Coaching to Empower Teachers

A Framework for Improving Instruction and Well-Being

Catherine Pendleton Hart, Fredrica M. Nash, Catherine Hart, Fredrica Nash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000429206
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Learn how to make instructional coaching more empowering and effective by supporting teachers as learners and leaders in their own classrooms. This unique book offers a powerful assets-based coaching framework that capitalizes on teachers' strengths, internal motivation, and professional goals. The authors provide a useful analysis of popular theories and models that ground coaching and support intentional planning; tools and strategies to help you enact the framework through ongoing coaching cycles; and examples, vignettes, and transcripts to illustrate coaching in practice. Each chapter also includes opportunities for reflection and practice to guide you along the way.

Appropriate for school-and district-based coaches of all levels of experience, this book will enable you to provide a more targeted, proactive learning experience for ongoing teacher growth. With an instructional framework designed to empower teachers, increased teacher professional capacity can be expected for lasting impact on students, classrooms, schools, and communities.

Part I
Foundations of Coaching

1
Addressing Teacher Well-Being

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186045-2

Introduction to Teacher Well-Being

Teachers make a difference in the lives of students. Teachers who engage in instructional practices that contribute to the development of critical and curious thinkers and who value a students’ social and emotional states and foster their social and emotional competence support long-term success in life. Teachers contribute to the joy and achievement—both personal and professional—of children by cultivating caring classroom environments, facilitating rigorous instruction, and emphasizing student perseverance and agency. Teachers help children find their purpose and their passion and help them create pathways to achieve their goals. Because of the difference they make, it is critical to promote the well-being of all teachers.

While the well-being of teachers is critical, the intensity of caring for students and meeting the demands of the job leads to a sometimes overwhelming list of responsibilities that can impact teacher well-being. Results from the American Federation of Teachers’ 2017 Quality of Teacher Work Life survey reveal this impact: 61% of respondents found their work always or often stressful—double that of the general population. Further, 58% of educators reported seven or more days of poor mental health in the month prior to completing the survey. Teachers make a difference in the lives of students, and yet this difference is taking a toll on their own well-being.

Figure 1.1 Chapter 1 Overview

Factors That Impact Teacher Well-Being

Disempowerment

Disempowering factors in schools include a revolving door of school reforms that sometimes ignore teacher voice (Fullan, 2007), external decision-making that devalues teacher expertise (Meier, 2002), increased emphasis on testing and accountability that limits teacher autonomy in the classroom (Smith & Kovacs, 2011), and negative public perception about teachers that can be demoralizing (Day, Kington, Stobart, & Sammons, 2006). These disempowering factors in schools decrease teacher well-being as they increase stress and erode a teacher’s self-image and feelings of self-efficacy.

Secondary Traumatic Stress

In addition to disempowerment in schools, teachers are exposed to secondary traumatic stress daily. The National Child Trauma Stress Network (NCTSN, 2020) defines secondary traumatic stress as “the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another.” Teachers, who work with students from various backgrounds, experience secondary trauma when students with whom they have built strong, trusting relationships share individual, first-hand experiences of trauma—and this occurs day after day and year after year. Traumatic experiences students share might include abuse at home, food or shelter insecurity, exposure to unsafe neighborhoods, and even divorce. These adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, can result in chronic toxic stress for students without mitigating or buffering support. Students’ stress is then taken on by the teacher who cares for and teaches these students. A data brief by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in 2020, showed that one in three children ages 0–17 (33.3%) had experienced at least one ACE in their lifetimes and 14.1% had experienced 2 or more. As teachers demonstrate care for their students, their stress begins to increase as their ability to buffer their attachment decreases, leading to diminished emotional capacity to effectively teach their students.

Burnout

Burnout differs from secondary traumatic stress in that it does not occur because of specific trauma but as a result of ongoing work-related stress. Christina Maslach has studied and written about burnout, especially burnout in the caring professions, since the 1970s (Maslach, 1978, 2003). According to her work, people in the caring professions—education and health care, for example—are susceptible to burnout because of the high level of emotional engagement between workers and their clients (e.g., teacher and students) and the “prevailing norms” in these professions of selflessness, going the extra mile, and working long hours (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Nel Noddings (2002) further underscores the impact of caring on teachers. She writes about the ethic of care in education, especially relational care, which describes how people are deeply affected by the experience of caring for others. This deep care for others is the reason many teachers do the work they do and yet it can be emotionally exhausting.

Impact of Stress and Burnout on Classroom Outcomes

Travis and Ryan (2004) in Wellness Workbook identify three concepts of wellness: wellness exists along a continuum; illness and health have a number of causes; and the ways individuals manage energy impacts and transforms wellness. They state that “even though people often lack physical symptoms, they may still be bored, depressed, tense, anxious or simply unhappy with their lives” (p. xviii-xix). Emotional states like these in turn contribute to decreased wellness. Travis and Ryan further describe overall health as only the “tip of the iceberg.” Not only do motivation, values, and behaviors also contribute to an individual’s wellness, the authors of the Wellness Workbook share that humans take energy from the sources around them, “organize it, transform it, and return (dissipate) it to their environment” (p. xxiv). These ideas are illustrated by the impact of secondary traumatic stress on teachers and the trickle-down impact on their students.

Stress, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout can deeply affect teachers. Secondary traumatic stress, for example, leads to fatigue, increased anxiety, self-doubt, and an overall lack of energy (Treatment and Services Adaptation Center, 2020). Symptoms of burnout include “overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment” (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).

Further, teachers who are tired, anxious, and detached and who feel ineffective in their work pass the impact of these symptoms on to their students. A low sense of teacher self-efficacy, for example, has been correlated with lower student achievement (Hargreaves & Fullan, 1996). Teachers who are emotionally exhausted can be more critical of students which in turn leads students to feel less competent themselves (Klusmann, Richter, & Lüdtke, 2016). Notably, it is not just academic achievement that is impacted by teachers who are not at their optimal level of well-being; students’ social and emotional well-being is impacted as well.

Finally, stress and burnout exacerbate equity issues because they contribute to high levels of teacher attrition in our most vulnerable schools. Teachers shift from one school to another, one district to another, or leave the profession entirely in part due to the caring nature of the profession and impacts on teacher well-being (Hughes, 2012; Ryan et al., 2017). Often, schools that are most vulnerable have the highest numbers of novice teachers. These teachers come into the profession with care to give but face challenges that impact their well-being, their students’ well-being, and student learning (Berry, Daughtrey, & Wieder, 2009).

We’ve seen this cycle of stress and burnout recently during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers are spending more time planning lessons for their students only to anxiously await as no students arrive for their synchronous lessons. The barriers of time have been dissolved as teachers try to meet their students’ every need whenever they are not asleep and yet many of the teachers with whom we have worked no longer feel that they are making a difference in their students’ lives. Teachers who believe in the powerful role of relationships in the classroom have struggled to connect with students whom they have never met in person. Exacerbating already emotionally draining conditions, we have seen and heard teachers looking for solidarity in the loneliness, limiting beliefs, and negative energy b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Authors’ Gratitude
• About the Authors
• PART I Foundations of Coaching
• PART II The CoachED Framework
• Appendix A. Tools for Coaching
• Appendix B. Coaching Transcripts
• Appendix C. Key Terms
• References