Listen to me: Australian teachers tell you how to succeed

There are several ways to think and write about the work and identities of contemporary Australian teachers. One way is to acknowledge the real challenges and pressures they face, including well-documented burnout and attrition. Another way is to highlight their success strategies in navigating a complex and demanding profession.

Our research

Ensuring broad coverage, the teachers interviewed were located in all six Australian states and the Northern Territory. The interviews conducted were with 33 females (78.5%) and 9 males (21.5%). These are in percentages corresponding to the current workforce, where there are significantly more female teachers than male teachers, Furthermore, they traversed many year levels in primary school and diverse subject areas in secondary school. They worked in a blend of government, independent and religious schools, flexible learning centres and distance education schools.

We conducted the interviews between March 2019 and December 2020 and hence coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. This provided us with additional insights into the work of teachers as they traversed this extraordinary time.

From nearly 300,000 words of transcripts, we were able to identify how these teachers talked about the complexities, challenges, contradictions and comforts that inherently exist and manifest in the profession. This comprehensive study acknowledges some of what Australian teachers face and how they accomplish and tenaciously endure.

To guide our analysis of how the teachers’ success strategies were enacted, we needed a framework. We employed these five dimensions: psychosocial; profession and professionalism; changes and continuities; naming, framing and shaming; and teaching by design.

Constrained agency and declarative propositions

Our identification of teachers’ success strategies was set against the backdrop of the concept of constrained agency. This notion highlights the considerable professional autonomy appropriately assigned to teachers. It also signifies the structural and systemic restrictions on that autonomy.

With this constrained agency in mind, we articulated 10 propositions about teachers’ success strategies. These propositions were inferred during analysis of participants’ data and formed the structure of the book chapters. Specifically, we observed teachers demonstrating success on their own terms by being:

1. Designers for learning: teachers use their autonomy as professional designers of learning experiences.
2. Emotional labourers: teachers manage their real feelings to strengthen their professional identities.
3. Narrative constructors and deconstructors: teachers construct, deconstruct and reconstruct complex stories about the character and significance of their work.
4. Pandemic navigators: teachers reflect on their innovative responses to COVID-19 designed to traverse unprecedented change.
5. Policy refractors: teachers mediate education policies to make them work in their respective contexts.
6. Relationship brokers: teachers manage multiple relationships with students, parents/carers, colleagues and other stakeholders.
7. Self-regulated learners: teachers are motivated learners in response to the changing demands of the profession.
8. Situated ethicists: teachers conduct contextualised decision-making about ethical dilemmas as they conduct moral sense-making of situations they encounter.
9. Teaching idealists: teachers draw energy and hope from the idealised constructions of teaching that often led them to enter it in the first place.
10. Technology reframers: teachers understand and make use of changing technologies to enhance their teaching.

Teachers’ success strategies

The final chapter in the book distils the teachers’ demonstrated success strategies into four distinct yet interdependent categories. The categories are: value-driven, agentic, adaptable and relational. Only the strategies related to being value-driven are identified as being intrinsically embraced by the teacher. The other three categories include strategies that are influenced by the teacher’s internal and external worlds.

Teachers’ value-driven success strategies were directed at ensuring clarity around their values. Examples included their construction and deconstruction of narratives to resolve contested beliefs and values, and to work through contradictions between policy imperatives and classroom realities without surrendering their professional judgement. Teachers find joy in connecting to their values in the face of policies that sometimes feel hostile – for instance, when national assessments meet data-driven requirements.

Teachers use agentic strategies to bring their values into the world of teaching. Agency and motivation are closely linked, as seen in their work as designers of rich learning for their students. A striking example of these strategies was the diverse responses to the unprecedented challenges of COVID-19, when teachers’ adaptive resilience generated distinctive innovations.

Teachers’ adaptable strategies facilitate their intelligent, purposeful responses to change. Their actions as emotional labourers assist their students and them to navigate complex emotional landscapes, while enacting care for others and themselves. Teachers’ self-regulated learning likewise equips them with practices and skills to achieve success and to plan effectively for future development.

Relational success strategies

Finally, teachers’ relational success strategies refer to their motivation and resilience being implemented as relationally situated practices deeply tied to their ethical responsibilities, emotional labour and commitment to student growth. For instance, their ethical professionalism is intimately grounded in trust in others and in oneself. Furthermore, teachers continually draw renewed energy and enthusiasm from revisiting their teaching ideals. It helps them to flourish and thrive in diverse working environments.

Part of a broader context

These findings about teachers’ success strategies are part of a broader investigation of teachers’ experiences. For instance, Karnovsky and Kelly (2025) advocated a new form of emotional discourse about teachers’ working lives, against the backdrop of the systemic forces framing that work.

Internationally, this book is part of a five-nation research project led by Associate Professor Marc Clarà at Universitat de Lleida in Catalonia, Spain. The other countries are Brazil, Chile and Ecuador. With his colleagues, Clarà has elaborated NARRES: La relación entre las narrativas y el desarrollo de la resiliencia en los profesores [The relationship between narratives and the development of resilience in teachers]. The project explores the impact of how teachers makes sense of their situations on their emotions. This in turn influences their capacity for resilience.

Key takeaways

We are profoundly grateful to the 42 participants in this study, who taught us so much about the commitment, connectedness and courage of Australian teachers. They showed us that their success strategies are complex, multifaceted and situated in highly diverse working environments and material conditions. They also reminded us that ‘what works’ in one context might not succeed in another. Above all, they demonstrated that effective teaching is grounded in carefully articulated values, as well as in teachers doing what they do best: being agentic, adaptable and relational.

The best way to honour these and other Australian teachers is to listen to them as they share their strategies for success. In that way, future generations of teachers, and their students, will have the best possible chance to succeed in their turn.

Biographies

Karen L. Peel is a senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is an experienced classroom teacher, having taught in Australian schools across decades of educational transformation. Her research interests include the implementation of practices for effective teaching and self-regulated learning, classroom cultures that support positive behaviour, and contemporary issues in education that impact outcomes for students and educators. She is on LinkedIn.

Deborah L. Mulligan (not pictured) is a retired classroom teacher with more than 35 years of teaching experience. Deborah currently holds the invited position of Honorary Post Doctoral Researcher with the University of Southern Queensland.. Her research interests include ageing (specifically older men and suicide ideation); research design and methodological practice; grief and bereavement in motherhood; and the various aspects of researcher identity. She is also interested in the application of ethics when conducting research with marginalised groups. She is on LinkedIn.

Nick Kelly is associate professor of design science in the School of Design, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, QUT. His research investigates all aspects of creating more designerly schools: the design of school environments, teachers as expert designers of learning experiences, and how students develop design capabilities. He is on LinkedIn.

R. E. (Bobby) Harreveld is Professor Emerita at Central Queensland University, Australia. Her interests include socio-cultural understandings of education in diverse contexts; research education and ethics (politics, theory, practice); professional and vocational education and employment transition pathways; and distance, open, and online teaching and learning. She is on LinkedIn.

P. A. Danaher is Professor in the School of Education at Excelsia University College, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He has continuing research interests in the work and identities of academics, educators and researchers, as well as in education research ethics, methods, politics and theories. He is on LinkedIn.