Teaching Is Better in Company

What becomes possible when Collective Care and instructional practice come together?

Not long ago, I ran into a principal colleague I had worked alongside for many years. We weren’t at a conference or sitting around a meeting table. We were standing on the sidelines of a basketball game at his school, watching my son play.

“Misty, what are you doing now?” he asked.

I told him a little about my research with teachers and what I was doing with it now: bringing together what I had learned about teacher flourishing, Collective Care, creativity, and the instructional practices I have spent my career developing alongside educators. His response was immediate: “Does the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation know about what you’re doing? This is just what we need right now.”

His words stayed with me because the work I had described wasn’t only about helping teachers cope with the demands of teaching. I had become increasingly interested in what happens when Collective Care and instructional practice come together—when the experiences that help us feel connected, creative, and alive also enliven the way we teach.

I know the feeling of survival mode in education, when the work narrows to getting through the day, the week, the term. I also know the entirely different feeling of leaving a conversation with a colleague carrying an idea I cannot wait to try; of planning together and suddenly finding ourselves playing; of seeing a familiar part of the curriculum differently because someone asked a question I would never have thought to ask. And I know the delight of receiving the text from a teacher that says, You have to see what my students did.

Joy moves. When something comes alive for us, we want to share it. This is where my research into teacher flourishing has been leading me: away from treating wellbeing as something we attend to before returning to the “real work” of teaching, and toward considering what becomes possible when we care for the people and the practice together.

From self-care to caring company

Teaching asks a great deal of the people who do it. In my doctoral research, I described the work as a kind of tightrope between passion and depletion, shaped not only by the intimate emotional work of being with children and families, but by the conditions in which that work takes place. Chronic under-resourcing, intensifying demands, competing initiatives, political pressures, and the accumulation of emotional labour all enter the classroom with us (Paterson, 2026). When teachers are expected to carry the burdens of teaching without themselves being adequately cared for, hurt blooms.

Of course individual care matters. Therapy, medication, movement, rest, time outdoors, extended health benefits, a good meal, or an evening doing something entirely unrelated to education can all contribute to our wellbeing. I am grateful for many of these things in my own life. My concern is what happens when the wellbeing of teachers becomes primarily the responsibility of individual teachers. Drawing on Pooja Lakshmin’s (2023) work on Real Self-Care, I explored this tension in my dissertation: individual practices can be beneficial, but they cannot on their own change the relational and systemic conditions in which a person is being asked to work (Paterson, 2026). I have no interest in flourishing becoming one more competency teachers are expected to master, as though the goal were to become increasingly capable of withstanding whatever comes our way.

What interested me instead was what happened when teachers were given time, space, materials, and one another. Nine teachers participated in the creative co-inquiry at the centre of my doctoral research. We made things together. We talked and listened. We worked with humble materials and reflected on experiences that were sometimes difficult to articulate in words alone. There was vulnerability, but there was also humour, curiosity, beauty, surprise, and the peculiar pleasure of discovering something through making that you did not quite know before you made it.

I came to call this creating in caring company. Bracha Ettinger’s (2006) concept of carriance helped me understand something I was experiencing in those gatherings: the possibility of carrying and being carried in shared encounter. This was not about fixing one another, absorbing one another’s distress, or pretending that collegiality could resolve structural problems. It was about what becomes possible when we do not have to experience the complexities of our work alone.

The teachers in my study helped me see care less as something one person provides for another and more as something that can be created between and among us. Intentional creative spaces opened possibilities for relational vitality, trust, and collective efficacy—the shared sense that together we can make a difference (Paterson, 2026). Through this inquiry, I had come to Collective Care.

Finding Collective Care elsewhere

I didn’t begin the doctorate with Collective Care as a framework and then design a study around it. I came to it through the inquiry itself, through what the teachers and I were experiencing and what I was beginning to understand about the relationship between care, creativity, and being together.

Later, while researching a SSHRC proposal for prospective postdoctoral work with Professor Claudia Mitchell at McGill University, I encountered a striking resonance in the work of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession. The Panel (2024) calls for a “whole-of-society approach” to transforming teaching and argues that educators should work within a climate of security, support, wellbeing, and decent working conditions. I remember the feeling of recognition. Here was something I had arrived at through the intimate scale of a small group of teachers gathered around tables in British Columbia meeting a much larger international conversation about the conditions necessary for teachers and education to flourish.

The SSHRC grant was not funded, but the inquiry did not disappear with the application. In many ways, I am living it now. My dissertation is finished, but I don’t understand the work of research as ending when the document is deposited. Knowledge mobilization asks us to bring what we learn back into relationship with the communities from which that knowledge grew, where it can be questioned, extended, and made useful.

The teachers who participated in my research offered calls to action, including opportunities for educators to create, connect, and explore the emotional complexities of teaching together. They recommended integrating Art-Care into existing gatherings not as another demand, but as an opportunity to build community (Paterson, 2026). I am living those calls to action now through my consulting, my work alongside partner schools, and the Flourishing Teachers Collective. And as I do, I keep noticing something that matters to me enormously: care for the teacher and care for the teaching are not separate.

