When Did Teaching Become a Job?

The Changing Face of the Teaching Profession

There was a time when the teacher quite literally ran the room.

Think back to the classrooms of the early twentieth century. Desks sat in neat rows. The teacher stood at the front. Knowledge generally travelled in one direction. Children opened the same book, completed the same task and perhaps even drew the same flower copied carefully from the chalkboard.

The teacher was the authority, the curriculum and, in many respects, the system.

It was orderly.

It was predictable.

It was also far from perfect.

Over the following century, we gradually dismantled that classroom.

Rows became groups. Groups became open-plan classrooms. Open-plan classrooms eventually acquired flexible furniture, beanbags, wobble stools and learning spaces.

Chalkboards became whiteboards. Whiteboards became interactive screens.

Teaching philosophies changed too. We moved through teacher-directed instruction, discovery learning, constructivism, inquiry learning, personalised learning and explicit instruction. At different moments, teachers have been encouraged to be facilitators, guides, curriculum designers, data analysts and direct instructors.

Then came another significant shift.

We began measuring almost everything.

Achievement data became increasingly visible. Standardised testing assumed a larger role. Schools could be compared. Results could be published. Improvement targets became commonplace. Teachers found themselves working within increasingly complex systems of accountability.

And throughout every reform, initiative and philosophical swing, one person was expected to adapt.

The teacher.

Perhaps it is time we asked what all of this adaptation has done to the person standing in front of the classroom.

Teaching was once a vocation

For many of us who entered education some decades ago, there was almost an unwritten understanding about teaching.

Teaching wasn't simply what you did.

It was part of who you were.

Teachers stayed after school.

They coached sporting teams, ran choirs, rehearsed school productions, organised camps, attended discos, painted sets and spent evenings preparing resources.

School holidays were technically holidays, although plenty of teachers spent at least some of them reorganising classrooms, planning units and preparing for the term ahead.

Sunday afternoon frequently meant thinking about Monday morning.

We accepted much of this because teaching was regarded as a vocation.

There was an element of delayed gratification in life generally, too. You finished university. You started teaching. You saved. Eventually you bought the car. Perhaps later came the house, the wedding and the family.

The world has changed.

So has teaching.

And so have teachers.

A different generation has entered the classroom

I increasingly encounter younger teachers who have much clearer boundaries around their professional lives.

School finishes.

They go home.

Weekends belong to them.

Holidays are holidays.

Some have second jobs. Some run businesses. Some have entirely separate professional identities outside education.

And they are often unapologetic about protecting those boundaries.

At first, it is tempting for those of us from another generation to look at this and wonder:

Have we lost something?

Has teaching stopped being a vocation and simply become a job?

But the more I consider this question, the less convinced I am that younger teachers are the problem.

Perhaps what appears to be declining commitment is actually something quite different.

Perhaps it is self-preservation.

Australian research suggests that teacher workload and wellbeing are significant concerns for the profession. Heffernan et al. (2022), in a study involving 2,444 Australian primary and secondary teachers, found that only 41% of respondents intended to remain in teaching. Heavy workload, teacher health and wellbeing, and the status of the profession were prominent factors influencing intentions to leave. Monash University

More recent Australian research has similarly identified workload, emotional demands and broader psychosocial working conditions as important influences on teachers' intentions to leave (Arnold & Rahimi, 2025; Rahimi & Arnold, 2025). Springer

So perhaps teachers haven't stopped caring.

Perhaps caring has simply become more complicated.

The classroom itself has changed

Walk into a contemporary classroom and consider what the teacher is now expected to hold in their head.

There is curriculum.

Assessment.

Literacy.

Numeracy.

Learning intentions.

Success criteria.

Differentiation.

Feedback.

Behaviour.

Attendance.

Trauma.

Wellbeing.

Child protection.

Sensory needs.

Executive functioning.

Language development.

Disability adjustments.

Parent communication.

Data collection.

And increasingly, there is another layer.

The contemporary teacher frequently works alongside an expanding multidisciplinary team.

Occupational therapists.

Speech pathologists.

Psychologists.

Counsellors.

Paediatricians.

Behaviour practitioners.

Learning support staff.

Each professional may provide valuable expertise.

