Teachers and emotionality

Teaching well depends on lots of things. One key to being at your best is to have reserves of energy so that you can get to all the things that need to be done and still have a life. Strategies for renewing energy are pretty clear - get plenty of sleep, manage your diet well and look after yourself emotionally. We hope you are on top of your sleep and diet, and mme moe can help you keep a track on your emotions.

The mme moe's reflection functionality has five settings for your emotions, ranging from red - feeling worrisome about your work, to green -  feeling fantastic about your work. For each of these settings you can apply a reason from four distinct areas - decision making, planning, assessing and interactions. mme moe then enables you to monitor your emotionality with graphs of weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly outlooks.

If there's plenty of green on your bar graphs, you’re doing well and feeling good about yourself professionally. It is good to know that! But what if there is a fair bit of red, it is vital to know that too! It is an indication that all isn’t good for your professional self and should provide you a motivation to work out what is wrong and start to address it. Strategies to address the issue will of course vary from teacher to teacher. Sometimes it might be as simple as practicing a new breathing or mindfulness technique; sometimes a path for professional learning in behaviour management becomes clear.

With mme moe, not only can you monitor your emotions, you can identify specific areas of practice that you want to start to focus on and plan for improvement. The mme moe planning process connects you with resources and mentors or buddies to support your initial goals, one step at a time.

Beginning or early-career teachers are particularly vulnerable to their professional emotions. Schools can provide these teachers with mme moe's 'Reflect and grow' functionality to help. Giving new teachers the opportunity to see mme moe professional reflection and self-assessment signals in mme moe's 'Get the big picture' will make a difference. Teachers can check how well they are maintaining the reflection habit, view an overview of their capacity, and see how much growth they have made for the year so far. These are all activities that develop the teacher's growth mindset and affirm their professional persona.

A famous old African saying is ‘it takes a village….’ With mme moe, we build a community of professionals. - a community tends to look after each other. And that is a key reason why we make our moe functionality available to all users. We can all see how we are going. We can all celebrate when things are going well, and we can all pitch in and help if we find that some things are off kilter.

With change being probably the main thing we all deal with, isolating teachers in their classrooms just isn't good enough anymore. It would be good if teachers were cognizant of their own emotional and professional needs and those who have a duty of care for teachers should be alert to teachers' needs and address them quickly. Happily, you can use mme moe for exactly this.