Thinking About Switching Teaching Positions? What No One Tells You About Making a Change Mid-Career

When the job boards are starting to post for next year, your mind and your heart can start to wonder if a change is what you need to love teaching again. If you're already looking, this one's for you.

"Guidance for Mid-Career Educators: Navigating the Challenges of Switching Teaching Positions"

When you're more than halfway through the year, exhausted to your core, students deep in the second semester slump, a little thought can quietly show up in the back of your mind: What if next year looked different?

Maybe it's been a rough year, or a rough couple of years, and you've reached the point where something clearly has to give. Maybe it's not even that dramatic, and you've just been curious about what else is out there: a different grade level, a different content area, a different kind of room entirely. Whatever is pulling at you, this is the time of year when it gets louder, because the job boards are starting to fill up with positions for the upcoming school year and suddenly that vague "what if" has actual listings attached to it.

Let's talk about switching teaching positions in depth, because your future deserves more than a pep talk.

Episode 52 of the Next Chapter for Teachers Podcast: Erin Sponaugle shares insights on transitioning between grade levels or teaching positions. Listen now for expert advice.

It's Okay to Want Something Different

I want to say this before anything else, because teachers don't hear it enough: wanting a change does not mean you failed at what you were doing. It doesn't mean you're being disloyal, or dramatic, or that you should just push through for a few more years. We are not meant to stagnate. We are people, and people grow and change, and at different points in life they want and need different things.

That's true for everyone except, apparently, for teachers, who often get the subtle message that choosing to stay in one classroom doing one thing forever is the noble path and anything else is abandonment. I want to push back on that pretty firmly. Staying and thriving is wonderful. But staying and slowly hollowing out is not something to be proud of, and it is not good for you or for your students.

The Real Advantages of Staying in the Same Teaching Position Year After Year

Here's the thing, though. There genuinely are good reasons to stay, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because this isn't a post that's telling you to blow everything up. It's a post that's helping you think clearly so you can make the right call for yourself.

When you stay in a grade level or content area for years, you become good at it.

You know the content deeply, you know the age group, you've figured out what works and what doesn't, and that knowledge is valuable. There's a real comfort in walking into your classroom knowing exactly what you're doing and why. You can pull out materials you've refined over years, you can adapt them for whoever's in your room this year, and you can operate at a level of proficiency that takes a long time to build. We need teachers who have that depth, and it is genuinely an advantage.

There's also the matter of recognition.

When you're known in your school or district as the person who does a particular thing really well, that opens doors too, whether it's moving into a leadership role on a team, being tapped for committee work, or being seen as the go-to person in your content area. None of that is nothing. It's real, and it's worth factoring in.

Considering a Change in Your Teaching Career? Discover Important Insights Before You Decide!

The Cons of Staying Put: When Comfort Becomes a Rut

But here's the flip side, and this is where it gets honest (or how I've honestly felt at times as a teacher).

Boredom is real.

Even when you love your content and your age group, doing the same thing year after year can eventually drain the enthusiasm that made you good at it in the first place. That's just being human.

You can also get into a rut so deep that you can't see over the edges of it anymore, and that's when you start losing your edge and your joy. It creeps up. One day you're a teacher who loves what they do, and a few years later you're just getting through the week, and you're not even sure exactly when that shift happened.

Then there's the typecast problem.

You know how certain actors always get cast as the same kind of character? Same thing happens in schools. Maybe you always get the high-ability students, or maybe you always get the students with behavior challenges because everybody knows you can handle them. And yes, that's a compliment. It really is. But getting the same deck of cards every single year, never getting to expand or stretch or try something new, that wears on your joy in a way that's hard to explain until you're living it.

And Last but not least, we have the recovering Teachaholic.

If you're in the process of coming back from burnout and trying to build better boundaries around your time and energy, doing the same job in the same space with the same expectations piled on top can make that process a whole lot harder. Sometimes the environment itself has to change for the person inside it to change.

Exploring Teacher Guilt: Understanding the Challenges of Being Stuck Due to Perceived Expertise.

"But You're So Good at It." (And Other Things That Will Try to Keep You From Switching Teaching Positions)

Ugh, this one. This is the one that gets you (and me).

You start to mention, maybe tentatively, that you're thinking about something different, and suddenly the people around you have a lot of feelings about that.

"But you're so good at this. Why would you want to leave? We don't know what we'd do without you. You've really got it figured out here."

And the guilt just pours right in, doesn't it? I know, because it happened to me, and I know how hard it is to hold your ground against it.

Here's what I want to say to you as plainly as I can: you cannot let how other people feel about what you should be doing with your career determine what you actually choose to do with your career. You get one life, one teaching career. You do not owe anyone the version of yourself that is most convenient for them. What other people want from you is information, not your instruction manual.

What to Consider Before Switching Grade Levels or Content Areas

If you're seriously looking at a move, here are the things worth thinking through carefully, because a decision made purely out of exhaustion and a desire to escape tends to look different in September than it did in March.

First, look at the full picture of any position you're considering, not just what it isn't, but what it actually is.

If you're considering a different grade level, think about what changes and what doesn't. A different schedule, a different age group, a different set of colleagues, potentially a different school entirely. Those are all real factors, and they go both ways.

Second, if you're interested in something you haven't done before, go observe it if you can.

Actually being in a room where that thing is happening tells you so much more than you can gather from a job description or even an interview. I think there's real value in seeing, not just imagining.

Be careful about asking other teachers if they like their position.

Here's why. If I had gone up to an art teacher and asked, "Do you like teaching art?" and she'd been having a terrible year or was burning out, she could have talked me right out of something that turned out to be the best professional decision I ever made. Instead of asking whether someone likes their job, ask them what they like about it and what's harder than they expected. That gives you much more useful information than a yes or no that might be more about where they are on any given day than about the job itself.

