Teachers ask us how to grow. For me that’s the wrong question on its own, because growth isn’t one thing — it’s three, and they lead to completely different lives.
In my experience most people never choose between them. They drift into one, usually the loudest, and find out afterwards.
When to use this
- When you’re at capacity and something has to change
- If the obvious next step is a second teacher and it makes your stomach drop
- Before taking on a bigger space
- When you’re doing well and can’t work out why it feels worse
The three shapes
More hours. The default, and the one with a ceiling you can see from here. There are only so many evenings, and the last ones you add are always the worst ones — the far venue, the awkward slot, the class you dread. Growth by exhaustion.
More value per hour. Same week, different work. Courses instead of drop-ins. A specialism people travel for. Small groups at a higher rate. The teaching stays the thing you do, and this is the shape most teachers underuse.
Other people teaching under your name. A second teacher, a studio, a timetable. And this one is different in kind from the other two.
The third one is a change of profession
I want to be plain about this, because it’s the one that catches people.
The moment somebody else is teaching under your name, your job changes. You are now recruiting, training, covering, scheduling, quality-checking and handling it when a student complains about somebody who isn’t you. Those are real skills. They are also not the skills you trained for, and they will eat the hours you used to spend in the room.
That’s a legitimate choice. Some of the best people in this sector made it deliberately and are glad. But it is a decision to stop being primarily a teacher, and it deserves to be made rather than arrived at.
How you do one thing under pressure is how you’ll do everything under pressure. If you already avoid the difficult conversation about a rate, running a team will hand you one of those every fortnight.
Two or three things, not everything
Whichever shape you pick, the mechanism is the same and it’s smaller than people expect.
Two or three deliverables. Not ten. Written on paper, in enough detail that you’d know whether you’d done them.
Then everything you touch gets one question: is this taking me towards that, or not? If not, it goes — and there are only three ways out. Automate it. Delegate it. Eliminate it. There is no fourth option, and “I’ll get to it” isn’t one of them.
There’s no standing still
One thing worth holding onto, and it applies whichever shape you choose.
You’re never treading water. While a teaching life sits unexamined, the venue changes hands, the demographic shifts, the class that always filled stops filling. Everything around you is moving whether you are or not.
So choosing not to grow is fine. Choosing not to look is different, and it’s the one that catches people out around year seven.
Action steps
- Name the shape you’re currently drifting towards. Be honest.
- Ask whether you chose it, or whether it just happened.
- Write two or three deliverables for the next year. Paper, not a phone.
- Take three things off this week’s list by automating, delegating or eliminating them.
Related resources
- The week that holds
- Who do you work for?
You may look at all three and decide you want your week exactly as it is. That’s a perfectly good answer and it’s the one a lot of experienced teachers land on. The point isn’t to grow. It’s to know which shape you’re in, and to have picked it.