Owning your professional identity

Initial teacher training (ITT) promises much. You get told that, at the end, you will be an advocate for your subject, inspirational, primed on the latest thinking on psychology, assessment, behaviour management and inspection requirements so that you are ready to help shape society. What they don’t necessarily tell you is that becoming a teacher not only alters your perception of the world; it alters you, too. In the words of Kate Clanchy (2019), it is a ‘bodily experience, like learning to be a beekeeper or an acrobat: a series of stinging humiliations and painful accidents, and occasional sublime flights’ (p. 1), which change you. But this change, and the burden of responsibility in being a teacher and the desire to ‘get it right’, should not mean a diminution of your unique talents, experiences and heritage. On the contrary, it is only by owning our teacher identity and personal identities in school that we can truly become great teachers. A need for increased diversi