Stress-Busting Strategies for Teachers

How do I manage the pressures of teaching? (ASCD Arias)

M. Nora Mazzone, Barbara J. Miglionico

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781416619390
• eBook ISBN: 9781416619420
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Does stress keep you up at night? Is there never enough time to do what you want and need to do at school and at home?

Veteran educators Nora Mazzone and Barbara Miglionico have been there, too. Here, they offer simple, proven tactics to help you manage the stresses of being a classroom teacher. Learn how to

* Employ healthy practices that positively affect your mindset
* React, generalize, and maintain to create a positive environment
* Identify and use your ideal professional pace
* Exploit your intrinsic preferences for how to get the work done
* Make food and exercise choices that will better fuel your mind and body

Choose to act now so that you can look forward to entering the classroom every day for many years and finding and keeping a healthy balance between work and home.

Understanding Stress

If you are like many of our colleagues, you always wanted to be a teacher. Why? Perhaps a teacher played a critical role in your academic success or helped you through a difficult personal time. Many of us were motivated to be a teacher to repay that kindness and enhance the lives of children. We envisioned a career filled with happy students and imagined watching them grow intellectually and emotionally as a result of the environment and instruction we provided. What most of us did not anticipate were the significant challenges and stresses that we would face in our professional and personal lives.

We have all read about good stress and bad stress. Good stress can enhance motivation and help us excel. Stress can help us with challenges related to our interactions with colleagues, parents, and students. Stress may be induced by certain deadlines or duties or may be generally related to the environment and culture of the school. No matter the cause, productive or good stress helps us focus on our goals and stay resilient.

Negative stress, however, is the kind of stress that threatens our well-being. Negative stress is detrimental to our mental and physical health, both of which affect overall wellness and professional performance. You can recognize the tipping point between good stress and bad stress by becoming more aware and adept at monitoring how your body and mind feel, work, and respond. Healthy teachers make good instructional decisions, are alert and poised on the job, and provide a climate in which students are happy and productive. For healthy teachers, education is a calling and a rewarding lifelong profession.

The Reality of Teacher Stress

Getting out of work by 3 p.m. Good vacations. Summers off. How could teaching be as stressful as careers in business, law, or dentistry? Although many people believe that teaching is an easy job, the challenges are well documented.

Growing demands and declining resources in school systems, along with economic challenges faced by family members of employees and students, cause stress that not only adversely influences employee morale and health, but also has a cascading effect throughout the system. (Reeves, 2010, p. 40)

Teachers who lack critical feedback and who are not adequately supported leave teaching at alarming rates. Keigher and colleagues (2010) found that more than 26.5 percent leave teaching to pursue other occupations. And, according to the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Challenges for School Leadership (2013), teacher satisfaction has declined 23 percent since 2008 and a shocking 51 percent of teachers report feeling under great stress several days a week or more. Only 2 percent of teachers reported that they are not experiencing stress on the job.

The results from the MetLife survey verified the escalating dissatisfaction of teachers and linked that discontent to school conditions and stress. Other studies detail the extensive challenges that teachers face each day when they come to school, identifying student behavior, workload, and school climate as key variables (Collie, Shapka, & Perry, 2012; Gold, Smith, Hopper, Herne, Tansey, & Hulland, 2010).

Teachers experience professional stress from a long list of contributors, including

• Lack of resources
• Difficult parents
• Lack of acknowledgment for professional expertise and skill set
• Diverse student needs due to cultural experiences and performance gaps
• Poor behavior from students
• Negative colleagues
• Unrealistic accountability measures from federal and local administrations

If professionals outside the field of education fail to acknowledge the pressures that teachers feel, it is more critical that professionals in education recognize, acknowledge, and address our stressors.

Look around and you can easily identify the signs of stress in your colleagues. Teachers who are overwhelmed do not exhibit stamina, good morale, high self-efficacy, patience, or creativity. They are tired at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day and are often absent or tardy. Stressed teachers have trouble meeting deadlines and fall behind in daily tasks such as returning phone calls and e-mail messages. They complain that there are not enough hours in the day to get the work done and that they are pulled in multiple directions simultaneously.

