Starting with the self

humble and transformative practice

When I was but a young thing, I thought you qualified for the job and that was it. You just got better by repeating it over and over.

That’s not just a ME thing - a slip of education where I missed out on the lessons that said you needed to keep learning.

It was an industry thing. An institutional thing. A cultural thing.

I qualified to teach on Friday July 7th, 1995. My university tutor came out to my final placement in Sheffield. There was a bit of an interview with whoever was supposed to be mentoring me, and I finished that afternoon with Qualified Teacher Status. It took a few months for the awarding bodies and ceremonies and such-like to confirm my Post-Graduate Teaching Certificate, but there I was, a newly minted 22-year-old teacher. I had a job offer to boot, and as far as I was concerned, I was a real grown-up now, bless me.

Supervision faded out over that qualifying year. At first, other teachers sat in every lesson. They scrutinised what I was supposed to be doing and how I was going to do it. Or they told me the content and I basically had to get on with it. Then, I became a glorified substitute teacher (well, not even the glory to be honest) babysitting classes, doing my own thing. As long as I taught what I was supposed to teach, they didn’t much care. I need to dig out a photo of those halcyon times. I’m sure I have one somewhere.

At least there were check-ins, though, in June. By September, with my certificate and my stamped, signed approval, I had classes all of my own. I was supposed to have some oversight from the head of department, but since all the other staff had called him the Chocolate Teapot (CT for short) you can imagine how that went.

We had five governmentally prescribed days. Baker Days, as they used to be known. INSET days, as they came to be known. Insect Days as one of my friend’s children called them, where they imagined we were all at school doing junior entomology courses studying beetles and earwigs and the likes. Then Education Secretary Kenneth Baker (who would later go on to usher Dangerous Dogs’ Legislation into the dying Conservative history) passed INSET days into law in the Education Act of 1988, and there was an assumption that teachers should engage in things called ‘Continuing Professional Development’.

State schools (no such obligation for fee-paying indepedent schools or private schools) took five days off our holidays and had to provide us with training.

No longer were we seen as having got our certification and that was that.

Schools arranged things from local authority providers, or from wandering nomads who came and taught us how to teach and use IT and things like that. That makes it sound trivial. I loved those days. They were so much better than anything I got in university. I loved them so much that eventually, I got to be one of those CPD providers myself, helping schools assess better, move literacy across the curriculum and generally improve results. Twice, I went to science conferences and got to be a) the tail end of a sperm (best day ever) and b) the anchor of the placenta that stops it falling out (second best day ever, but far more traumatic than being the tail end of a sperm, whose only job is to propel really, really, really well and, if you’re lucky enough to propel your sperm cell into the egg, you then fall off and integrate into some other stuff). If I’d have learned all biology as those scientists were doing at those science conferences, I’d have been a biologist. Hands down first choice.

Gosh I was a sponge of a learner. Any teacher could have made me into a good scholar by making learning irresistible.

And unlike the TOTS (tired old teachers) who moaned about Insect Days and Baker Days and CPD, I was too young and naive to know I was supposed to feel the same. I was supposed to feel that, if you’d passed a test and qualified, you were golden.

Carry on, ad infinitum. Well, at least until you could collect your pension.

Because I was encultured naively in a world where you were expected to keep learning, that’s what I did. Plus, if you were really nice, they let you go on days off out of school as well. Then you got to go to a hotel (sometimes overnight) have a nice, stress-free day with grown-ups, learn how to teach better, and go back and tell your mates in school.

I was so good at it that I got to go and teach others how to do it.

That was another revelation. The first day at our CPD leaders’ training (in an £800-a-night hotel in Kensington proper) one of the instructors was doing stretches having been for a run, about to have a leisurely 8am breakfast. I’d been up for hours, still wearing my 5am teaching habits, beavering away in a darkened bedroom. I couldn’t believe that there were people who didn’t exist in what felt like a pressure cooker.

When I entered teaching, it was shameful to need ongoing education; it was a sign that you were incompetent, or that you were a beginner. Now, I feel like there are few professions at all where you enter as a fresh-faced 21 or 22 year old and you’re just supposed to know what you’re doing for the next 40-odd years of your life, where every day is the same as the last.

Working with dogs, of course, has its own CPD requirements - although they aren’t as onerous on the whole as Kenneth Baker’s bare minimum requirement for teachers, of 5 days per year. My current membership requires me to do 10-12 hours a year. I usually do that in a month or so, so … When I joined that institution, the requirement was 36 hours, but that standard has been dropped. It’s one reason I’ll be leaving that membership organisation when my current dues expire. Another is that it doesn’t accredit a whole bunch of useful courses, so a lot of what I was doing didn’t count. They aren’t the main reasons I’ll be leaving, which I want to share elsewhere as I think they are important, but I’m not sure where I fit next, other than committing to even more learning. I’d say, ‘oh well!’ but it requires completion of very expensive courses that are currently beyond my desire to spend cash on when I don’t know how much they’ll add to my current understanding, so we’ll see. Learning shouldn’t be expensive hoops to jump.

