Most teachers don’t cross the world for a salary alone. They move for a school’s reputation, its mission, the people they met at interview, and the promise of doing their best work somewhere new. Underneath all of it is a simple hope: that the work will inspire them.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes a teacher arrives, unpacks, and slowly realises that the school they joined is not the school they imagined. Nobody lied. Nobody acted in bad faith. The gap was simply never named.
Not every school is a community school
Some of the best-known international schools are built around community. Staff live close together, socialise together and lean on each other far from home. The school becomes a second family, and leaders actively promote that culture. Teachers who have worked in schools like this often come to see it as what international teaching is.
Other schools work differently. In cities where many staff are local, have returned home, or have long-established lives outside work, colleagues often have family, friends and commitments that have nothing to do with school. They are professional, capable and committed to the job. But they are not looking for a new social circle. At best, they are looking for good co-workers.
Neither model is wrong. A boundaried, professional culture can bring real strengths: clearer expectations, a healthier separation between work and home, and less of the intensity that can make close-knit schools exhausting. The problem is not the culture. It is arriving with the wrong expectations of it.
Four wavelengths of connection
Adam Grant’s new book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World, offers a useful way to think about this. He argues that we connect with people on four different wavelengths:
- Associates are transactional ties, joined by compatible needs.
- Allies are partnerships built on purpose, united by compatible goals.
- Pals are bonds of shared fun, linked by compatible interests.
- Companions are connections based on care, attached by compatible values.
With associates and allies, the focus is on the outcome: getting something done together. With pals and companions, the time together is the point. Grant is clear that no wavelength is better than another, and that we don’t need every co-worker to be a pal or a companion. Many people are more comfortable keeping work professional.
The trouble comes when two people are on different wavelengths. Grant cites research showing that this kind of mismatch, at home or at work, often leaves people feeling disappointed or even betrayed. That is exactly what happens when a teacher arrives from a strong community school expecting companions and finds colleagues who see each other as associates. Nobody has done anything wrong. The newcomer reads professional distance as rejection. Their colleagues may have no idea that anything is amiss.
Grant also offers a line that gets to the heart of this article. Loneliness, he suggests, is the absence of companions; joylessness is the absence of pals; and aimlessness is the absence of allies. A school does not have to provide companionship. But if it cannot offer allies, colleagues and leaders united by a shared purpose, staff lose more than friendship. They lose direction. That is where inspiration starts to drain away.
The encouraging part is that the wavelengths are also ways of interacting. When people work together like allies, they can grow into allies. Shared purpose can be built deliberately.
Let down by your own expectation
Part of this disappointment belongs to the teacher. We all carry assumptions from our last school, and it is easy to project them onto the next one. But part of it belongs to recruitment. If a school’s culture is professional rather than communal, and that is never mentioned at interview, the teacher is left to discover it alone.
The deeper mismatch is often about inspiration. Many teachers join a new school expecting to be stretched, challenged and invited to contribute ideas. The school may simply be expecting them to deliver the curriculum well. Both are reasonable expectations. When they collide unspoken, the teacher who came to be inspired finds they are mainly being asked to do the work.
The language of work and the language of learning
Ron Ritchhart’s work on Creating Cultures of Thinking identifies language as one of the cultural forces that shape every school. He contrasts the language of work, which focuses on tasks, completion and compliance, with the language of learning, which focuses on thinking, understanding and growth. Students notice the difference immediately. So do teachers.
When the adult conversation in a school is dominated by deadlines, data submissions and checklists, teachers learn that their job is to complete things. When it includes questions, ideas and professional curiosity, they learn that their thinking matters. Teaching is a thinking profession. People who chose it rarely want to be treated as task-completers, even when the tasks are important.
When teachers are made to feel small
The effect of this gap is quiet but real. A teacher who is never called upon, never asked for an idea, and never invited into the bigger conversation starts to doubt their own value. Self-esteem drops. Interest fades. The person who arrived full of energy begins to do exactly what is asked and nothing more.
Amy Edmondson’s research describes psychological safety as the shared belief that it is safe to speak up, ask questions and take interpersonal risks without being embarrassed or punished. When a new teacher feels small, that safety is missing. They stop offering ideas because they are unsure whether ideas are wanted.
Crucially, this is rarely deliberate. Most schools don’t set out to diminish anyone. The harm comes from a lack of transparency: about the culture, about what the role really involves, and about where a teacher’s voice is welcome.
Multipliers grow people out of their boxes
Early in my career, I was fortunate to work for leaders who trusted me and gave me opportunities to grow, often before I felt ready for them. Looking back, they were working on the principle Liz Wiseman describes in Multipliers: the best leaders amplify the capability of the people around them rather than diminishing it. They didn’t keep me in the box I arrived in. They looked for what I could become.
Wiseman calls one type of these leaders a Talent Magnet: someone who attracts good people, uses them to their full potential, and is glad when they move on to bigger roles. People want to work for leaders who will grow them, even if that growth eventually takes them elsewhere. If a teacher leaves for a promotion at another school, that is not a loss. It is a sign that the leadership did its job.
The alternative is leadership that only manages: keeping people in fixed roles, focused on compliance, going through the motions. Schools need good management. But if nobody in the leadership team takes on the role of inspiring people, the outcome is predictable. A thinking workforce that is never stretched becomes a disaffected one.
What schools can do
- Name your culture at interview. Be honest about whether staff socialise, how the community works and what new arrivals can expect. Candidates can then choose with open eyes.
- Be clear about the role. Say whether the job is mainly about delivering an established programme or about shaping it. Both are legitimate, but they attract different people.
- Use the language of learning with adults. Ask teachers what they are thinking, not only what they have completed.
- Call on new staff early. Invite a new teacher’s perspective in their first term. Being asked signals that they belong.
- Grow people beyond their role. Give stretch opportunities and celebrate staff who move on to bigger jobs. A reputation for growing talent attracts more of it.
- State your intent when giving feedback. Grant cites research showing that people are far more receptive to critical feedback when it is framed around high expectations and belief in their ability.
What teachers can do
- Ask the culture question at interview. How do staff spend time together? How are new teachers supported in their first year? Where do teachers’ ideas go?
- Check your assumptions. Your last school’s culture is not the default. Notice what you are expecting before you arrive.
- Look for allies first. Shared goals build strong working bonds, and companionship can grow from there.
- Build community beyond school. Clubs, networks and friendships outside work protect you if school life is more professional than personal.
- Seek inspiration deliberately. Professional networks, reading, writing and courses can supply the stretch a role may not.
People still want to be inspired
Schools can be communities or workplaces, families or professional teams. They can’t be all things to all people, and they don’t need to be. What they owe the people they recruit is clarity about which one they are.
Because whatever the culture, teaching remains a thinking profession, and people who think for a living still want to be inspired by it. A school that hires a teacher for their ideas and then never asks for them hasn’t just lost an idea. It has slowly lost the teacher.
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