Holistic Approach Key to Lessening Educator Burnout
At TeachWell, we begin each educator series discussing how economic and political factors, parent and student needs, educational trends, and technology impact their teaching practice and the extent to which many of these factors are out of their control. We do this because we strongly believe that each individual teaching practice exists within a broader shared context that greatly impacts the classroom.
Teacher turnover affects student learning and engagement in meaningful ways. We lose dedicated, caring educators every year due to the stress, overwhelm, and secondary traumatic stress or compassion fatigue they experience in their professional lives. For the past decade, teacher burnout is an increasing challenge for the field of education. The Learning Policy Institute estimates annual teacher turnover at 16% each year, costing districts upwards of $20,000 per educator annually. And the cost is not in dollars alone.
TeachWell is founded on the idea that increasing individual agency is essential. The TeachWell model introduces a new approach to professional development that includes peer support, personal reflection on core Social Emotional Learning (SEL) competencies, and mindfulness so that educators recognize where they do have influence in their teaching practice. This leads to a greater sense of agency, optimism, and resilience. Hundreds of educators throughout the Bay Area thrive in our peer support and learning groups, find personal meaning in key SEL skills, and experience respite through our guided mindfulness practices.
In the past eight months, an already overtaxed and burdened teacher workforce has had to bear one of the most unsettling, disruptive and challenging times that the field of education has seen in recent history. Teacher burnout has reached an unsustainable level. A recent article in the New York Times reported that 28 percent of educators said the coronavirus had made them more likely to leave teaching or retire early. Citing a poll by the National Education Association, the article explains that this phenomena is impacting generations of teachers including veterans as well as teachers with less than 10 years of experience.
Beyond the already demanding landscape of education, COVID presents an unprecedented set of obstacles and challenges to teachers across the country. Recognizing the overwhelming impact on educators, TeachWell has assessed our framework for efficacy. We’ve determined that we must move beyond support for the individual educator to strengthen the role of school site administrators as well. Our response is based on research in both the corporate and education sectors. VUCA, an acronym standing for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, is a term typically used in the corporate world. It most often speaks to the need for strategic leadership that is responsive to each of these factors. The concept of VUCA, originally coined after the cold war and the fall of the USSR, has gained new relevance since the time of COVID. While it captures the current environment of all professional sectors, VUCA profoundly resonates in the field of education more than ever. The strategies of VUCA can effectively be applied to school administrators who must balance Volatility with Vision, Uncertainty with Understanding, Complexity with Clarity, and Ambiguity with Agility.
TeachWell recognizes that we must remain grounded in the relational nature of education. Research at the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, in addition to a recent study by the Yale University Center for Emotional Intelligence, showed that “teachers who work in a school with an administrator with more developed emotion skills tend to experience fewer negative emotions and more positive emotions. These positive emotions lead to more optimism and resilience that not only mitigated teacher burnout, but also increased the resilience of their students in these times.
Our framework for supporting school administrators integrates critical emotional intelligence practices of stress management, emotional regulation, and strong team work with the tactical management strategies of VUCA. We work as thinking partners WITH school leadership to leverage their invaluable understanding of school staff to identify needs and the systems of support required to increase the overall climate and culture of wellbeing for their school site.
TeachWell remains committed to supporting the individual educator with our focus on personal practices and peer support. We embrace a growth mindset by following current research to identify best practices and adjust our offerings to increase the efficacy and positive experiences of educators. We are inspired by the work we are doing with administrators and school leaders as we learn with them about the systems and supports that most effectively increase educator wellbeing, mitigate burnout and inspire educator resilience to move beyond surviving to thriving in these trying times!