I’ve always been committed to the fact that professions require ongoing learning. It’s not enough simply to keep practising without reflection, without review, without peers. I honestly cannot tell you just how much I get out of conversations with peers because those conversations are utterly invaluable. It is the best part of my job. I feel for practitioners working in isolation, or afraid of speaking to their colleagues in case someone pinches an idea or doesn’t give them credit for something. I feel so honoured to be part of lively conversations that challenge how I think.

Because that’s our job, isn’t it?

I was reflecting on something Professor Israel Goldiamond said about behaviour analysis. While he was talking about human patients, it’s equally applicable - if not more so - to those of us working with animals and their guardians. He said, ‘the contingencies we might start out with and the behaviours we might first analyse and change are our own.’

I feel like that sentence needs some gravitas adding to the important bits.

the contingencies we might start out with AND THE BEHAVIOURS WE MIGHT FIRST ANALYSE AND CHANGE ARE OUR OWN.

In other words, when we’re in a helping profession - be it teaching, counselling, nursing, psychology, guidance or social work - and we’re involved in looking at behaviour in order to change things that ameliorate lives - the first thing we should be thinking about is our own behaviour.

Oh hell yes to that.

That’s always been the centre of my professional life: how can I do better? I can only get better results, serve students better, educate more widely, support clients better and generally contribute to discussions with colleagues when I’m engaged in self-reflection & analysis that leads to behaviour change.

If I’m not doing that, I’m probably not serving people as well as I could, whoever they are. I’m probably not serving the dogs I work with as well as I could, and that really gets me grumpy.

I’ve been messing around with some of the behaviours I routinely teach in my bid to get Lidy on video doing everything I ever need to share with clients. But Lidy is such an easy student. She’s me in dog form. As long as learning is irresistible, she’ll learn it. I appreciate that energy. Plus, I’m not afraid of it. If she parks her bum, that’s not me giving her a big FAULT sign or a bit Urrr-Errr buzzer noise like you might find on Family Fortunes. When she parks her bum, that’s me going, ‘how can I change how I’m doing this so it’s easy for her to understand what I want of her?’

Because if I ask right, she does it.

If I teach right, she learns it.

Kids are like that too. But most of them have been encultured in traditions where the student is to blame if they don’t understand what’s being taught. I understand those traditions, because it was how I was encultured. I just ‘didn’t try hard enough at maths’. Saying the teacher wasn’t teaching me right was tantamount to anarchy. It absolutely wasn’t the done thing. In fact, thinking of my work leading CPD across the UK for English teachers, a lot of that was about helping them transition (if required) from seeing the students as increasingly too stupid to learn into seeing it as an opportunity to ask ourselves how we might approach things differently so it’s accessible for the learner.

That’s a tough call for some. It calls for you to put your ego aside.

For the TOTs, those Tired Old Teachers, well, it wasn’t because they were tired or old. I’m both. It’s not made me roll my eyes and grumble loudly about being taught to suck eggs. It was mostly about that enculturation in systems that required the only change to come from the learner. A system where the human equivalent of parking your bum because you don’t really know what’s being asked, but you’re offering something nonetheless because you are biddable and trying no matter what it looks like. It was the system that said that, once qualified, you knew everything. Even if you were 22. And the expertise proven by your piece of paper and qualified status was the final demonstration that you were now She Who Should Not Be Questioned.

Not least by herself.

I’m glad to have come up in a culture where it’s now expected that professionals seek out additional development opportunities and commit themselves to analysing and changing their own behaviour. I think those individuals always existed, despite a system that favoured the onus resting with the student for change, not the ‘teacher’.

But that’s our biggest question as canine behaviour practitioners in whatever our role might be: asking ourselves what we’re up to, whether it’s working and whether there’s anything worth changing. A commitment to self-reflection and continual shaping of practice, that’s all.

After all, if we can’t change, how can we expect it of a client or their dog?

It also requires us to have a keen eye for the areas of our individual practice that are neither favoured nor comfortable: the parts of our work where we feel least capable.

In the past, self-selecting to go on a course about this or that topic was practically an admission that you were crap at it, that you didn’t know enough, that you weren’t really worthy of your qualification or credentials. It’s still a little like that. It takes a lot of humility to say ‘I’m not as good as I’d like to be at this bit of my work. I’m going to focus on that.’

It’s easy to chase the shiny and interesting stuff, to pursue that to expertise and ease.

The tough thing is looking inwards, seeking out the troublesome spots and deciding to change them. That’s especially hard when people hold you up as an expert, I think.

Food for thought.

I’ll be probing all my tender spots (yuck!) these coming weeks, and enjoying the liberation it brings to have license to go think about how I can do better for others and myself in the future. It should feel liberating. Not scary. No hint of imposter syndrome. Just license to go push back against my comfort zones.

What could be more thrilling?

The most exhilarating ride of them all, my friends. And you never know where it will take you.

Scary, yes. But so cool.