Finding a voice

Introduction

Often as teachers we spend a significant amount of time reflecting on our own practice but rarely is that time formalised; it’s often on the journey home, a fleeting (yet treasured) moment of peace during break duty or sat thinking with that glass of wine on a Friday night. The vast majority of our time spent introspecting is focussed on the ‘Even Better Ifs’, how can we make our practice better and ensure that we don’t stand still. The ‘What Went Wells’ rarely get a look in. Perhaps this is where we can find one of those ‘silver linings’ of the current lockdown situation; our lives have completely changed, we must stay at home, we cannot go out and see our friends and family, and we suddenly have endless time on our hands with no real notion of when life will return to ‘normal’. With what feels like endless time to reflect thinking about the ‘WWWs’ is key to enabling ourselves to stay in a positive headspace. That is what I am aiming to do in this article within the context of Be Her Lead; to reflect and discuss the key features of what has enabled me to successfully lead three cohorts of girls through the programme.  

When I came to write this post, I stumbled and initially struggled to pull the strings together as to why my Be Her Lead sessions had been so successful. I had previously spent so much time thinking about how I could improve them, I hadn’t truly reflected on the underpinning reason for the success in the first place. Writing this post took me back to my underlying vision and reasons for applying to Be Her Lead in the first place; empowering the girls to find their voice, use their voice and to stand up and speak up for themselves. 

Finding my voice

Nowadays I am definitely someone who speaks their mind, I am someone who isn’t afraid to say no or to question the choices and decisions of others. A lot can change over the course of just a couple of years and this ability to find and use my voice is definitely something of a recent emergence. At 22 I didn’t like to speak up, I rarely stood up for myself and I most certainly did not like to rock the boat. 

Following my undergraduate degree,  I started a chemistry PhD and joined a research group of forty people, the only snag being that I was one of only four women. I lacked positive female role models; the culture between the women could be incredibly toxic and I would often finish my days feeling anything but empowered, often more downtrodden than anything else. As luck would have it, I was incredibly fortunate in that my PhD supervisor recognised that I would never learn how to stand up for myself unless I was pushed to, and so began four years of tough love. Being spoken over in meetings, having ideas stolen and being assigned to dead-end projects pushed me toward what could only really be described as a eureka moment that was instead a ‘no, I’m not doing that’ moment with my supervisor. Saying no and having the confidence to finally say no could not have felt more empowering and was a turning point for how I dealt with things that I disagreed with. 

I had to be pushed, quite forcefully, to find my voice. It was what I needed but it was not pleasant and some of the psychological scars stay with me today. The pinnacle moment of the whole process was in my leaving speech, where my supervisor announced to the entire research group “when Izzy first joined the  group, it was very clear that she was scared of me. Now as she leaves, I think it is extremely clear to all that it is instead I who am scared of her”.  

As I reflect on those four years and on being the person that just let things be, I never want one of the girls who I have a duty of care towards to finish school feeling like they cannot speak out. I want them to feel empowered so that they can find their voice and use it.

Finding their voice

Taking your own experiences and using them to mould the experiences of others can be challenging; it is one thing to have a vision but putting it into practice is a completely different kettle of fish. Be Her Lead provided the perfect vehicle for this to be achieved, but its implementation was critical for enabling my girls to feel empowered and to have the self-confidence not just to find their voice but to use it. When choosing the group of girls to run the programme with (in particular the first time I ran the project), I was incredibly selective – I wanted a group of girls who effectively ‘flew under the radar’ and who often did not receive that teacher attention. They were not the high flyers but they were also not ‘naughty’ girls, they sat in the middle, maybe underperformed slightly in internal assessments but never flagged for any issues with behaviour. I was in the privileged position of being Assistant Head of Year 8, I knew the girls and was positioned such that I could choose the students I wanted to work with. 

As I thought back over my own experiences, my own self confidence and ability to use my voice has come from knowing myself and understanding the world around me. That as a process did not happen overnight, there was a tonne of self-reflection and introspection that went into understanding myself. I realised that I needed to facilitate this within the students that I was working with; it was not about me, it was about them, and the girls needed to understand this quickly. 

When running my Be Her Lead workshops, I chose session topics that I believed would enable the girls to best understand themselves and the world around them – from periods to social media, body image to gender roles – there was more to do than what I had time for. However within that hour session, we would only spend about 50-60% of that time working on the content for that day. The rest of the time was spent on reflection, getting the girls to speak up, to ask questions and most importantly, to answer their own and each other’s questions. The use of anonymous post it note questions was not just a nice add on, it was key and essential to the sessions. 

The end of each session would set up the start of the next session; each student would be given a post it note, on it they could write a question about what we had covered that day or a question that was relating to whatever was on their mind at that moment in time. There was no opt out – if they had no questions, they were still expected to make a mark on their post it note and hand it in. The following week we would go through the questions together and without realising this helped the girls build their sense of community; what initially started as me answering the questions for them evolved into them answering each other’s questions. I would read out the post it note and then field it to the room, their answers were sincere, funny, helpful and kind. They built the confidence not only to write their questions but to answer them. It would not be unusual for us to spend 30 minutes going through the questions and different answers, but it was their time and their chance to speak and no way was I going to take that away from them. This started the process of supporting the girls to find their voice and use their voice. If they can begin by speaking to each other, to support one another, then it puts them on a path where they can speak up outside of the room, if not for themselves but for their fellow women. 

Before writing this, it was initially difficult to put my finger on the one thing that I thought was key to a successful Be Her Lead programme. From writing this, having the time to reflect and think upon the ‘What Went Wells’, I believe that giving the girls time and space to explore their ideas and speak is one of the most powerful things you can do as a Be Her Leader.

Looking to the future

I will spend a lot of time in the coming days, weeks and months reflecting on what I can do to facilitate a successful Be Her Lead programme in my current and extremely different context when life returns to normal. I’m now a Head of Year, I have more time but less; I have a lighter load of teaching but so much of my time is taken up with dealing with ‘stuff’ - from fallings out to consoling upset students to dealing with physical fights, it can often feel like every moment of ‘free’ time is taken up with dealing with one incident or another. I have just 40 girls in my year group to 80 boys, in my old school it was a 50:50 split, this brings with it some quite unique problems. We are on a temporary site, hopefully for not much longer but the current lockdown situation will dictate that, there is no-where that really feels ‘perfect’ for running Be Her Lead. I can see the possibility of taking the entire cohort of girls in year 9 through a Be Her Lead programme. What a privilege that would be to enable the entirety of a year group of girls to be empowered not only to find their voice, but use it.

Are you a female teacher interested in supporting girls and tackling gender inequality in your school? Apply for next academic year’s Be Her Lead programme here.