The Unteachables Podcast

#128: 4 ways imposter syndrome shows up for teachers in the classroom (and what you needed to know YESTERDAY to overcome it)

• Claire English • Season 6 • Episode 129

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The imposter syndrome episode every teacher needs.
You’re in the classroom, trying your best, showing up with good intentions… but there it is. That sneaky voice that whispers:
“Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

Sound familiar? Yeah. Me too.

In this episode, I’m walking you through four of the biggest ways imposter syndrome has crept into my teaching life — from crying over curriculum codes to having students find me on Tinder (yes, really). Because if you’ve ever felt like the only teacher in the building who doesn’t have it together, this is your reminder: you’re not alone.

More importantly, this isn’t a “rah rah you’ve got this” fluff pep talk. This is real-talk about the systems that set you up to feel like a fraud, why your self-doubt makes total sense, and how to reframe those fears into fuel.

If you’ve been feeling like a walking imposter in your own classroom — this one’s for you. Let’s roll the tape.

What You’ll Learn:

  • The four most common (and painful) ways imposter syndrome shows up in teaching
  • Why feeling confused by curriculum or acronyms doesn’t make you incompetent
  • How a group of Year 12s and Tinder nearly sent me into hiding (true story)
  • Why behaviour challenges aren’t proof that you’re failing — just that you need better tools
  • The difference between good and crap leadership when you’re struggling
  • How to stop measuring your worth by how quiet your classroom looks

Resources Mentioned:

Have a question, comment, or just want to say hello? Drop us a text!

RESOURCES AND MORE SUPPORT:

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Claire English:

Oh, hi there, teachers, welcome to the Unteachables podcast. I'm your host, claire English, and I am just a fellow teacher, a toddler mama and a big old behavior nerd on a mission to demystify and simplify that little thing called classroom management. The way we've all been taught to manage behavior and classroom manage has left us playing crowd control, which is not something I subscribe to, because we're not dancers, we're teachers. So listen in as I walk you through the game, changing strategies and I mean the things that we can actually do and action in our classrooms that will allow you to lean into your beautiful values as a compassionate educator and feel empowered to run your room with a little more calm and, dare I say it, a lot less chaos. I will see you in the episode. Hello friend, how are you? I hope that your week is going well.

Claire English:

Whether you are listening to this on the way to work, I am sending all of my strength and coffee and all of the things for the day ahead. I hope it's a brilliant one. If you're on your way home from work, I hope that it was all okay, that you were treated well, that you felt some success. You know like you had a good day. Those days are so good, aren't they, when you walk out of a class, those lessons where you walk out of a class and you're like, oh my gosh, that was a good one. The kids were engaged, I felt like I was like on point with things and my energy was there. I used to always feel like that after English classes with juniors that were always a little bit oh, but then we'd have lessons where they used to get like really involved in debates and be really excited and it was just like this beautiful kind of like energy in the room.

Claire English:

Actually, like I have just so obviously, I've just moved to Australia and I had that really weird in between part between London and Sydney where I was in New Zealand and I wasn't able to teach there because I had to do all the paperwork and it wasn't worth it for a year, so I just focused on the unteachables. But now that I'm back in Australia, I am just and I've been here and I've settled down. Now I've still got to do some bureaucratic stuff to be able to go back into the classroom, like my working with children's check, and I've got to like re. I'm still technically on leave from NESA, which is like the education board here. So I've got to do some stuff to reactivate my teaching.

Claire English:

But lately, I'm telling you, my heart has been yearning to be back in the classroom. So I will be going back into teach casually. Obviously it's like a catch 22, because for me to be talking to you about classroom management, I really need to be honing those skills because you lose it. You know that even over the Christmas break or like the summer break, wherever you are in the world, like that six weeks it makes you feel like you've forgotten to teach. And I don't want to feel like an imposter, a fraud, because I haven't been in the classroom for two years. It's been a year now. But I don't want to go long like any longer and feel like I'm an imposter. I know what I know, I know that, I know what I'm talking about, but I want to be able to live that in the everyday.

Claire English:

So catch 22, instead of going in full-time teaching, because then I would just have to throw the unteachables in the bin and the work that I do here matters and I'm so passionate about the work I do here and it's so needed. So instead of going back full-time, I am going to be going in and teaching, casual days here and there when they pop up. My goal would be one a week, but you never know, I might just go in more, I might go in once a fortnight. But, honestly, like my heart's just been yearning to be in the classroom in any capacity, to be around a table with teachers, to have chats, to yeah, to just be in the room and to have that like that energy, that vibe again, like with the kids. Like that's why I do this work and that's why I I just love teaching, you know.

