Video · Teachers Media
A Lesson to us all
Teachers who have shaped colleagues, pupils and whole schools sometimes leave a mark that outlasts them by decades. Recognising that mark — through obituary, tribute, or a lesson taught in someone's memory — is a small but genuine part of what makes teaching a professional community rather than just a workforce.
About this video
The teaching profession, at its best, has the character of a craft passed on through generations. New teachers learn from experienced ones; experienced ones remember the mentors who shaped them; and departments, schools, and subject communities carry the marks of the people who built them long after those people have left or died. When a distinguished teacher passes, the tributes that follow are one of the visible signs of that continuity.
What makes for a good tribute is honest specificity. Generic praise ("she inspired everyone she met") tells you nothing; specific praise ("she rewrote the department scheme of work three times, and each time it got sharper") tells you what actually happened. The best obituaries and tributes in the teaching press — the TES, Schools Week, the various professional-body journals — tend to work by naming particular practices, particular decisions, particular pupils whose lives changed, and letting the reader draw their own conclusion about the person.
For schools, an internal tribute — a lesson taught in memory, a room renamed, a scholarship established — can be a way of keeping a colleague's contribution alive in the daily fabric of the school rather than in a memorial that becomes invisible over time. The tribute serves both the person being remembered and the community doing the remembering.
Discussion prompts
- Who in your school's history is still visibly influencing how things are done? What would happen if their contribution wasn't named?
- What would a genuinely useful tribute to a departing colleague look like — one that captured what they actually did, not just that they were nice?
- How does your profession as a whole remember its own — through obituary, oral history, mentorship, institutional memory? Where does that break down?
Try this in your classroom
- Write one paragraph about a teacher who shaped you. Be specific: what did they do, and how do you carry it forward?
- When a colleague leaves your school, contribute something substantive to their send-off — a specific memory, a named influence — rather than generic thanks.
- If your school has a tradition of tribute or memorial, look at how it's enacted. Is it living or performative? What would make it more meaningful?