Who is Looking After Teachers’ Well-being?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Increasingly, educational institutions are focusing on the socio-emotional well-being of students, but who is taking care of educators?

Who is Looking After Teachers’ Well-being?
Increasingly, schools are focusing on the socio-emotional well-being of students, but who is taking care of educators? Photo: Bigstock
Reading time 5 minutes
Reading Time: 5 minutes

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According to a study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), teaching is one of the most stressful professions in the United States. The stress suffered by teaching professionals affects their health, commitment, performance, and satisfaction, making it a job with one of the highest turnover rates in history.

Educators’ mental well-being profoundly affects that of students; however, although there are many programs to support the psychological well-being of students, teachers’ wellness is neglected. About 46% of teachers report feeling stressed daily during the school year, a percentage even higher than reported by physicians (45%). Stress can affect their love and commitment to the profession; less than a third of the K-12 teachers surveyed felt committed to their work. According to the same study, performance begins to decrease during the first years of teaching.

Another study on sleep habits from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil reported that 46% of high school teachers were diagnosed with excessive daytime sleepiness. Also, 51% reported poor sleep quality, affecting their performance, and impacting their students’ results.

For elementary school teachers, one study shows that those with higher stress and symptoms of depression negatively harm students because they present a negative and underperforming environment in the classroom. When teachers are stressed, students have more difficulty in their social adjustment and academic performance. According to a survey of more than 78,106 students from 5th to 12th grade, the less commitment the teachers have, the worse is the academic performance of the students.

Between 1988 and 2008, 41percent of teachers left the profession, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Although this number includes retirees, 23 to 42 percent stopped teaching in the first five years.

The adverse effects of teacher turnover

When teachers turnover consistently, performance in math and languages decline among students, especially for those with low grades in these subjects, according to a study conducted in New York. In the U.S., the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future estimates that more than $7 billion is lost each year due to teacher turnover in public schools. This also increases inequality in access to education in low-income schools because of the loss in the community of the relationships between the teachers and the students and parents, resulting in poor performance by the students.

Key factors contributing to teaching stress

School’s organization (leadership, environment, and work culture): A supportive work culture, excellent leadership, and an atmosphere of collaboration provide great job satisfaction among teachers. When the teacher is dissatisfied with any of these factors, the teacher’s stress increases. Federal and state school policies can also increase or decrease teacher stress and his/her effectiveness.

Workload demands: Managing a large group of students, dealing with student conflicts, tending to parents, especially the difficult ones, cause chronic stress in teachers. Unfortunately, most educational and professional development programs do not have programs that prepare teachers for heavy workloads.

Autonomy and decision-making: Many teachers feel they have no autonomy or decision-making power in their work. And it’s not unusual; according to a study by Gallup, compared to other professions, teachers ranked lower when asked if they felt their opinions count in their workplaces. But this sentiment has been increasing in recent years, from 18% in 2004 to 26% in 2012. It is necessary to ensure that the teacher’s voice is heard when making institutional decisions to avoid teacher turnover.

Social and Emotional Competencies (SEC): Having these competencies is key to influencing students positively. Yet, few teachers receive training in the social and emotional areas. Several programs and policies have already been created in the United States that seek to change this deficiency by tutoring and inducting teachers into wellness and care or stress management programs. Those with higher SECs typically have more significant support from their managers, higher job satisfaction, and feel more accomplished at work.

If a teacher does not learn to manage his/her stress, the institution is also affected, impacting student performance. In contrast, if a teacher has better control of their emotions, they reinforce the positive behavior of the students and help them better manage their own negative emotions. That’s why teaching professionals have training programs in these skills.

Interventions for reducing stress

According to the Teacher Stress and Health study, interventions that can be performed to help teachers fall into three broad categories:

  1. Organizational: those with a focus on changing the culture of the organization.

  2. Individual organization interface: refers to including relationship building and support in the workplace.

  3. Individual: teaching individual practices to manage stress.

The study also mentions other proven policies to reduce teacher stress, improve their well-being, save institutional money, and improve student outcomes. Some of these policies are:

Implement mentoring and induction programs that can help improve teacher satisfaction and retention. According to research on professional development in the United States, teachers involved in such programs have increased. Support for new teachers produces greater satisfaction, commitment, teacher retention, best practices in the classroom, and better ou
tcomes for their students.

Implement emotional learning programs (SEL), which can also impact students. According to a study of 350 K-5-level teachers in 27 schools in urban areas of the United States, teachers trained to implement a SEL-based program reported greater effectiveness in controlling their classes and an increase in their levels of personal satisfaction.

At its highest, stress can affect the teacher’s physical health, so it is crucial to reduce stress and improve teacher well-being and performance. Data shows that schools with wellness programs have increased. At one pilot school, a wellness program was conducted from 2011 to 2012 that included administrative planning, change campaigns, and incentives. More than half of the participants not only reported having less stress, but also better health. About 46% of teachers lowered their body mass index, 34.7% of them dropped their systolic blood pressure, 65.6% reduced their blood glucose, and 38.6% saw a decrease in their cholesterol levels.

More and more, schools are caring about providing socio-emotional support to students. However, often, that responsibility falls to the teachers, who do not have the preparation to deal with these issues, so they end up themselves emotionally exhausted and stressed. It becomes too significant a burden that often leads teachers to leave.

Just as institutions seek to take care of the students’ emotional well-being, equally, they should provide this care to educators because stress directly affects the health of teachers, the institution, and the performance of the students. What is necessary is to establish the elements to identify, analyze, and mitigate psychosocial risk factors and to promote a healthy organizational environment in the workplace.

With that in mind, Mexico approved the Official Mexican Standard (NOM) 035, which aims to “implement, maintain, and disseminate a policy of preventing psychosocial risks in the workplace.” It is divided into two stages: the first implemented last month and focusses on prevention measures, informative campaigns and identifying workers exposed to severe stress. The second stage is about the identification and analysis of psychosocial risk factors, the evaluation of the organizational environment, control measures and actions, the practice of medical examinations, and records. It will enter full force in October 2020, forcing companies of all sizes to pay attention and address psychosocial and emotional risk factors such as stress, anxiety, and sleep imbalances of their employees. The standard will focus on detecting fatigue from overwork, poor leadership, workplace harassment, or violence. If these problems are not addressed, companies may be sanctioned by the Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare (STPS).

Such proposals are of paramount importance in preventing health problems for professionals. Let us hope that laws like the NOM-035 normative will positively impact teachers and other professionals in Mexico, setting an example so that measures such as this one will be replicated in the rest of the world.

Paulette Delgado

This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0