Emotions matterĪn anonymous teacher who filled out our most recent survey described the balancing act like this: We can’t control what is happening to us and around us, but we can control how we respond to it.
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Add in new expectations of becoming distance-learning experts to support uninterrupted learning for all their students and caring for the ever-evolving demands of their families, and it’s no surprise that 95 percent of the feelings they reported recently are rooted in anxiety. So, before the pandemic, America’s teachers were already burning out. Like our research, these studies found that the general causes of teacher stress and burnout are related to a lack of strong leadership and a negative climate, as well as increased job demands, especially around testing, addressing challenging student behaviors, a lack of autonomy and decision-making power, and limited to no training in social and emotional learning (SEL) to support educators’ and students’ emotional needs. Other research has shown that at least 30 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years of teaching. In one study, 85 percent of teachers reported that work-life imbalance was affecting their ability to teach.
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Our research findings are echoed across a growing body of research on teachers’ stress and burnout. The primary source of their frustration and stress pertained to not feeling supported by their administration around challenges related to meeting all of their students’ learning needs, high-stakes testing, an ever-changing curriculum, and work-life balance. A national sample of over 5,000 educators answered the same questions about how they were feeling.īack then, the top five emotions were frustrated, overwhelmed, stressed, tired, and happy. In 2017, our center conducted a similar survey on teachers’ emotions. Given the unexpected new demands our educators are facing, we might assume that how teachers are feeling now is entirely different from the emotions they were experiencing before the pandemic. This requires 100 percent parent involvement, actually 200 percent because my kids are in two different grades! My vision of finally having someone else take care of my own kids’ education, even virtually, was smashed to smithereens. Once distance learning had gone into effect, we heard from one educator who shared: The second pertains to their stress around managing their own and their families’ needs while simultaneously working full-time from home and adapting to new technologies for teaching. The first is mostly personal, including a general fear that they or someone in their family would contract COVID-19, the new coronavirus. The reasons educators gave for these stress-related feelings could be divided into two buckets.
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From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.