpful, selfish or your dedication to your job will be questioned. This may also be tied up with any career progression aspirations you have.
c) You want to be seen as the person who can handle anything.
The reality is that by saying yes every time, eventually someone will be disappointed because you will have taken too much on, tried to spin too many plates and have them all crashing down around your ears. This can feel devastating because you’ll question your ability to cope in teaching, which may reduce your feelings of self-worth.
Instead, being brave, pausing and taking time to consider each request will give you a sense of control and help you to manage your workload far more effectively. Checking in with yourself and asking, “Does this serve me and my students?” will help you achieve this.
5) School comes home with you
This missing boundary isn’t just about taking physical school work home with you. This is also about your mental and emotional boundaries.
Perhaps, you go home and ruminate on an error you made in your lesson today or a difficult conversation with a parent that left you feeling personally attacked and weary. Perhaps you worry for the wellbeing of a student who disclosed a safeguarding issue to you during the day.
Instead, of reflecting and leaving those thoughts and feelings at school, you allow them to consume you at home. You think about school in an endless loop. You take on the emotional burdens of others. You feel unable to enjoy your evening.
This leaves you feeling exhausted, unable to switch off and yet completely wired and unable to sleep. Consequently, in the morning, you already feel short of energy, compassion and motivation to get through another day.
What is missing here is a boundary that dictates that you are worthy of having time off for yourself and that the emotions, worries and frustrations of others are theirs to carry, not yours.
6) You question your value as a teacher, and as a person
The final indicator that you may be missing some much need boundaries in teaching is that any remark, constructive criticism or error that you encounter feels like a direct attack on your value as a teacher.
Not only that, you downplay your own teacher brilliance and think that you must do more and more in an effort to prove your worth to others. You never feel like you will be good enough. You downplay or even ignore all of your achievements and the daily wonder that you bring to your job.
This can extend to your own self-worth as well. Your identity boundary is missing: you forget that you are a human being first and a teacher second. Instead, your teacher mask is your whole identity and so any attack on you as a teacher feels like a direct attack on you as a person.
Teaching is no longer a job. It is your entire entity.
This boundary is the most important. It helps to keep teaching in perspective. It helps you to remember that at the end of the day, teaching is a job. Perhaps it is a job of great value and importance to you. Yet, it is only a job.
Next steps:
Know that if these signs are resonating with you, there is a way to overcome them and insert your own boundaries. You can change. Begin with your physical boundaries such as setting a time limit on your work and prioritising your workload rather than wading through everything.
If you would like support with the more complex boundaries, such as taking off your teacher mask, switching off from teaching and switching on in your life again, why not book a free virtual coffee with me to discuss whether we could be a good fit to work together. Book in using my diary link here.
Gemma Drinkall is an Educational Wellbeing Coach, helping middle leaders in education to create clear boundaries so that they can love teaching, and their lives, again.
