Teachers are a varied bunch despite what students might think. Behind the scenes, there’s a whole bunch of vibrant, interesting and intriguing personalities in the staffroom and tonight we’re going to take a look at them. Let’s explore the different types of teacher you’ll find in any school…

The Perfectly Prepared Professional

This teacher has got their stuff together. Every lesson is planned. Every resource is ready to go. Their resources are excellent. Their classroom is immaculate. This teacher is ready for anyone or anything.

Basically, these people are ‘Peak Teacher’ and they’re often so perfect that you might begin to wonder where they find the time. Or that they might be highly-sophisticated AI.

The Complainer

This teacher exists to turn their nose up at everything. New behaviour policy? Nah. Twilight meetings? Are you joking? Changes to the usually scheduled timetable to make way for exam intervention? For goodness sake. These teachers are usually composed in the classroom, good at what they do but let loose in the staff room with a tirade so epic you’d swear they’ve practised it in their head a thousand times.

The Ball of Excitement

These teachers are usually quite the opposite to those above: everything excites them, everything is an opportunity and despite everything, they’re always bouncing off the walls. These teachers usually have the noisiest lessons that the kids love and their excitement spills over into the staffroom, dripping enthusiasm about everything they do. It can be quite infectious and of all the different types of teacher, enthusiastic educators are among the best.

The Tech Teacher

Their classroom looks like a showroom for an upmarket electronics’ store. There’s a flash new projector, an Apple iMac, visualisers, tablets and every cable with every connector presently discovered by humans. These teachers use their iPad from the front to control their slides like an absolute wizard and you begin to wonder if the school provided this stuff (If so, where’s mine?!) or if it’s just stuff they’ve brought from home (If so, stop making the rest of us look like dinosaurs).

The Burnt Out

Despite every teacher feeling this at some point, there are a few teachers out there who seemingly embody this on a more permanent basis. They have heavy eyes, above-average caffeine intake and you might catch them falling asleep during a morning briefing or an after-school training session. Check in on these guys occasionally – ask if they need help with anything. They’d probably appreciate it.

The Authority

Of all the different types of teacher, there are none more repsected than the Authoritarians…these teachers are the sort that can bring a class of 30 to absolute silence with little more than a look and the raising of an eyebrow. Heaven help any child that crosses this teacher. They exude compliance and silently demand attention. These teachers are usually the teachers wandering the corridors, responding to ‘on-call’ alerts and poking their head into classes to ‘make sure everything is in order’. Yes. Absolutely. It is now.

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