But ultimately someone has to translate all those recommendations into what happens at 10:17 on Tuesday morning when 27 children are sitting in the classroom.

That person is usually the teacher.

The alphabet has entered the classroom

Then there are the acronyms.

ASD.

ADHD.

PDA.

Dyslexia.

Dysgraphia.

Dyscalculia.

ODD.

And others.

Those diagnoses and descriptions can be incredibly important. They can give children and families access to understanding, support and appropriate adjustments. They can help teachers recognise that behaviour, learning and regulation are far more complex than simply whether a child is "trying hard enough".

That represents progress.

But there is another side to the story.

Teachers are increasingly being asked not simply to teach a class but to understand the individual developmental, behavioural, cognitive, emotional and sensory profiles of the children within it.

And they should.

The problem is not that we are recognising individual difference.

The problem is whether we have redesigned teachers' working conditions to make that level of individualisation realistically possible.

Then there is NCCD

The Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability is another important development in Australian education.

Its purpose matters. The NCCD collects information about students receiving reasonable adjustments because of disability, while Australian schools have obligations to make reasonable adjustments so that students with disability can participate in education on the same basis as their peers. Department of Education

But there is an important distinction.

The NCCD does not simply mean that every child with a diagnosis needs an individual learning plan.

Indeed, a formal diagnosis is not necessarily required for NCCD inclusion; professional judgement about disability and the reasonable adjustments actually being provided is important, and the framework includes quality differentiated teaching practice as one level of adjustment. Department of Education

Yet somewhere between policy and implementation, teachers can experience inclusion as an enormous documentation exercise.

Individual plans.

Adjustment records.

Meeting notes.

Evidence.

Parent consultation.

Learning support meetings.

Specialist recommendations.

Review cycles.

Data.

More evidence.

The intention is admirable: know the learner and provide what that learner needs.

But we need to ask a difficult question.

At what point does documenting that we know the child take time away from actually knowing the child?

The workload is not simply bigger. It is denser.

This is where the work of Longmuir and McKay (2024) is particularly important.

They argue that discussions about teacher workload cannot simply consider the number of hours teachers work. We also need to consider the density of that work—the complexity, intensity and number of competing demands teachers manage within the available time.

Teachers move rapidly between instructional, relational, behavioural, administrative and emotional tasks. The cognitive and affective demands of that work can reduce the capacity teachers have available for relational engagement with students. Springer

That distinction matters enormously.

Because a teacher can technically leave school at 3:30 and still be completely exhausted.

We sometimes look at hours as though they tell us everything about professional commitment.

They don't.

A teacher who leaves at 3:30 may have spent the previous seven hours making hundreds of decisions.

Who needs intervention?

Who needs extension?

Who hasn't eaten?

Who is dysregulated?

Who needs a movement break?

Who didn't understand the instructions?

Who needs feedback?

Who needs their assessment modified?

Whose parent needs a phone call?

Which adjustment needs documenting?

Who is unusually quiet today?

And, by the way, what are we teaching next lesson?

This is not simply workload.

It is cognitive load, emotional load and relational load.

Perhaps the new generation has learned something we didn't

This is where I have had to challenge my own thinking.

I can look at younger teachers protecting their personal time and think:

We didn't do that.

We stayed.

We worked weekends.

We spent holidays preparing.

We answered emails at night.

But perhaps the question isn't whether today's teachers are willing to sacrifice enough.

Perhaps the question is:

Why did we ever build a profession that depended upon sacrifice?

Maybe leaving at 3:30 is not laziness.

Maybe refusing to answer emails at 9 pm is not evidence of declining professionalism.

Maybe protecting school holidays does not mean someone cares less about children.

Research on Australian teacher retention supports the importance of looking beyond individual commitment. Psychosocial working conditions—including workload, emotional demands, recognition, leadership, social support and meaningful work—are connected with teachers' intentions to stay or leave (Arnold & Rahimi, 2025; Rahimi & Arnold, 2025). Springer

Perhaps this generation is drawing boundaries previous generations should have drawn much earlier.

But there is something I don't want us to lose

And this is where my concern remains.

Because teaching cannot become entirely transactional.

There is something profoundly human about teaching that cannot be captured in an enterprise agreement, workload formula, NCCD spreadsheet, diagnostic report or position description.

A great teacher notices.

