The legendary cartoon character Snoopy once said, “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog. Sigh! There’s so little hope for advancement!” In many ways, teachers may feel like Snoopy: Yesterday I was a teacher. Today I am a teacher. Tomorrow I will probably be a teacher. Sigh! There is so little hope for advancement! It is fully understandable that teachers aim for promotion but sometimes it just seems that there is no opportunity for such. Promotion is another word for advancing something, be it ourselves (and our career) or a product. It is looking to increase or improve perceptions of a person or an item. Promotion, we are told, is an essential part of modern life and business. We have to market our school, our business, ourselves; we should want to go higher in our career.
How do we go about gaining promotion? Most folk do so by promoting themselves, by marketing themselves. Some do it brazenly, openly, confidently, deliberately. Some will look to gain promotion by doing further studies, by attending courses, by experiencing different environments, by adding achievements to their (already lengthy) CV. However the reality is that we are actually promoting ourselves, and (indirectly) our school, all the time but just maybe not in a good light and maybe without realising it! If we want to market ourselves, to promote ourselves, the simple way to do it is to ensure we are doing what we do very well, with joy and enthusiasm.
We should be aware though that there are various problems with promotion in education. The first one is that the ‘higher’ we go in terms of rank, the further we move away from the area which we love (working closely with children or with our subject), which we trained for, where we are experienced, where we are gifted. The second one is that we are not guaranteed to be successful in that new area – a very good teacher will not necessarily make a good Head of Department, a very good Housemaster will not necessarily make a good Deputy Head, a very good Deputy Head will not necessarily make a good Head (the roles are very different). Thirdly, if we are honest, it probably is not the promoted job that we are wanting but actually the pay and perks that may go with it. Therefore do we really want, or even need or indeed suit, that promotion?
However, we may need to recognise that while promotion is going higher it is not so much a matter of being appointed to a position of a higher rank but being raised to a higher level and standard of performance in what we currently do. The best promotion we can have is improving and increasing our ‘product’ which for teachers is in the development of the children. Promotion, literally (coming from two Latin words), means moving (‘motion’) positively, actively, forward, on behalf of (‘pro’) – advancing, in other words.
The poet Ogden Nash famously said that, “A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of” – whichever side of the door a dog is, there is always something on the other side that he thinks may be better. In a similar way, the door to promotion is not always going to be the right place for us; we may, in fact, be barking up the wrong tree! Keep moving higher though – that is advancement!
