Everyday Self-Care for Educators

Tools and Strategies for Well-Being

Carla Tantillo Philibert, Christopher Soto, Lara Veon

• Publisher: Eye on Education
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000022902
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

If you're an educator experiencing burnout, compassion fatigue, or vicarious trauma, this book will help you embrace tangible self-care practices to improve your well-being both in and out of the classroom. Using the framework of the "window of capacity"—the zone of the nervous system arousal in which a person is able to function most effectively—the authors illustrate not only "the why" of self-care, but also "the how." Chapters explore how stress at school impacts personal life, the way teacher self-care benefits students, and ways in which schools can implement and support well-being. The book includes a variety of tips and interactive activities to help you identify your own needs and implement helpful practices. You'll leave with a toolbox of information and simple practices to effectively advocate for your well-being in educational spaces and beyond.

1

Introduction

Walking through the halls of stressed school communities as a mental health professional can lead to heartfelt and challenging interactions with educators. Too many times to count, a teacher or administrator has jokingly asked “Can I get counseling, too?” with a dark undercurrent of truth to the question. Sometimes, on occasions when we have enough time and space to respond with full authenticity, these moments can result in tearful conversations about the stressful nature of working in schools. Opening up the topic of stress and well-being with educators is like drinking from a fire hydrant – once the spigot is opened a flood often ensues.

While our work in education, therapy, and counseling has primarily been with children and adolescents, we have had the growing sense for many years that focusing on counseling children, though imperative, is like putting a Band-Aid on a broken leg. Evidence from neuropsychology and education is mounting that the affective systems of teachers and students are tangled together throughout the school day and that focusing exclusively on direct support for children will yield disappointing results.

That is because, like all humans, the brains of teachers and students are wired to share emotional experiences with one another. We are a social species, and learning is inherently a social act. Therefore, it is vital for us to have the capacity to read and respond to each other’s affective cues and to model them. This process – which is a foundational component of human development – takes place through mirror neurons, which fire when we are imitating behaviors to learn new skills. This is a vital part of the learning experience in formal classrooms, which are designed to produce this effect. Students are cued, under optimal conditions, to follow the lead of their teachers through reciprocal imitations (Zhou, 2012). In other words, emotions are contagious by design.

Emotions in Schools

There are few places where this contagion effect is more evident than in schools, where emotions – both positive and negative – can spread like brush fires. The educational researcher Andy Hargreaves (2001) refers to schools as emotional geographies, which he defines as “the patterns of spatial and experiential distances that help shape, configure, and color the feelings and emotions about ourselves, our world, and each other” (p. 106). Students are physically close to one another every day for long periods of time, and so these patterns exert themselves recursively throughout the school day. Anyone who has spent significant time in the classrooms and hallways of a brick and mortar school will recognize how quickly anger, fear, excitement, or laughter can spread across the building.

Under ideal conditions, this is a good thing. Strong learning communities are rich with achievement emotions, such as interest and enjoyment (Pekrun, Frenzel, Goetz, & Perry, 2007). Learning is a social act with social purposes, and so the spread of these positive emotions can create and amplify opportunities for all children in a school.

This effect is also true for negative emotions, however. Students who experience unhealthy levels of family or community conflict, for example, without the developmental assets to learn coping skills to manage these experiences will manifest fear, mistrust, and anger in the classrooms and hallways of their school. Because of the contagious nature of emotion, other members of the school community will also experience the repercussions of these experiences, an effect called vicarious traumatization.

While the affective-behavioral manifestations of traumatic experience are at the severe end of the continuum, this effect is not exclusive to extreme circumstances. As Hargreaves points out, every school interaction is laced with an emotional valence. Therefore, the entire school is subject to this transfer of feeling states. Ideally, the shared emotional understanding is a learning-directed encounter between an adult and a child, like the excitement of a new idea or the congratulatory feeling of a good grade on a test. This effect, where two or more people experience a shared emotional understanding, has been referred to by Walter Denzin as emotional intersubjectivity (2007). Most effective teachers have the capacity to sync with their students’ emotions in this way by offering activities and regulatory strategies to help them stay in the sweet zone of learning.