Claire English:

Anyway, speaking of imposter syndrome, I still get it all the time. I get it doing this work, I get it in the classroom still, and I've been here for 15 years and I've been doing this work for three years. I have been a senior leader, I've been in so many positions and still, to this day, that imposter syndrome creeps in, which is what I want to talk to you about today. I would like to talk to you about four ways that imposter syndrome has shown up for me in the classroom and I want to kind of just guide you through that, because I am certain that you are out there listening and you might have felt this way, one way or another and I just want to kind of debunk a few things and just it's kind of a validation episode of you feeling a little bit better about yourself in the classroom.

Claire English:

Okay, first up, when we talk about imposter syndrome as teachers, it really is that voice that I had in my head that was like you're just not cut out for this, whether you're a brand new grad or a few years deep or even more, a decade or so deep, imposter syndrome can hit so hard for us, that immediate feedback from so many bodies in the room, whether it's their behaviors or the way they speak to us, or the fact that in teaching there's quite a lot of like everything's on the table. It's not like you're sitting at a desk in an office and the only person that thinks that you can't do it is the person who's seeing the data or the person that's sitting across the table from you In teaching, if you are in a classroom and you aren't all over behavior, it just is so like there, it's so visible to everybody, so it can. Just it's so easy to feel like a fraud in teaching, so it like when it comes to imposter syndrome, you might not be thinking I'm not cut out for this. But you might be thinking something like oh, what if my principal walks in right now and realizes that I don't have control over my class or I still don't understand the curriculum, or what the hell is this acronym Like? Is it just me? Am I just dumb? Like I just don't get it? I can't understand that. These are all things I've thought. By the way, my students don't take me seriously. How could they possibly take me seriously? How can I teach anyone when I can't even manage the behaviors in the room? I've got these students sitting up the front and they're not able to learn. I can't even learn. Sorry, I can't even teach them. They're in this classroom and I can't even teach them. These aren't just doubts that creep in. This is the shape that imposter syndrome takes when you care deeply about your work and you're navigating a system that rarely gives you enough tools, training or time.

Claire English:

So I'm going to unpack those common ways that imposter syndrome shows up in teaching and why none of them mean that you are failing and talk through my experiences a little bit. The first one was I don't understand the curriculum. What the hell is this? Am I the only one that's confused? There's another acronym there that I just don't understand. Maybe someone's sitting in a meeting, like you're sitting in a meeting with the whole staff team and your principal says an acronym and you're like, oh my God, what the hell is that? And you don't want to say what is that. So you jot it down in your book and you try to Google it later. It's so hard to understand what is going on. There are so many things.

Claire English:

The biggest gift that I've been given in teaching was my friend Kerry, who I worked with in my first school. She was a teacher. I've spoken about perfect Kerry before. My friend Carly called her perfect Kerry, um, and I think the head teacher of English called her perfect Kerry as well as a bit of a joke in the staff room because she was the one that looked like she had it all together. But then I had a planning day with her and I don't think she'd ever listened to this podcast. I might actually reach out to her now that I'm back in Australia, but and maybe show her this. But she, um. I did a planning day with her and we were in this room together and the planning day was for the new English curriculum, probably like I was only in my second year or first year of teaching and it was like the fifth update probably, that I'd already seen the English curriculum Anyway. So I sat with her and I go, kerry, I've got something to ask you like something to say, and I please don't judge me for it. But like I was looking at the curriculum and the language of the curriculum and I said I actually don't understand this.

Claire English:

I was really, I really struggled at university and I don't know if I've said this before on the podcast, but so because of the trauma that I was kind of processing during my time at university, I had a period of time where I was living out of my car. Things were just not good for me at all when I was at university. I've actually blocked out a lot of the work that I did during that time. I was at university for five years and I have very little recollection of a lot of the things that I learned at university, of a lot of the things that I learned at university. So when I got into the classroom it felt like I was almost kind of like chewed up and spat out and I just had no idea what was going on. So for me to be able to sit in. I trusted her for me to be able to sit in front of her and say, kerry, I just really don't understand this. I thought maybe it was something that I was taught at university that I just didn't remember and maybe that I was the problem and that there was like it wasn't, like, maybe I wasn't ready to be a teacher, maybe I needed to go back and do my degree, maybe I needed to go and do extra study or something like that. That was the thought that I had in my head.