When teaching comes alive

This is what it can look like in real life. A teacher brings a question about her students into a gathering. Someone notices something in it. Another person offers a connection. We put a concept in the middle, pull out some materials, and begin thinking with our hands. Someone sees the problem differently. Someone laughs. Somebody says, “Wait—what if…?” A few days later, some fragment of that encounter appears in a classroom. The children take it somewhere the teacher hadn’t anticipated, and she sends a photograph or a message because she wants someone else to see what happened.

This is one reason I resist separating teacher wellbeing from instructional practice too neatly. Teaching itself can be a source of vitality. A compelling question can wake us up. Making something can change our thinking. Understanding a child differently can renew our curiosity. A colleague can help us rediscover possibility in a part of our practice that had become routine.

None of this makes inadequate resources, excessive workload, inequity, or the other pressures shaping teachers’ lives disappear. Collective Care cannot be used as a pleasant substitute for the material and systemic conditions educators need to do their work well. Indeed, the UN High-Level Panel (2024) situates teacher wellbeing alongside decent working conditions, professional support, and wider social investment in education. But I also don’t want our conversations about teaching to become so saturated by survival that we lose sight of what we are trying to make possible.

I want teachers to experience the magic of engaged students. I want us to have colleagues with whom we can get excited about an idea. I want there to be room for the text that says, LOOK WHAT HAPPENED! I want us to experience ourselves not only as people managing an increasingly demanding profession, but as curious, creative, intellectual human beings doing work that can still surprise us. Perhaps wellbeing is not always something we have to leave teaching to find. Perhaps some of it can be cultivated within a teaching life worth living.

The serious business of having fun together

There is another part of Collective Care that I want to take seriously precisely because it can look so unserious: getting together. In the years since COVID disrupted so many of our ordinary habits of gathering, I have found myself increasingly attentive to what happens when teachers are simply in one another’s company—not necessarily for another meeting or formal professional learning session, but to eat, talk, read something interesting, make something, laugh, or follow an idea because it has caught our attention.

I don’t want to instrumentalize those experiences by claiming that every dinner with teacher friends needs to improve instruction or increase collective efficacy. Sometimes a group of tired teachers eating popcorn and laughing together should be allowed to be exactly that. Pleasure, curiosity, beauty, companionship, creativity, silliness, and play are not frivolous additions to a serious professional life. They are part of being fully alive within one.

And sometimes, amid all that ordinary being together, something pedagogical does happen. Someone mentions a book or tells a classroom story. Someone asks a question and another person says, “That makes me think of…” An idea passes between us and changes as it goes. We leave carrying something we didn’t arrive with.

Maybe that is another reason I keep returning to Ettinger’s (2006) idea of carriance. What we carry for one another need not always be heavy. We can carry possibility too.

What can we afford?

I’ve been thinking about affordance throughout this first collection of Journal pieces. Gibson (1977) used the term to describe possibilities for action that emerge in relationship between an environment and the one encountering it. In What Can a Material Make Possible?, I ask what different materials afford learners. Here I find myself wondering what our professional lives afford us.

Do the ways we organize teaching afford time to think with other teachers, become fascinated by an idea together, make something, linger, laugh, or know one another beyond our roles and responsibilities? Or does our time together become another place where we efficiently work our way through everything that needs to be done?

There is also the ordinary meaning of afford. What can teachers actually afford? I don’t want Collective Care to become another beautiful thing teachers have to purchase. There are retreats, apps, memberships, courses, therapies, and experiences that can genuinely support wellbeing, but caring company cannot depend upon having sufficient disposable income to buy it.

It can happen around a kitchen table, in a classroom after school, at a library, on somebody’s couch, or online with people living thousands of kilometres apart. There can be gorgeous food. There can also be tea and whatever is already in the cupboard. The table matters, but the people around it matter more.

Who is your caring company?

Which brings me back to that basketball court and my colleague saying, “This is just what we need right now.” I’m still interested in the this. We need working conditions that allow teachers to do their work well. We need adequate resources, professional respect, time, trust, and meaningful structural responses to the conditions producing distress. Collective Care cannot substitute for any of these.

And I think we also need one another. We need people with whom the creative, intellectual, relational, and joyful life of teaching can breathe. People who help us move out of survival mode long enough to remember what fascinates us. People who ask good questions, see possibilities we have stopped seeing, make us laugh, and are the ones we cannot wait to text when something extraordinary happens with our students.

So I wonder: Who is your caring company? Who leaves you a little more curious after you’ve spent time together? Who brings more life to your teaching? Who makes you want to share what you’re discovering?

Maybe send them a message. Gather around something worth talking about and see what you carry away together.

Want to continue this inquiry with me?

I created The Reading Social because I wanted to make this kind of gathering a little easier. It is a free hosting kit for bringing a few people together around something worth reading and talking about, with room for food, conversation, curiosity, and wherever the ideas take you. It doesn’t need to become another meeting. The point is to be in good company.

GET THE FREE READING SOCIAL KIT →

References

Ettinger, B. L. (2006). The matrixial borderspace. University of Minnesota Press.

Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lakshmin, P. (2023). Real self-care: Crystals, cleanses, and bubble baths not included. Penguin Random House.

Paterson, M. (2026). Making care matter through co-inquiry: The HeART of well-becoming [Doctoral dissertation, Simon Fraser University].

United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Teaching Profession. (2024). Transforming the teaching profession: Recommendations and summary of deliberations. International Labour Organization.