Positive or negative, large or small, there is no doubt that emotions reverberate across campuses. Like a stone being thrown into a lake, the ripples are largest that are closest to the stone. It is doubtful, for example, that mild anger or anxiety in an art class will be felt in the main office unless accompanied by a troubling behavior. To that point, the “size” of the emotion matters, as well. Large rocks make large ripples, while pebbles make ripples that can scarcely be seen spreading. Less extreme emotions are less likely to spread, while strong emotions (positive or negative) are quite likely to impact those in close proximity.

The Emotional Labor of Teaching

Teachers are particularly subject to the contagion effect. And while more severe behaviors are more likely to impact teachers more severely, they can also experience vicarious manifestations even in mild or generally positive cultures because teachers work in close proximity all day, nearly every day, to children whose regulatory capacity has not fully developed! Like math or reading, it takes time and experience for them to learn effective strategies to manage their emotions. My three-year-old son, for example, literally fell on the floor crying this morning because I asked him to put on socks. While older children and adolescents certainly have more advanced skills than that, the emotional pendulum does swing wide for many years before they develop the social-emotional competencies to modulate and moderate affect-based behaviors.

It is impossible for teachers to avoid being impacted by those emotions. In fact, it is an implicit part of their job description. Take a second to think about our cultural stereotypes of teachers and the role expectations that they carry: We expect our teachers to care for their students and we frown on educators who do not exhibit the patient and optimistic behaviors that we would demand, given the nature of their profession. We romanticize self-sacrifice and expect our teachers (understandably) to be emotionally invested in the well-being and success of every one of their students.

That being the case, teachers have a high bar every day regarding their emotional regulatory capacity. At a minimum, they are required to put away their negative feelings in the service of forming and maintaining quality learning relationships with their students. But not only are they asked to be in close proximity with small under-regulated humans, they are also expected to utilize all available pedagogical and interpersonal skills to infect them with feelings of motivation, and even inspiration. As such, emotional regulation is central, not peripheral, to the teaching experience. In fact, it is a fiduciary job requirement that is often overlooked by school leaders as a foundational and teachable skill set.

The responsibility to apply social-emotional competency as a part of their job description has been described by educational researchers as emotional labor. Originally described by Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart (1983), emotional labor is the management of feelings to create bodily displays in accord with organizational norms and enacted for institutional goals – usually profit. Early work on emotional labor focused on customer service occupations, such as flight attendants and restaurant servers, in which workers interact intermittently but consistently with consumers. During those interactions, they are required to both amplify positive and suppress negative emotions. The motto “service with a smile” is the prototypical example of emotional labor. Teachers enact emotional labor, then, when they are not feeling excited but act as if they are as they greet children at the beginning of the school day, or when they stuff away their frustration at student misbehavior in order to model the virtue of patience. In other words, any time a teacher up-regulates or down-regulates an emotion to serve the institutional goal of learning, it is a form of emotional labor.

In and of itself, this is not a good or a bad thing. Teachers are drawn into the field precisely because they receive tangible psychological benefits from the role, often in the form of enhanced self-esteem (Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006). Most teachers perform caring tasks willingly and reap some measure of reward from maintaining the identity of a caring professional. For all of the stresses of teaching, it is an honorable career that is authentically democratic and invariably optimistic.

Sadly, this optimistic sensibility can compound stressors when unmet academic standards, disruptive student behavior, and limited resources create a wide gap between the archetype and the reality. This can be especially true for new teachers and teachers in high need communities. The subjective experience of this gap can lead to micro-interactional dilemmas, because teachers may be forced to choose many times every day between sharing their real feelings of disappointment or frustration and self-regulating towards a demeanor that is congruent with their professional expectations. Most teachers choose appropriately, of course, by working to psychologically vacuum pack inappropriate responses to challenging situations. When this incongruence reaches intolerable levels, however, they can be faced with feelings of in-authenticity and dissonance (Oplatka, 2009). This incongruence, discussed at some length below, can result in physical, psychological, and behavioral manifestations of stress that impact not only the teacher, but also their classroom and school community.

