The Quiet Institutionalisation of Teachers
By Dimitris Spyropoulos
There’s a point early in most teachers’ careers when something shifts. You don’t know exactly when it happens. As Simon Sinek puts it, there’s no exact moment when you realise you love your wife. It happens over time, through experience, through friction. Teaching works in a similar way. There’s no clear decision, no moment where you say, “this is different now.” You walk into class, open the coursebook, and start teaching. It feels normal. It works. So you keep doing it. What matters isn’t the action itself, but what sits behind it.
University doesn’t prepare teachers to follow a book. It does the opposite. It focuses on how language is learned, how students interact, how meaning is built through use. Trainee teachers study classroom dynamics, communicative approaches, task-based learning. They learn to adapt, to respond, to make decisions. Teaching is presented as something active, not something you deliver step by step. And yet, very quickly, many of those same teachers begin to rely on the coursebook. Not because they’ve changed their minds.
It’s the environment they walk into. The classroom doesn’t work like the university setting. There are expectations, some spoken, most not. Lessons need to move. Content needs to be covered. Parents want to see progress. Schools want consistency. The coursebook quietly solves all of that. It gives you something to point to, something to follow, something that makes everything look organised. And after a while, it stops feeling like a choice.
The teacher who used to question materials starts to follow them. Adapting becomes occasional instead of constant. The focus shifts. Less attention to what’s happening in the room, more attention to what comes next. The lesson becomes something you get through, not something you shape.
You become institutionalised.
You learn what works in the system. A lesson that runs smoothly, follows the plan, and stays on schedule is easy to justify. It looks right. It’s easy to explain to a parent or a coordinator. A lesson that goes off track, even for the right reasons, is harder to defend. It’s less predictable. Over time, predictability wins. And slowly, the book becomes the lesson.
Not officially. No one says it out loud. We still like to think we are creative, flexible, doing what’s best for our students. But the line between material and curriculum starts to blur. The ideas from university don’t disappear, they just move to the background. They show up in small moments, here and there, but they stop shaping the bigger picture. And eventually, you find yourself in a Facebook group asking which coursebook everyone else is using.
The uncomfortable part is that it works.
Students move through levels. Exams are passed. Classes stay organised. The Director of Studies is happy. There’s no obvious reason to question it. That’s what makes it harder to see. Nothing is clearly broken.
And yet, something has changed.
The kind of teaching new teachers are introduced to—responsive, flexible, built around what actually happens in the classroom—needs space. It depends on being able to slow down, to follow a moment, to change direction. When everything is tied too tightly to the book, that space gets smaller.
So the issue isn’t whether coursebooks should be used. They’re useful, and in many cases necessary. The question is how much control they end up having.
Because if we train teachers to think, adapt, and make decisions, but then place them in systems where following is easier and often safer, those skills don’t disappear. They just stop being used. And at some point, without anyone really noticing, teaching turns into something else. More predictable. Easier to manage. Harder to recognise as the thing we originally trained for.