They notice the child who suddenly stops putting their hand up.

They notice the reader who can decode beautifully but cannot explain what they have read.

They notice the child whose behaviour changes after lunch.

They notice the student who understands everything verbally but freezes when asked to write.

They notice the child surrounded by friends who somehow never quite seems to belong.

They notice the student whose data looks perfectly acceptable but whose eyes tell another story.

That kind of noticing is at the heart of teaching.

And it requires something increasingly precious.

Capacity.

If teachers are cognitively overloaded by documentation, emotionally depleted by complexity and constantly switching between competing demands, then perhaps the greatest danger is not that teachers leave.

Perhaps the greater danger is that good teachers remain but no longer have enough space to notice.

Longmuir and McKay's (2024) concept of workload density is particularly relevant here. Their work suggests that increasing complexity and competing demands can leave teachers with less capacity to engage relationally with students—the very dimension of teaching many educators consider central to their work. Springer

That should concern every educational leader.

This is where school culture enters the conversation

We cannot keep asking teachers to become more resilient in systems that continually demand more of them.

That is not a sustainable leadership strategy.

Instead, leaders need to ask what their school culture communicates about what it means to be a "good teacher".

Do we quietly celebrate the teacher who stays until 6 pm?

Do we unconsciously judge the teacher who walks out at 3:30?

Do we confuse exhaustion with commitment?

How many meetings have we created?

How many initiatives are operating simultaneously?

How much documentation have we added locally rather than being explicitly required externally?

How many times do teachers enter the same information into different systems?

How much of what teachers do directly improves learning?

And perhaps the most powerful leadership question of all:

What can we remove?

Rahimi and Arnold's research into Australia's teacher shortage suggests that working conditions matter considerably. Their findings draw attention not only to workload but also to organisational factors such as trust in management, recognition and organisational justice when considering teacher retention. Springer

School culture, therefore, isn't a soft issue sitting somewhere alongside workload.

Culture determines how workload is experienced.

Perhaps vocation needs a new definition

Maybe teaching hasn't stopped being a vocation.

Maybe our definition of vocation needs to change.

Vocation should not mean martyrdom.

It should not require teachers to surrender evenings, weekends and holidays as evidence that they care.

Professionalism should never be measured by exhaustion.

But neither do I want teaching to become simply the efficient completion of contracted tasks between 8:30 and 3:30.

Somewhere between those two extremes lies the profession we need.

A profession where teachers remain intellectually curious about the children they teach.

Where teachers have time to notice.

Where inclusion means understanding learners rather than merely documenting adjustments.

Where multidisciplinary collaboration genuinely supports teachers rather than becoming another layer they must coordinate.

Where evidence informs professional judgement rather than replacing it.

Where teachers can leave school, go home and have a life.

And where they return the next morning believing deeply that what happens in their classroom matters.

Perhaps that is the changing face of teaching.

Not a generation that cares less.

But a generation asking education to find a more sustainable way to care.

And perhaps those of us in leadership need to listen.

Because the question facing educational leaders is no longer:

How do we get teachers to give more?

Perhaps the better question is:

How do we create school cultures in which teachers have enough left to give?

References

Arnold, B., & Rahimi, M. (2025). Teachers' working conditions, wellbeing and retention: An exploratory analysis to identify the key factors associated with teachers' intention to leave. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52, 1947–1973. Springer

Australian Government Department of Education. (n.d.). Data on school students with disability. Department of Education

Australian Government Department of Education. (n.d.). Information products for educators and education providers on supporting students with disability. Department of Education

Heffernan, A., Bright, D., Kim, M., Longmuir, F., & Magyar, B. (2022). 'I cannot sustain the workload and the emotional toll': Reasons behind Australian teachers' intentions to leave the profession. Australian Journal of Education, 66(2), 196–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/00049441221086654 Monash University

Longmuir, F., & McKay, A. (2024). Teachers workload strain: Considering the density as well as the quantity of teachers work. Curriculum Perspectives, 44, 561–565. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-024-00279-2 Springer

Rahimi, M., & Arnold, B. (2025). Understanding Australia's teacher shortage: The importance of psychosocial working conditions to turnover intentions. The Australian Educational Researcher, 52(1), 383–409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-024-00720-5 Springer