Claire English:

But the truth who can remember all of those acronyms? Who can immediately get their head around the kind of language that is in the curriculum? The English curriculum is very convoluted. It's not black and white, it's not. Students are learning this, especially like I know about other parts of the world. I know that the UK English curriculum is very similar as well, but the English curriculum is very convoluted and very confusing. But here's the truth, right. Most systems are vague, most systems are acronym heavy, they're underexplained and the learning curve is vertical in your first few years. And, as I said, every country, every you know every place and even every state in Australia has different acronyms for different things.

Claire English:

Even now, with my work in the unteachables, I'll have people ask me a question like hey, do you follow the FCCDB model? And I'm like what the hell is that? And it's like people expect me to understand what everything is now. But I don't. I don't understand all the acronyms. So guess what I do? I get onto Google and I Google it. I'm like, oh okay, that must be what it means. But usually when I Google an acronym, 10 different you know things, for that acronym come up in different industries as well.

Claire English:

So feeling confused is not proof that you are not good at this or you're not ready. It is just proof that the onboarding process for teachers leaves just a few gaps. So what I need to say to you about this stuff is you don't need to know every curriculum code to be a credible teacher. Ask the damn questions, nobody's going to judge you. Okay, that is that one. Point. Two my students aren't going to take me seriously.

Claire English:

This one hit me hard in the first year of teaching because I was only about four years older than my year 12 students that I taught. I was thrust into a year 12 class. They were the best, they were amazing. Like it was such a great class to teach. But some of them were taller, they were louder than me, they were way more confident than I was in that space. I mean, they had their mates in the class, they knew the school. They'd been there for six years, longer than me.

Claire English:

I'd just come into this school and I just felt like I was shrinking into myself at the front of the room, thinking how the hell am I going to be taken seriously here? What will I do when I need to talk to them about their behavior? I'm in no place to talk to them about their behavior. And to make matters worse, one day three of the boys that I taught they hung back. Remember I was 22 at the time. They hung back at the end of the lesson and I'm like you three, okay, like what's going on? And they were nudging each other and one of them was like just tell her, man, just tell her.

Claire English:

And then one of the boys said oh, miss, we found you on Tinder. And I nearly died. I nearly died and I just said like oh, I just don't know what to say. I said but you're young. Like, how did you find me? My age range isn't down that low. And they're like oh, we, we lie about our age. So that was how they found me and because we're in close proximity at the high school, they um, I was obviously someone that popped up and I remember thinking like there's just no way I'll ever have authority here. They're going to walk all over me. I mean, they know I'm on Tinder, how am I going to? How am I going to do this? But here is what I learned real fast Respect doesn't come with age or experience or volume or not being on Tinder.

Claire English:

It comes with consistency and presence and calm leadership. And things really shifted for me when I started to let go of those feelings and started to focus on building a credible teaching persona, but also kind of just acknowledging like, yeah, I am a young teacher and yes, these are the challenges that I'm going to face and yes, I might need support with this. And I really think that young teachers need a lot more support in the classroom when it comes to building their credible teacher presence, because it is very hard, especially when you're a secondary teacher and the students that you're teaching are not that much younger than you Like it can be really really challenging to navigate. Okay, so point three what if someone sees me struggling? You know what if my, what if my principal walks in right now? Oh my gosh, like the class is chaotic right now. Of course the principal always walks in when my class is chaotic right now. Of course the principal always walks in. When my class is chaotic, you never see, she never sees it when it's, you know, nice and settled Imposter syndrome. It just thrives in that secrecy and that you know. Worry about somebody being able to see. You know the reality of your classroom. Imposter syndrome will say you better hide this chaos or they'll realize that you're not cut out for this job. This is true. It's true in year one and it's true in year 20 of your career. So what you start to do is you start to know why I started to do anyway, over prep, just panic, 24, seven.

Claire English:

The leadership was going to walk in. I was measuring my worth by how in control my class looked, no matter what was happening. So maybe I would put up slides for them to copy. If I knew that, you know, people were roaming around the building, if I knew that there was something happening that day, I would just put things up on the board for them to copy. Because when we're talking about the pedagogy of poverty, things like that. Kids reward you with low effort work. They will reward you with their behavior. So they will sit there and copy down three pages of notes, because it doesn't mean they don't have to think, it means they don't have to put anything on the line, they don't have to risk anything. There's a whole episode on imposter syndrome of the pedagogy of poverty. If you'd like to listen to that, I can tag tag it down below for you to go immediately. But here's what I want you to know Good leadership and I say good leadership is not expecting perfection.

