On an episode on Teachers Talk Radio, Khanh-Duc Kuttig shared a striking metaphor, describing teaching as an “egg crate profession.” In Germany (and the UK, incidentally), eggs are sold in trays of six or ten rather than the expected dozen. In her analogy, teachers are like individual eggs, each in a separate compartment—an image that captures the isolation many experience in their roles. You can listen to the episode here.
Yes, teachers interact during lunch breaks, staff days, and meetings. But much of their professional development happens in their own classrooms, through trial and error rather than deliberate collaboration. Since they spend most of their working hours teaching independently—following their own lesson plans, managing student challenges—they can often feel unsupported, like an egg sitting alone in its tray.
This metaphor really struck me. Just days before, I was introduced to a podcast that has been on my mind ever since (there are quite a few blog posts brewing, but I’m still digesting). A massive thank you to Tracey Lee —and, of course, to Holly Everett and Rachel Musson from the Two Inconvenient Women podcast. (I’m currently making my way through their catalogue, which is manageable at just 19 episodes—but they’re so rich!) Anyway, I digress.
Holly and Rachel’s latest episode explores Systems Thinking (which has been my jam for over 20 years—so, naturally, Tracey knew I’d love it). They talk about schooling as silos, and I couldn’t help but connect this to the egg carton metaphor.
Rachel put it brilliantly:
“As secondary school teachers, we’re so siloed. In our departments, we don’t always know what’s happening in other subject areas. Sometimes, in a lesson, a student might say, ‘Oh yeah, we talked about this in RE,’ and you realise—yes, of course, it’s connected. But so often, students are so conditioned to see subjects as separate that they don’t even make those connections themselves. And that’s heartbreaking, because it’s in those connections, that relationality, where the real energy and richness lie.”
In a coaching conversation yesterday, my client mentioned that what gets her through the school day is the camaraderie—the way colleagues look out for each other. That support does exist, yet when we think about ‘the education system,’ what comes to mind first? Silos. Egg cartons. The structures that keep us apart.
On the podcast, Holly and Rachel invite us to shift our focus—to stop lighting up the parts and start lighting up the spaces in between.
Just imagine what we could do.
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