I was fortunate enough to do a BEd. Triple Honours degree, which resulted in being qualified as a Secondary School Teacher with an RE Specialism, as well as a JNC qualified Youth & Community Worker. Our training covered a lot of ground - radical and progressive ground too. Much was learnt - but even through all the training across the four years, I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the prerequisite of patience in education – for both teachers and learners.

What is patience? Perhaps more than anything, it is the ability to go a little slower, to take time to notice, to go deeper, to explore, to allow curiosity to have its place. Without patience there is no learning – after all, learning, good, deep learning, takes time. We see it when we observe a young child who’s just made a new discovery – the way a buckle works, the pages of a new book being turned, the sounds in a word, a new bug spotted in a hedge – what you see is a child absolutely caught in the moment, their curiosity propelling their discovery, and their laser-sharp attention,  all characterised by patience.

To the detriment of learning and flourishing, impatience can be more apparent in the education system than the patience we need and would all benefit from. Impatience can be an unspoken underpinning and enacted value. We feel this in our bodies and express it in our words. It creates a dissonance which we can experience physiologically and emotionally – ‘We are short of time’, ‘We can’t give the children what they need’, ‘We can’t get it all done’, ‘We can’t be the kind of teacher we want to be because there just aren’t enough minutes in the day for that’. Without realising it, unwittingly, a system and a way of being has been created whereby the wrong things are given undue accolade to the detriment of what really matters.

Impatience is also like a toxin in our bodies – it increases our stress and skews our perspective.

 In Oasis, driven by our vision, our mission, our ethos, and our 9 Habits, we believe that patience is fundamentally important for following a relational and restorative approach, which is core to who we are in all that we do. Centring the dynamic of human connection and belonging, and acknowledging that in every interaction we have, we have the power to either help heal or to harm the other, is truly transformational, changing the way we teach as well as how and why we teach. Patience is a vital prerequisite for our relational restorative approach.

Through the practice and development of patience, we are able to be fully present – absolutely vital in the context of learning. In a classroom this shows up in how we are attentive and attuned to the students, seeing them, understanding what is happening in them, and so adjusting and adapting what we are doing and how we are being so as to build connection- the basis of any good learning- and maximise that learning for each student in our care.

Being patient is also a way we increase our agency too. Patience empowers us to hold a posture that exudes a steadiness, secured through our own sense of inner peace and calm. Our threshold for stress and worry is increased too. We are able to remain in the driving seat of our own lives, maintaining our sense of agency over our work and not pushed around or controlled by the pressure of it.

And the impact of all this on our students? As we are able to be increasingly patient, we create the environment in which more learning can take place. Our presence calms and soothes and can even heal. Our curiosity and playfulness develop greater interest in our students. Our ability to pause and reflect helps us to adapt and adjust.

Patience truly is a prerequisite. Maybe we should talk about it a whole lot more.

 Written by Jill Rowe – Oasis Ethos & Formation Director