Strengthening Your Teacher Identity

Do you ever find yourself questioning the success or failure of a teaching moment or asking, “Why am I here, doing this job?” Have you compared yourself with other teachers and questioned your own identity as a professional? Teaching is a vigorous and personal journey. Checking on our teacher identity development, at any stage of our career, helps keep us on course to our destination of professional success.

Why is teacher identity important?

Research shows that teachers who stop and reflect maintain a stronger teacher identity. In college, preservice teachers must repeatedly reflect on new content learned, field teaching practices, and interactions with mentors and others at school sites. Using reflection at the university level reinforces knowledge, encourages teacher identity discourse, and helps dispel any teaching misconceptions that a preservice teacher may have. Replaying events, practices, and conversations and talking ourselves through them via reflective practice is essential. 

Reflective opportunities allow you to ask yourself questions, develop proactive solutions, and even realize when you need help. This may seem like another task to add to your already full cup, but with the proper outlet, your cup will feel like it’s perpetually flowing and not holding stagnant water.

Reminding yourself of who you are as a teacher brings you back to the foundation of your “why.” Your teaching philosophy about effective classroom management, accurate and fair grading, existing biases, successful learning environments, working with professional teams, your place within the school culture, and other topics creates your teaching philosophy and teacher identity. In 2012, researcher Christopher Day found that teachers with a strong teacher identity and passion for their content area experience a stronger sense of self-efficacy and agency. Working through their misconceptions about teaching and learning helps teachers to communicate better and show students more empathy. 

HOw Reflective Practices Help Teachers

Why are we asked to think about our thinking, decision-making, and actions in college as preservice teachers? Reflective practice asks preservice teachers to think critically about their professional development, evaluate practices, and consider the strategies, technologies, or new educational theories they’re observing or using for the first time. Overall, this practice helps preservice teachers gain confidence by reflecting on their thoughts and sharing them with a community of mentors, instructors, and peers, which contributes to their emerging teacher identities. 

Implementing Simple Reflective Exercises

Whether you’re a beginning teacher of a few years or a veteran of many, it’s important to find a sustainable reflective practice that’s easy to add to your day (and even something you look forward to). Try these out and see if they work for you.

Journaling: If you enjoy handwriting, invest in a writing journal you’re excited about (one that’s leather-bound or has an inspirational cover). Use your favorite writing implement to help get your thoughts onto the page. If handwriting isn’t your thing, journal in a Microsoft Word document. Just be sure to always have it accessible.

Consider a diary or journaling app. Look for features such as affordability, comfortable interface, ease of use, speech-to-text features, and periodic notifications. Some journaling apps, such as Dabble Me, allow you to write your daily reflections as emails to yourself.

One-minute rant: Sometimes, we just need an unstructured reflective opportunity to articulate and release frustrations and feelings we want to work out at a later time. A time-limited opportunity allows you a moment for release but prevents emotional escalation. Keep your rant focused on a specific topic, and use a timer.

Letter to my future self: This exercise allows you to think about your aspirations as a teacher and the specific goals you want to achieve in a given amount of time. Imagining your future teaching identity can help you get perspective on the bigger picture of your professional journey and identify goals such as achieving a higher degree or teaching at a higher level.

Artist representation: Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, find an artistic outlet to help you reflect on your professional experiences. You can use a picture or other artwork as a prompt for your perspective. You can keep tangible artifacts from students, administrators, colleagues, or parents for inspiration. These pieces can be pictures, notes, or quotes you wrote down from conversations. Allow these items to motivate you to create something symbolic or abstract. These objects can represent your identity as much as writing can.

Action research: All teachers are researchers: Action research is the cyclical process of planning, acting, making observations, and reflecting. It effectively addresses specific difficulties you may be experiencing in your learning environment, such as struggles with classroom management, test scores, or teaching strategies.

Start with a question that targets a specific problem. Collect and analyze data you may already have related to this problem (an assessment or observational data). Then, research possible interventions you can plan to implement in your classroom. Collect new data and reflect on your new observations. Is the intervention working? As you reflect on your latest data, plan your next steps to deepen the process of learning. Think critically about the problems you find in your practice, and empower yourself by using a growth mindset to solve them. 

How to Overcome Reflective Challenges

As with anything, consistency can help you stay on track and see your progress. Teaching is a community of practice. Consider sharing your thoughts and reflections with a trusted colleague or mentor. Form a lunch group to create reflection questions to share together. Add reflection to your daily or weekly schedule, and plan when you want to reflect. This might be helpful right after a lesson you taught for the first time. 

If you’re still trying to decide what to write about, just free-write, free-draw, record a dialogue with yourself, or keep a list of reflection questions on hand. Engaging in reflective practice fosters personal and professional growth, creates space to explore learning experiences and professional development, and magnifies the value and effort we put toward these professional actions.