How do you know if you are experiencing early signs of stress? On quick examination, you will find a lack of professional and personal balance. The line between work and home will become increasingly blurry and you will feel that more is to be done at the end of each day than you have accomplished. Your day will be spent playing catch up and worrying that you cannot meet the needs of your family. The signs of teacher stress are everywhere, but we often deny or ignore them until the impact is significant enough that there are noticeable performance deficiencies.

Rethinking Negative Stressors

What causes negative stress for one person can cause positive stress for another. For example, videotaping a lesson or principal’s walkthrough can bring out the best or the worst qualities in teachers and students. We know that stress comes from what we think (mindset) and what we experience (conditions). We also know that these two factors are intricately entwined and how you react both behaviorally and verbally can have a lasting impact on students (Dweck, 2006). Challenging work conditions cause emotional responses and those emotions establish a mindset that you bring to work each day. The opposite is equally true. Your mindset can make a difference in how you perceive your conditions. If you go to work filled with bad feelings, your mindset will help to create a negative atmosphere that may contribute to challenging work conditions.

Clearly conditions impact our mindset and our mindset impacts our conditions, and both can cause stress. Here’s an example. Your school doesn’t meet Adequate Yearly Progress. The superintendent leans on the principal to beef up literacy instruction and the principal mandates a change in literacy pedagogy. In order to demonstrate to the superintendent that gains are being made, teachers are required to collect and send assessment data to the principal each month. The teachers are outraged. They feel that the administration does not respect them as professionals, recognize their hard work, or care about anything other than test scores.

Think about what just happened. The stress of change—forcing the adoption of new pedagogy and the requirement to report assessment data monthly—caused the teachers to react with a negative mindset. The teachers perceived from the change that the administration only values test scores and lacks appreciation for practice. The reciprocal relationship between mindset and conditions cannot be ignored. We can learn to ameliorate that interaction.

How often do you sit in the faculty room and hear comments like these?

• I heard from the elementary schools that next year’s 6th grade class is the lowest-performing cohort that we have had in a long time. How are we going to get them to pass the state tests?
• This new schedule is impossible. There is not enough time to get our lessons aligned to the CCSS across grade levels.
• We are constantly expected to do more with fewer resources.

All educators recognize that these statements reflect real conditions. Some student cohorts are needier because of gaps in the curriculum. Responsible teachers inherently want to see all students succeed, but many feel added pressure from the accountability measures that use student scores as a gauge for determining the success of both students and teachers. And, it’s obvious that new schedules can throw off pacing and time management—and that resources are strained and less plentiful with imposed tax caps. We can’t change those realities.

What we can do is to alter the way we speak about these conditions as we set the foundation for developing a more positive and open mindset. Consider the impact that the following statements would have on your colleagues.

• I heard from the elementary schools that next year’s 6th grade class is the lowest-achieving cohort that we have had in a long time. It’s making me think about what I can do now to get ready. Perhaps we can share ideas earlier than usual so that we can focus our efforts on where these students need the most support to get through the state tests.
• This new schedule is challenging and I am having trouble staying ahead in my planning. Does anyone want to work together on lesson alignment? Maybe we can meet briefly and work on one segment of the unit. I will bring snacks!
• We are constantly expected to do more with fewer resources, yet we need to get the job done at the same high level. I have ordered some great new materials, but I also have a ton of stuff that I haven’t used. Why don’t we have a materials swap?

The difference between the two sets of statements lies within the relationship between conditions and mindset, which we establish by how we choose to think and react. Yes, choose, because our thinking is within our control. The first set shows difficult conditions plus a negative mindset. The second set reflects the same difficult conditions, but is offset by a positive mindset. A positive mindset provides us with the opportunity to think creatively and work collaboratively to get to our goal: we will be successful and we will support one another along the way.

Words and attitudes are amazingly infectious. Altering our mindset—the way we think about and speak about the conditions—offers us the opportunity to establish a positive school environment without denying that we have real obstacles to overcome.

Outcomes of Teacher Stress

The most important factor in student learning is the teacher (RAND, 2012). Healthy educators are able to provide a nurturing environment in which students feel safe, happy, and academically successful. Teachers who are overwhelmed by poor working conditions establish similar environments for their students and resort to teaching to the test, demanding high levels of performance without proper support, and reprimanding students more than motivating them.

