Rediscover the core purpose of your teaching vocation

There is a scene that repeats itself every September in staff rooms. Someone hands out the schedules, someone comments on the number of students per classroom, and in a corner, a teacher with twenty years of experience looks at the list without saying a word. They are not burned out in the clinical sense. Rather, they are disconnected from the reason they chose this path in the first place. When we talk about teacher demotivation, we usually look for individual culprits, as if the teacher lacked resolve. The data points in a different direction. The OECD's TALIS 2018 report, which in Spain gathered responses from 7,407 secondary school teachers, found that 85.6% of Spanish secondary teachers claim to be satisfied with their choice of profession, above the OECD-31 average of 76%; in primary education, the figure rises to 89%, and nine out of ten primary teachers, 94%, would choose the profession again. Vocations, therefore, have not disappeared. What has been eroded is something else. That same report shows that only 14% of secondary school teachers in Spain feel that society values their profession, compared to the OECD average of 26%. Here is the rift: teachers who love their profession and at the same time feel that this profession matters to no one outside the classroom.

The word vocation comes from vocare, to call. One does not call oneself. The call is sustained by a community that reflects meaning back onto what you do, and when that community is silent, the call becomes an exhausting monologue. Teacher burnout has been studied in Spain for two decades, and recent literature agrees on something uncomfortable: the most frequently cited triggers are not difficult students, but administrative overload, lack of recognition, and isolation from peers. In TALIS 2018, 49% of teachers pointed to excessive administrative work as a significant source of stress. It is not a character problem. It is a problem of conditions and meaning.

The common mistake in staff rooms is to address demotivation with more management: another platform, another protocol, another meeting. Gregorio Luri, high school professor and author of The School Is Not an Amusement Park, has spent years arguing that school recovers its meaning when the teacher recovers the authority of knowing something worthy of being transmitted. It is not a matter of nostalgia. It is about the fact that a teacher who has stopped reading, thinking, and talking with other adults about what they teach ends up turning into a content administrator. And a content administrator does not have a vocation: they have tasks.

Consider a concrete case. Marta has been teaching History for eighteen years. She knows that the War of Succession appears in the curriculum for ninth grade, she knows which pages of the textbook she has to cover, and she knows it must be finished by April. What she stopped asking herself long ago is why that war should matter to a fourteen-year-old girl living in a southern neighborhood of Madrid. The day she asks herself that question again, and finds an answer that first convinces her, something changes in how she enters the classroom. The curriculum has not changed. She has.

Vocation is not preached in an orientation talk at the beginning of the school year. It is recovered when the teacher places themselves back in the position of the learner, when they read something that shakes them, when they debate with a colleague about why to teach the War of Succession or how to explain a derivative to someone who fears it. That inner work does not appear in any protocol, yet it is what sustains everything else. Studies on teacher satisfaction confirm this indirectly: among the variables that most predict teacher satisfaction are the quality of relationships with colleagues and the perception of one's own efficacy, which in turn is related to better training. It is no coincidence. A teacher who feels competent and supported can withstand what sinks another.

It is worth stating something that is rarely said in staff rooms: demotivation is not a betrayal of vocation; it is often its flip side. Those who expected more of themselves and of the school become demotivated, not those who never expected anything. That is why the way out is not to lower expectations or to resign oneself, but to return to the teacher the raw material of their profession: culture, judgment, and conversation with others who also think.

At Nomba Education, we start precisely from there. Before techniques, a teacher needs to reconnect with the "why," and that reconnection cannot be improvised: it is nurtured with a path that begins from within, with culture and purpose, rather than with the latest methodological trend. We do not train content executors. We accompany teachers so they can become once again what the word vocation promises: someone called to something worthwhile. Recovering that "why" is not an emotional luxury; in light of the data, it is the prerequisite for the satisfaction that almost all teachers claim to feel not to run out halfway through the school year.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.