- Common toxic staffroom behaviours, including gossip, cliques, envy over colleagues’ success, and public correction, usually undermine dignity.
- Burnout-driven negativity and the practice of using learners as messengers in adult disputes particularly damage the school culture.
- Teachers have been urged to separate disagreement from disrespect, support struggling colleagues, and reflect on whether their own conduct would create a healthy staffroom if mirrored by everyone else.
Teachers share a workplace, but not always a sense of teamwork. Behind closed staffroom doors, some of the biggest battles in schools have nothing to do with learners.
There is a side of school life that rarely appears in official reports. It does not appear in lesson plans, examination statistics, or school prospectuses. It happens inside the staffroom. The staffroom can be a place of laughter, professional support and friendship. It can also become a battlefield where gossip travels faster than official communication, friendships turn into factions, and a colleague’s misfortune becomes somebody else’s entertainment. Most teachers will recognise at least one of these behaviours. Some may even recognise themselves.
“Did you hear what happened?” This may be the most dangerous sentence in any staffroom. One teacher mentions a colleague’s name, another moves closer, someone lowers their voice, and within minutes a private matter has become public entertainment. The subject could be a promotion, a transfer, a relationship with the administration, a disagreement with a colleague or even someone’s personal life. The biggest problem with gossip is that it rarely remains accurate. By the time the story reaches its fourth listener, facts may have been replaced by assumptions, and by the time it reaches the person being discussed, the original statement may be almost unrecognisable. A professional staffroom should not operate on rumours.
Walk into some staffrooms, and you can immediately identify the groups: the teachers who always sit together, the colleagues who whisper together, the group that knows everything before everyone else, the teachers who rarely interact with people outside their circle. Friendship itself is not the problem. The problem begins when friendship becomes exclusion, when information is deliberately withheld, colleagues are treated differently, or staff decisions become influenced by personal alliances. A teacher should not need to belong to a particular clique to feel respected at work.
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Envy can quietly poison professional relationships. A colleague earns a promotion, someone receives an award, another teacher is trusted with an important responsibility, a colleague introduces a successful innovation, and instead of congratulations, the staffroom produces explanations for why the person “doesn’t deserve it.” Maybe they are close to management. Maybe they know somebody. Maybe they were simply lucky. Sometimes the hardest thing for colleagues to say is “Well done.” But professional maturity requires learning to celebrate another person’s success without feeling diminished by it.
Every staffroom has the teacher who knows everything: they have an opinion on every issue, they know what the headteacher is planning, why a colleague was transferred, what happened at the county office, who is being promoted, and what the next policy will be, and somehow they are always willing to share the information. The problem is that confidence is not the same thing as accuracy. Teachers should learn to distinguish between verified information and staffroom speculation. Not every rumour deserves to be forwarded to a WhatsApp group.
There is a time and place for professional correction, and the staffroom is not always it. A teacher makes a mistake and another colleague immediately turns it into a public lesson, criticising a teaching method in front of others or turning a minor error into an opportunity to demonstrate superiority. Constructive feedback is valuable; public embarrassment is not. If the goal is to help a colleague improve, correction should preserve their dignity.
Burnout can change the atmosphere of an entire staffroom. A teacher becomes permanently negative, rejecting every new initiative, criticising every meeting, describing every learner as a problem, and treating every administrative instruction as another reason to complain. Teachers have legitimate grievances, and they should be able to express them. But constant negativity can eventually become contagious. The staffroom needs honest conversations, but it also needs people willing to ask what can actually be done.
Using learners as messengers should have no place in a professional school. Two teachers disagree, and instead of resolving the matter directly, one sends a message through learners, or tells learners what another teacher supposedly said. Suddenly, children are carrying adult conflicts between classrooms. Learners should never become messengers in teachers’ personal or professional disputes. Whatever the disagreement, adults should handle it themselves.
Experience deserves respect, but length of service should not become a licence to intimidate younger colleagues. New teachers bring fresh ideas, technological skills and different experiences. Experienced teachers possess institutional knowledge and years of classroom wisdom. The strongest schools combine both. A veteran teacher should be able to mentor a new colleague without belittling them, and a new teacher should be able to contribute without behaving as though experience has no value. The staffroom should be a place where experience meets fresh thinking.
Some teachers struggle to separate disagreement from disrespect. A colleague challenges an idea, and suddenly they are enemies. Someone disagrees during a meeting, the relationship changes, greetings disappear, information stops being shared, and every subsequent interaction becomes personal. This is exhausting. Professional disagreement is normal; personal warfare is not. Teachers do not have to agree on everything. They simply need to learn how to disagree without destroying their working relationships.
Perhaps the most painful behaviour of all is the colleague who celebrates your downfall. You make a mistake, you are criticised, you miss an opportunity, you face a difficult situation, and instead of support, someone quietly enjoys your struggle. Sometimes the laughter is subtle; sometimes the comments are disguised as jokes; sometimes the message is simply “You thought you were better than everyone else.” A healthy workplace should not depend on people failing so others can feel successful. Teachers should be able to fall without being pushed further down.
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Schools often spend enormous energy discussing learner discipline, academic performance and institutional targets. But there is another question worth asking: what kind of workplace are teachers creating for one another? A school can have excellent policies and still suffer from poor staff relationships, because education is delivered by people. When teachers trust one another, collaboration becomes easier. When they respect one another, disagreements become manageable. When they share ideas, learners benefit. When they constantly fight, everyone loses.
The solution does not require everyone to become friends. Teachers have different personalities, backgrounds, opinions and ambitions. They will disagree. They will occasionally irritate one another. That is normal. What matters is professionalism: do not gossip about a colleague when you can speak to them, do not undermine someone in front of learners, do not turn friendships into political camps, do not celebrate another teacher’s failure, do not make learners participants in adult conflicts, and do not mistake constant negativity for professional courage. The staffroom should be somewhere teachers can breathe after a difficult lesson, not somewhere they need another lesson in survival.
Perhaps every teacher should occasionally ask themselves: “If my colleagues behaved exactly as I behave, would this be a healthy staffroom?” The answer may be uncomfortable. But it could also be the beginning of change.
By Hillary Muhalya
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