Teacher Stress as an Indicator of a National Concern

The implications of this truth are far reaching. There is a growing body of literature that emphasizes the negative consequences of large scale cognitive and emotional dissonance – a pattern that has contributed to an epidemic of teacher burnout and turnover, particularly in high poverty schools.

While not every teacher is suffering, many are. In 2017, “Teachers reported having poor mental health for 11 or more days per month at twice the rate of the general U.S. workforce. They also reported lower-than-recommended levels of health outcomes and sleep per night” (Educator Quality of Life Survey, 2017, p. i). Based on a Gallup poll, Greenberg, Brown, and Abenavoli (2016) note that “46% of teachers report high daily stress, tied with nurses for the highest among all occupations” (p. 2). The toxic national discourse on education has compounded teacher worry, with nearly half of the teachers in a national survey reporting that their stress has increased significantly as a result of “the national political environment” (Rogers, 2017, p. 3). As a result of these factors, job satisfaction in the teaching profession is at an all-time low (Metlife, 2013).

There is a sense of unease that national reports of teacher stress may be a canary in the coal mine regarding public education. Teachers are at the heart of the very mission of public schools – providing a social and economic safety net for our democratic institutions through access to quality learning opportunities. That so many of them report high levels of stress and low levels of satisfaction should precipitate both data-informed reflections on the most common symptoms and research-based approaches towards the most effective solutions.

The remainder of this chapter, then, will emphasize the importance of awareness and self-advocacy in light of these distressing trends. To jumpstart that approach, we will describe key research on two of these symptoms, high teacher turnover and low student achievement, which educational research has identified as indicators of unhealthy levels of teacher stress where they occur. In doing so, we draw a link between the national picture and the micro-experience of teachers, who experience stress as the neurological, physiological, and psychological manifestation of a low-control, high-stress career.

The purpose of this work is not to discourage, but rather to find avenues towards wellness through validating the true teaching experience, providing them with tools and strategies to have essential conversations with school leadership as we begin to think through practical solutions to a problem that is both local and national. As a solution, we present the growing consensus that mindfulness-based professional development can help teachers improve their social-emotional competence and their capacity to regulate emotions in the service of forming and maintaining relationships with the children they serve.

Starting a Self-Advocacy Toolbox

One of the goals of our book is to give educators a toolbox of information and simple practices to effectively advocate for their well-being. Stigmas associated with mental health can be a barrier to address emotional well-being at work, and employees often hide anxiety and depression for fear of professional repercussions. A large U.K. study, for example, found that 86% of the British workforce would hesitate to approach a colleague about a perceived mental health concern, and 35% did not approach anyone for help the last time they experienced a significant mental health issue (Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 2017). Feeling comfortable to have essential conversations about stress with supervisors, in particular, is an important step towards self-care, especially when its manifestations may be impacting job performance. According to a 2017 report, however, only 36% of employees believe that they could rely on the support of their supervisor if things get difficult (Hellebuyck, Nguyen, Halphern, Fritze, & Kennedy, 2017).¹

Having conversations about stress and wellness can be very challenging for teachers. First, they are responsible for the well-being of children and may be disinclined to share perceived vulnerability with school administrators for fear that misconstrued or exaggerated concerns could impact their employment. In general, teachers have not traditionally wielded sufficient institutional power to self-advocate with confidence.

These conversations are also constrained by the structure of schools and the policies required to operate them. Broad responsibility for adult supervision at all times makes it a logistical challenge to block out enough time to unpack stress, which can be a messy topic (recall the fire hydrant analogy). For some of the same reasons, policies are often in place that make it difficult to practice self-care, such as human resource policies that make cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Activities
• Meet the Authors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Stress at Home and School
• 3. The Impact of Teacher Self-Care on Students
• 4. Implementation and Support for Well-Being
• Conclusion
• References