Why the Best Teammates Make the Best Teachers
It’s May, and we are just wrapping up our hiring season for the ’22-23 academic year. When interviewing candidates for teaching and staff positions at Browning, I make it a point to ask about their experience in being a teammate. Perhaps this seems an odd point of emphasis, but I have come to believe that the capacity to see oneself and act as a teammate is absolutely necessary in professional school life.
For Browning adults, being a teammate is something more robustly demanding than the goods of “collegiality” or even “collaboration.” It involves offering unconditional support and generosity to others, on the recognition that such a disposition provides benefits to the school mission and common good that are both immediate and transcendent. This shows up in ways which are sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle, but always significant.
As a school founded on relationships, for example, Browning prefers to use its own teachers to cover classes for absent colleagues. There are times, of course, where substitute teachers are necessary and helpful, but for single classes and short absences, Browning instructors cover for one another. Under pandemic conditions, as you might expect, this commitment can be daunting, particularly during periods like the past four weeks, when we’ve seen spikes in COVID positivity in both our school and our city. Despite the exponential increase in requests for coverage, however, our faculty and staff have quite literally continued to answer the call; indeed, when a colleague shares news of their unexpected absence, or a division or department head issues an appeal for coverage, there is a deluge of response from teachers across our three divisions and staff from throughout the building, all offering to sub for a period or three in the name of supporting colleagues and making in-person learning available. Though it would be easy to ignore an email, or to point to one’s own busyness, or to howl about the fatigue brought on by two years’ worth of pandemic, Browning’s adults do none of these; rather, without fanfare and without calculation, they embrace the spirit of being a true teammate.
“While our K-12 programming gives our boys opportunities to practice the art of teamwork, they also profit from seeing the virtues of the teammate modeled by the talented, caring professionals who surround them.”
Similarly, when the return of Browning’s Grade 9 from their weeklong work at the Island School in Eleuthera was delayed by three unexpected flight cancellations last weekend, a similar selflessness came to the fore. Despite being tired after a week’s worth of guiding 33 energetic ninth graders, our chaperones reacted to the disappointing news of delayed return not with demands or lamentations, but with a sense of what the team needed to do to stick together. There was no complaint of a weekend lost, no insistence that Browning’s administration needed to single-handedly right the unfairness of it all, because this was not what anyone had signed on for; rather, there was patient cooperation, clear communication, and on-the-ground initiative that got boys overnight accommodations and a chartered flight home. None of the team—the five wonderful chaperones, and the members of the Communications, Business, and Upper School offices that supported them—balked at the duties required; they just did what needed doing, because that’s what good teammates do.
The direct and practical effects of these examples are obvious: Classes get covered and in-person learning proceeds; boys are cared for and returned home safely from their trip. What is just as interesting to me, however, is the indirect effects of these efforts, namely the model that they offer to our boys. I have to believe that it means something for students to see a Grade 1 teacher supervising third graders at lunch, a French teacher trying their hand at art instruction, or a Middle School advisor covering an Upper School club, all in the name of supporting absent or unavailable colleagues. And it can’t pass the notice of Grade 9 boys that five faculty and staff volunteered to look after them during a week-long field trip, and that these same folks exhibited the kind of mutual trust, sacrifice, and accountability that extraordinary situations demanded. While our K-12 programming gives our boys numerous opportunities to practice the art of teamwork—in music ensembles, academic group projects, clubs and athletic teams—they also profit from seeing the virtues of the teammate modeled by the talented, caring professionals who surround them. It’s one thing to hear about the importance of being a teammate; it’s another thing entirely to have it shown to you by an adult you trust.
As we conclude 2022’s Teacher Appreciation Week, we can all surely catalog the dozens upon dozens of reasons that we venerate Browning’s amazing instructors: Their creativity, their compassion, their brilliance, their bravery, their skill, their sensitivity, and so on. As we celebrate these qualities (and rightly so!), perhaps we can also appreciate that a teacher who is a good teammate is of inestimable importance to their students, their colleagues, our families, and our mission—they are of inestimable importance to Team Browning.