Claire English:

They want to see growth, they want to see reflection, they want to see strategy. Good leadership will see struggle and they'll want to support. They won't want to make you feel like crap about it. They won't want to say, of course, like, good leadership is not going to walk into a first year teacher's classroom and go off, you're not cut out for this. Good leadership will say, okay, let's put some supports in place, let's go and get Claire English in here to you know, to give you some mentoring. And if it's not good leadership, you can't control what they think anyway and, to be honest, they're probably going to think some other crappy, narrow-minded thing. Anyway, they're probably going to go away. If they're going to think something crappy about you, they're going to find a reason to think something crappy about you. Bad leadership will always put people in two categories hero or zero. And I've seen it happen in so many schools where they've got their core group of people that they think are brilliant and they can't do any wrong until they do something wrong and then they're put in the bad category. Like it doesn't take much for a bad leader to put something like label a staff member as bad and then start to push them out. So, hero or zero, and if you're a zero, it doesn't matter what you do. They're going to think crappy thoughts about you anyway.

Claire English:

Challenging behavior in the classroom also does not mean that you are flawed or you're not cut out for it. It really is just so hard. Your struggle in the classroom is not a reflection on whether or not you should be a teacher. You just need more support. You need the right support and I know that that is such a huge source of imposter syndrome for so many of us. And that leads me onto the last thing that I have thought before, and I know other people think, is I can't manage behavior, so how can I possibly teach Like? What can I do if I can't even manage the behavior? If I can't get through the content, then what am I supposed to do here?

Claire English:

And it's one of the most painful ways imposter syndrome shows up, because it makes you feel like you're in survival mode all day long because your quality world and your real world are completely out of sync. You want to feel you know mastery in the classroom. That's one of your five basic needs and if you're not able to fill that mastery cup at your workplace, you will start to feel like you're in survival mode constantly and you will act in ways and you will respond to behavior in ways that maybe you are misaligned with your values because you're desperately trying to get back to a place of safety and control is safety. But here's the truth, right, you weren't given real training in behavior. You were handed vague advice like build the relationships and be consistent and don't take it personally, without anything to support you to do that, without any scripts or strategies or support for what that actually looks like, especially what that looks like under pressure.

Claire English:

And so when you have a class of 30 and low level, disruptions are happening and two students are up the front, desperate for you to teach them something, of course you start to think see, I'm not cut out for this. I can't even get them to listen. I can't even teach the two students in my room that are wanting to listen and wanting to learn. I'm doing my students a disservice. It's not fair on those two students. Maybe somebody else would be better placed in front of that room. They're not. You are so well placed in front of that room for your students. You just need the tools. You won't give the tools. That's not your fault.

Claire English:

Caring deeply does not mean you'll magically know how to manage a room. It just means you're ready to learn how to manage a room. And this is a skill set. It's not an instinct, it's not something that comes via osmosis. It's something that is a skill and it can be learned and that is brilliant to know and that's empowering to know that you are not stuck in the situation that you are in right now.

Claire English:

So just wrapping up imposter syndrome isn't something that is always loud. Sometimes it hides quietly behind those really insidious thoughts that we have like why does everybody else get this but me? Am I that dumb Students are not going to take me seriously. If I'm seen struggling, it means that I've failed or people are going to think a certain thing of me. Maybe you think I suck at behavior, so I suck at teaching. It doesn't mean you're not out for you know, cut out for teaching. It means that you care. It means you're still growing and I'm still growing. Everybody here is still growing. I would never trust a teacher who has nothing to learn.

Claire English:

You know, like we're always learning, we always have something to adapt, which is why, at the start of the episode, I said that I need to be in the classroom because I need to continue honing those skills to feel comfortable being able to teach people. At the moment I'm okay, it hasn't been that long, but give it another two years. My gosh, it is tough. After maternity leave I was, I went back in the classroom and I'm like, oh my gosh, like it just feels so long. Anyway, you're showing up. You're not a fraud, you are trying, you're incredible and I just wanted to give you that little pep talk around imposter syndrome today, because I know that it can show up in big, big ways for a lot of you. So if you have felt any of those things.

Claire English:

If this resonated with you, feel free, as always, to pop in and let me know, and let me know if this podcast episode was helpful. If it was helpful, by the way, one of the most brilliant things that you could do for me, honestly, is go and leave me a review, because that means that I am able and make sure you're following, so you get all of the other episodes just automatically in your um, in your inbox. Sometimes I love a podcast and I forget to follow it and then, all of a sudden, it disappears and I don't remember the name of it. But go and follow the show and go and leave me a review. It would mean so much to me and, yeah, it would help me to reach other teachers as well. Okay, lovely teacher, have a brilliant week and take care. I shall speak to you next episode.

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Claire English

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