"Embracing Change: Reflections on Transitioning from a 5th Grade Teacher to an Art Educator"

My Own Story: From Fifteen Years in Fifth Grade to Art Teacher

I taught fifth grade for fifteen years. Before that, a year each of third and fourth grade. So seventeen years as a general education classroom teacher, and somewhere around year fifteen of fifth grade, I pretty much decided that I could not do this for the rest of my career.

It wasn't that I didn't love my students or that I wasn't good at teaching anymore. But the increasing focus on standardized testing, the boredom, the drama-rama of almost-middle-schoolers- I knew in my bones that I could not sustain that for another fifteen to twenty years. Something had to change.

Ironically, I actually considered going to the middle school. I went and interviewed, learned the schedule, toured the building, really thought it through. And I came away from that experience knowing that it wasn't right for me. It would have been more of the same, just in a different building. I'm really glad I did that process, because it kept me from making a move based on wanting to escape rather than wanting to move toward something.

So I went back to the drawing board (literally). I was still in fifth grade, still feeling the pull to change, and then one afternoon I was sitting at my desk looking at the drawings my students had given me. One of my fifth graders had drawn this really detailed portrait of me, and I had it up on my wall because honestly it was impressive.

And something just switched on in my head. I could be an art teacher.

At that point I had already written and illustrated my first children's book, and something about it all clicking together- the art, the kids, the creative space lit me up in a way that I couldn't let go of.

The only catch was that I wasn't certified to teach art. So I did my homework, figured out what I needed to do, and I passed the Praxis to get my art certification. That took effort and time. But I wanted it enough to do the work, because it meant enough to me.

I also let my administrator know I was interested in an art position if one ever opened at our school. I didn't tell everybody, but I told the person who needed to know. And then I waited. The position took about two and a half to three years to open up. But when it did, I was ready.

Exploring the Impact of Teacher Burnout and Career Transition: Insights into Changing Grade Levels.

The Reality of Changing Teaching Positions: What Catches You Off Guard

I want to be honest with you here, because I think the stuff that's hard to say is the stuff that's actually most useful.

When you've done something for a long time and then you stop, there's a grief to it. A real one. For me, that was complicated by the fact that the pandemic hit at the end of my last year in fifth grade, and I never got a proper goodbye to my classroom, my students, or that chapter of my teaching life. Just Zoom, have a good summer, hope this is over soon. That stung. Even when the change is the right thing, the leaving has its own weight.

You also lose sight of the shore. You let go of familiarity. You let go of all the things you knew how to do without thinking, and you start over from scratch. New curriculum, new systems, new colleagues, new everything. That is disorienting even when it's exciting.

For me, taking on an art room for the first time meant figuring it out largely as I went. There were moments where I was very much making it up and hoping the kids couldn't tell (they mostly couldn't). And honestly, that whole experience of having to figure it out fast built a level of resilience and confidence in me that I didn't know I had. When you're forced to improvise and you pull it off, you find out what you're actually made of.

Keep in Mind It's a Trade, Not a Rescue

Here's the thing I want you to hold onto, because I think it's the most important practical piece of this whole conversation: making a change is a trade. Not an escape, not a rescue, not a magic fix for how depleted you're feeling right now. A trade.

You will exchange the specific challenges of your current position for the specific challenges of the new one.

Let me give you the real picture from the art side.

Teaching art is physically more intense than teaching fifth grade. I am on my feet all day, every day. I see over 600 kids throughout the week instead of one class. I do more direct teaching, more reviewing, more talking, more prepping materials, more cleaning up materials, and by the end of the day the overstimulation of constant color and scissors and glue and noise is real, and I have to intentionally decompress when I get home or it catches up with me.

Is it easier than fifth grade? No. It is different. And different is what I needed.

I am in alignment now with who I am at this stage of my life in a way that I wasn't before. Teaching art fits my values about education, my passion for creativity, my belief that the so-called soft subjects actually do more for students than we give them credit for, and my personality as someone who functions well as the one-of-a-kind unicorn of the school. When I was teaching fifth grade, that was right for who I was then. Art is right for who I am now. Both things can be true.

Exploring the Benefits and Challenges of Switching Grade Levels or Subjects: A Guide to Making Informed Decisions.

What Happens on the Other Side

You will get better at it faster than you think. You already have the classroom experience, the relationship skills, the professional instincts. You just have a new context to apply them to. And you may discover strengths you didn't know you had, because you never needed them before.

Change is sometimes hard on your colleagues, especially the ones who depended on you or who are going to miss what you brought to your old team. That's real, and it matters, but time does usually heal it.

And whatever upheaval happens on the inside- the fear and the chaos and the moments where you wonder if you did the right thing- that settles down, too, often faster than you'd expect. A year from now, you could be in an entirely different place, not just in a different room, but emotionally. And that's the goal.

Don't downplay what you want. Don't let guilt from people who care about you or convenience for your school talk you out of your own growth.

You don't know who is watching you make this decision and quietly filing away the courage it takes as evidence that they can do something similar. Your kids, your spouse, your colleagues- they're all watching. And your good decisions ripple further than you'll ever fully know.

You owe yourself the chance to grow. Don't deny it.

If teacher burnout is part of what's driving this conversation for you, Teachaholic was written exactly for this moment. Find it on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.

Looking for a way to save yourself from burnout without leaving the classroom? I've created a free guide with reflection questions, graphic organizers, and a quiz to help you get started on your journey. Download your free Teachaholic Action Guide to get started on your journey below!