8/3/2023 0 Comments Teacher burn out![]() ![]() The premise of teacher burnout is a convenient fiction that blames teachers for not being able to cope rather than faulting school systems that set both teachers and students up to fail. Burned-out teachers aren’t “significantly less socially and emotionally competent.” They’re handicapped by lousy school systems, ignorant officials, or out-of-touch administrators. ![]() Rather than address the root causes stressing out teachers in the first place-insufficient classroom resources, support staff and administrative support lack of input into decisions unpaid overtime high-stakes testing and lack of disciplinary and other policy enforcement, all of which make a teacher’s job harder and a student’s experience worse-the messages scapegoated educators who are put in the impossible position of being ordered to meet shifting and expanding expectations by districts that don’t give them the tools necessary to do so. The takeaways instead depicted teacher burnout as a contagion that brought down coworkers and students, with teachers as the disease vectors. Or, more likely, school conditions were stressing out both teachers and students alike, and the teachers were being blamed. ![]() A Quartz website article, titled “Classroom Contagion: Stress in the classroom can be as contagious as the flu,” discussed “stressed teachers propagating at-risk students by ‘infecting’ them with elevated cortisol.”īut the authors of the stress contagion study didn’t test the same students’ cortisol levels with a control teacher who was not, as they put it, “stressed and burned out.” The students may have stressed out the teachers, rather than the other way around. They called this transference “stress contagion,” claiming, “it is possible that spending most of the school day in interaction with a stressed and burned-out teacher is taxing for students and can affect their physiological stress profile.” The resulting media headlines further sensationalized the issue. In another paper, University of British Columbia researchers said that teachers experiencing higher burnout levels had students with higher morning cortisol levels. The researchers concluded that because teachers in close coworker relationships exhibited similar levels of burnout, their study “indeed demonstrated that burnout is-to some extent-contagious.” A Belgian study warned of “ burnout contagion ,” in which teachers can “catch” burnout from colleagues. Then I read two relatively splashy studies that crystallized what bothered me. Or, the researchers claimed, surprisingly specifically, that teachers cope “by maintaining a rigid classroom climate enforced by hostile and sometimes harsh measures bitterly working at a suboptimal level of performance until retirement.” Authors of a 2020 study concluded that, “as hypothesized,” students viewed teachers reporting higher levels of burnout as “significantly less socially and emotionally competent.”Īs I read those examples of teacher burnout literature, I was dogged by an unsettled feeling: While researchers mostly seemed sympathetic to teachers, their conclusions sometimes portrayed educators in a way I found disconcerting. Pennsylvania State University researchers described a “burnout cascade” with “devastating effects on classroom relationships, management, and climate,” in which burned-out teachers become emotionally exhausted, can’t manage “troublesome student behaviors,” and quit. Penny, whom I followed for a year for the book, experienced all of these issues, as do many teachers.Ĭoverage of teacher stress and burnout often emphasizes the negative effects of teachers’ stress on students. But after interviewing hundreds of teachers nationwide for my book The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, I believe “teacher burnout” is a myth-and the term should be ditched.Įxperts have identified several causes of teacher burnout, including inadequate workplace support and resources unmanageable workload high-stakes testing time pressure unsupported, disruptive students and a wide variety of student needs without the resources to meet them. The media often use the phrase “teacher burnout” to describe educators’ stress, exhaustion, and overwork. A joint American Federation of Teachers and Badass Teachers Association survey revealed that almost two-thirds of educators find work “always” or “often” stressful. Historically, teachers’ rates of “job strain,” stress from high demand/low control work, are higher than the average rate of all workers.
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