Introductions 👩🏼‍🏫👩🏼‍🎓

 Hi my name is Vicky and I’m a teacher in FE. I’ve worked in post-16 education for the last 16 years and teaching genuinely is the love of my life. I still get as excited about planning and delivering lessons as I did when I first graduated from university.

To introduce myself and be completely transparent I need to tell you that I’m also sober. I’ve been sober now for 22 months and this has definitely impacted my professionalism and practice in the classroom. I believe there is a correlation between the two and teaching and drinking are associated for perhaps the wrong purposes sometimes. Being a professional and the stress that we are under can sometimes cause problems. Mine was drink.

As a running theme through this blog I will probably refer to my sobriety as I do believe it’s an important part of the professional that I am now. 

I’m also in EdD student 👩🏼‍🎓- I’ve just started my research at a local university. Again, I would not of been able to access this without sobriety as I didn’t have the headspace or the capacity to consider anything else apart from drinking in the evenings. For me it has been hugely important to go back to education myself as a student as a reminder as to what it is like to be sitting in the classroom listening to a lecture and being taught. 

I hope you find this blog interesting and I’m going to try and use it throughout my doctorate to reflect upon the experiences I have within the classroom as well as doing my research. I’m going to try and bring as much of my current practice as possible to life as my focus is retrieval practice and the impact this has on students and teachers. 

Vicky x