The reality is that teachers spend more waking hours with a child than most parents. Those same students are observant and can learn important life lessons about resilience and compassion from their teachers. They look up to their teachers and are intensely aware of their verbal and nonverbal cues. Unfortunately, not all teachers are supported enough to be positive role models and not all students choose to respond in an understanding or cooperative manner when they sense the instability of a primary adult. Feeling a teacher’s angst, students often react in ways that invite negative feedback. A cycle of negative reinforcement quickly develops and interferes with the emotional connection and energy required for student learning.

The challenges of daily life in the classroom can affect us in many ways. The behaviors of our students and the nearly constant changes in curriculum, pedagogy, leadership, and expectations can provoke anxiety in the most masterful practitioners. The stressors we experience can serve to energize us or to weigh us down in ways that affect our physical, emotional, and intellectual performance. It is critical to pay attention to health because a teacher’s compromised capacity has a significant impact on the most precious educational stakeholders—the students.

Physical. It’s all about awareness. What we are aware of, we can do something about. So pause and ask yourself the following question: “Am I regularly experiencing any of the following signs of stress?”

• Muscle tension, including stiff neck, headaches, and backaches
• Poor sleep
• Lack of stamina
• Frequent colds or feelings of illness
• Trouble with digestion or stomachaches
• Rapid breathing
• Elevated blood pressure
• Change in appetite

Stop and think about the ramifications. If a teacher cannot cope with the challenges of the work environment in a healthy way, she is more apt to neglect professional responsibilities, engage in negative or ineffective communication, become impatient with the energy and productive chatter of students, be absent more often, and have low professional confidence. As a result, supervisors exert more pressure to improve performance and the stress increases. It’s a vicious cycle until it can be recognized and the teacher can actively employ strategies to help keep balanced or work toward rebalance.

Emotional. A stressed teacher experiences an overabundance of emotion in response to the challenges of the day. The smallest misstep can evoke extreme irritation, anxiety, or even anger. Sometimes, just going to work brings forth a level of agitation and frustration that is unwarranted by what’s going on in the present moment. Sure, it’s normal to wish for the occasional snow day or to look forward to an upcoming break, but when Sunday nights are more about dreading Monday morning than enjoying popcorn and a movie with your family and friends, you should be suspicious that something is going askew.

Do you wake up in the middle of the night with a sense of nervous energy? Does your To Do list revolve and evolve in your mind and prevent you from going back to sleep? Do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by being behind in paperwork and doing just enough to survive? Or wondering how to deal with Johnny’s escalating poor behavior? Both anxiety and depression affect our ability to stay focused and alert during the school day. Teachers who feel stressed are more likely than their counterparts to be negative on the job, have higher incidents of classroom management problems, be impervious to feedback about their performance, be resentful of change, and be focused on their work and contractual issues more than the pleasures that come from teaching each day.

Intellectual. Even a cold can make us feel sluggish and scattered and compromise our intellectual capacity. Teaching is an intellectually rigorous and demanding profession. Effective teachers need to be insatiably curious, astute, and creative. When doing our job well, we inspire children to learn more and to be resilient in the mastery of new knowledge. Teachers use keen observation and assessment skills to determine what each child needs to move him forward. We must expand our professional repertoire to address the diversity and accountability in today’s school environment.

Using Stress-Busting Strategies

The work of a classroom teacher takes intelligence, alertness, and stamina. When the level of stress becomes too high, we notice less, forget more, demonstrate unclear thinking which impacts efficient planning and delivery of instruction, and have lapses in mental stamina affecting our ability to think quickly for long periods of time. The challenges in the educational environment are real. Veterans and new teachers need to be proactive in understanding and managing the stresses inherent in the profession. The strategies we provide can help you to increase your awareness and take control of your reactions and responses so that you can look forward to entering the classroom each day.

Responding to Stressful Situations

So what can you do to interrupt the cycle of negative stress? Start by building a foundation of awareness. Learn to identify the reactions and strategies that avert or deter negative stressors. After that, you can apply these behaviors to your professional and personal life and maintain a pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Understanding Stress
• Encore
• Stress Self-Assessment
• References
• Resources
• Related Resources
• About the Author
• Copyright