Education Needs to Reform Around Teacher Well-Being
To solve demoralization and burnout, we need a new approach to Teaching and Learning
Warning Bell is a new newsletter focused on the incredible stress being put on the teaching profession, and on teachers themselves. My name is Stephen Noonoo—I’m a longtime education journalist and editor for Edutopia, EdSurge, THE Journal and elsewhere.
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This week we have a guest essay by high school teacher Jay Schroder, author of “Teach From Your Best Self.”
To Solve Demoralization and Burnout, We Need a New Approach to Teaching and Learning
By Jay Schroder
In education, it’s easy to see the direction in which things are headed. Educators are increasingly stretched, facing greater challenges. As a result, teachers are fleeing the profession while fewer people are entering teacher preparation programs. This is leading to teacher shortages, which in turn creates more stress and pressure on the teachers who remain.
Meanwhile, cultural factors—be it culture wars or the breakdown of social systems—make the job harder while undermining the respect and appreciation that teachers deserve for continuing to persevere in this punishing, but critical profession. Already, K-12 workers have the highest rate of burnout in the nation.
Unless something changes, we are headed toward the collapse of education.
What we need are new approaches to education that will allow us to avert this catastrophe. When teachers are stressed and burnt out, they cannot give their best selves to their students.
Clearly, we need a new vision for education, one that prioritizes teacher well-being, while decreasing the burden on teachers. Teachers need tools to maximize student learning through doing, not more, but less.
A New Approach to Teaching and Learning
Over the span of my 24-year teaching career, I’ve been tasked with adopting countless teaching methodologies and tactics—new ones are introduced each year—under the guise of elevating student outcomes. Yet, when we scrutinize the results, both in terms of student achievement and teacher exhaustion, it’s clear that such methods benefit neither students nor educators. Persisting in this trend not only isn’t working, it’s undermining the foundation of public education.
Not only is the increasing teacher workload bad for teachers, it’s bad for students too.
What I realized during my tenure is that both my mood and state of mind when I’m teaching make a big difference on how open and responsive students will be to my lesson. Whether I teach a class from a frazzled, stressed out state, or a state in which I’m calm, present, responsive, and relaxed, students notice and key off my energy. Experienced teachers know this. When we’re having an off day, things just don’t go as well, regardless of the quality of the lesson plans. However, when we’re open and clear—in other words in our best self—any decent teaching strategy is likely to work pretty well.
Research backs this up. The first empirical study of the relationship between the emotional exhaustion of teachers and student achievement was conducted in Germany in 2016 and involved 1,102 German elementary school students. This study was designed to explore the association between teacher stress and student performance in mathematics. Controlling for factors such as the teacher’s gender and years of experience, as well as the students’ socioeconomic status and cognitive abilities, researchers discovered that teachers’ emotional exhaustion correlated with significantly lower student mathematics achievement. The negative effect of teacher stress on student performance was higher in classes containing greater numbers of language minority students.
There are scientific reasons for why more stress and pressure on teachers is counterproductive. One of them is the fact that when we are overwhelmed, our limbic system tends to trigger us into fight, flee or freeze mode, effectively shifting our entire nervous system from “learning and experiencing” to “survival.” From survival, our body shuts down anything that is not required to save our life. This means, pulling energy out of our thinking brain and pumping it into the muscles for survival. Good for running or fighting, but not so good when standing in front of 35 seventh graders trying to teach them how to solve for 𝑥.
What we need are approaches that lighten the stress load on educators, so that they can stay in their best self brains. Because states of being are contagious, when I am in my most open, responsive learning brain, my students are more likely to engage in my lesson from their own best self brains. This, in turn, increases student learning while making my job easier, creating a positive feedback loop; as the easier my job becomes, the easier it will be for me to teach from my whole brain best self.
In a Teach from Your Best Self training (the teacher-centered professional development program I run), one of the concepts we learn to integrate into our teaching practice is applying the economics principle return on investment (ROI) to teaching.
ROI is defined as the ratio of an investment’s gain or loss relative to its cost. Just as investors want to invest the least amount of money for the maximum gain, teachers want their investments of time, energy and attention to maximally benefit students. A teacher’s time, energy, and attention are finite and precious; we want a big bang for every buck.
All too often, teachers exhaust themselves by doing things that don’t matter, that don’t deliver a positive ROI, leaving them with little energy for the things that do. Examining our job through the lens of ROI helps us notice where we might be pouring time, energy, and attention into things that both drain us and yield negligible student learning. Once we identify what isn’t paying off, we can begin experimenting with an eye toward lower-effort/higher-impact teaching.
But bringing new approaches like ROI to teachers is only a half step. Policymakers also need to take into account the fact that teachers have only a finite amount of time, energy, and attention—and reform education around prioritizing teacher well-being so that teachers have an easier time bringing their best to their students.
Unless we change direction and give teachers the support they need to show up for the job from their best self, education will continue its disheartening trajectory. However, innovative approaches that prioritize supporting teachers to consistently bring their best selves will both be good for students and empower teachers, who might otherwise suffer burnout and leave.
Policy changes that take things off teachers’ plates so they are freed up to bring their best to their students can be the force that changes education’s current trajectory. And because thriving educators correlates with thriving students, supporting educators is also one of the best things we can do for our kids.
Jay Schroder has taught high school English and social studies for 24 years. He’s the author of “Teach from Your Best Self: A Teacher’s Guide to Thriving in the Classroom” and received both the OCTE and NCTE High School Teacher of Excellence Awards. He's an affiliate faculty member of Southern Oregon University and a Southern Oregon Regional Educator Network Implementation Coach focused on well-being and resilience.
👁️👄👁️ Show & Tell
📚 Independent Reading
Forbes: A study from the free speech nonprofit PEN America “finds that nearly 400 bills have been introduced that are designed to push self-censorship by teachers, creating a chilling effect in classroom across America. “Fear,” says the reports introduction, “is the new watchword in public education.”
Education Week: Karen Lauritzen was named Idaho’s 2023 teacher of the year, but politics drove her out of her job and the state. Parents weaponized her own beliefs and took issue with her curriculum, opting their kids out of lessons on global citizenship and called Scholastic News too “woke.” She wasn’t done being a K-5 teacher, but now she teaches incoming teachers at a college of education. “I couldn’t be the teacher I wanted to be any longer with the political climate in Idaho.”
CBC: Canada is facing its own teacher shortage for many of the same reasons impacting U.S. schools. COVID spiked retirements, jobs are too stressful, and pay isn’t up to snuff. Quebec and rural parts of other provinces are relying on under-qualified teachers to close gaps.