This study highlights the impact of stress on teachers’ well-being and its consequences for the education system. Teachers play a critical role in shaping the lives and futures of children, but the teaching profession has become increasingly stressful, leading to negative impacts on teacher health, job satisfaction, and retention.
Identifying sources of teacher stress is essential in developing effective strategies to reduce stress and improve job satisfaction. To this end, we conducted a survey with 500 educational professionals including 53% from USA and 47% around the world, which revealed that stress among teachers is a systemic issue regardless of position or geographic location. The survey also found that sources of stress for teachers can vary widely, from heavy workloads and administrative duties to managing student behaviour, social and emotional competence, and meeting academic standards. It is important to acknowledge the impact of emotions on teachers, which can act as a mediator between various factors such as job satisfaction and burnout. The study also addresses the role of administrators in creating a supportive working environment, reducing the impact of stress caused by micromanagement and excessive paperwork. The study concludes that it is crucial to reduce stress levels and improve job satisfaction in order to ensure quality education for students.
Teaching is a demanding profession but at the same time it is an emotionally and psychologically draining job. It requires a significant amount of emotional and psychological energy due to continuous interaction with students of all ages who bring their own life experiences and family situations to the classroom. Educators are expected to nurture, understand, and help all students throughout the long school day. To execute restorative practices and respond appropriately to students, teachers must be in a good place emotionally, mentally, and physically. However, the introduction of many technological apps, data analysis, assessment tools, and subsequent deadlines has greatly impacted the lives of educators worldwide including USA. The increase in deadlines, lack of discipline and teachers’ conflict can create an enormous amount of stress, which has become more prevalent in recent years.
In 2016, Greenberg, Brown, and Abenavoli (Greenberg, Brown et al. 2016) documented five main sources of teacher stress , including school organization, job demands, work resources, social and emotional competence, and mindfulness.. (a) school organization (e.g., lack of leadership qualities, healthy school climate and negative school working conditions; (b) job demands, (e.g., excessive paperwork, high teaching loads, insufficient time (Shernoff, Mehta et al. 2011); (c) work resources (e.g., limited sense of teacher autonomy and decision-making power (Frank and McKenzie 1993, Wisniewski and Gargiulo 1997, Miller, Brownell et al. 1999) (d) social and emotional competence (e.g., lack of collegial interactions; (Schlichte, Yssel et al. 2005); (E) Mindfulness to stress management (lack of awareness to teachers to cope with stress). Specifically, four main sources of teacher stress: Micromanaging, Teachers Conflicts, and Lack of Discipline Plans are harsh realities in schools. These conditions can create a challenging work environment for teachers.
Recently the teaching profession has become more and more stressful. High levels of stress are having a negative impact on teacher health, job satisfaction, and retention. The effects of teacher stress are extensive and have a ripple effect, affecting not just the individual teacher but also students, educational institutions, and the surrounding community (Kapa and Gimbert 2018, Park and Johnson 2019, Worth and Van den Brande 2020).
Since the 50’s stress has been extensively studied and correlated with health problems. Stress as defined by the pioneer of stress related disorders is “The wear and tear within the body” (Selye 1956). We see stress as a temporary conditional of emotional and psychological imbalance. A state of mind where the motion of fear is prevalent causing thinking unclarity, emotionally driven decisions, displacement of anger and resentment (Meschino 2023).
Russek found that emotional strain associated with job responsibilities preceded heart attacks in 91% of a group of coronary heart diseases patients, while among a normal group only 20% reported similar strains on the job. Therefore, it is important for modern societies and workplaces to pay significant attention to stress (Russek 1959).
This article will examine the four main stressors that impact teachers’ health, teaching, and learning, including micromanaging, paperwork-app deadlines, lack of discipline plans, and teacher conflicts. Additionally, we will analyse the impact of stress on teachers’ leadership pillars, classroom management, student interactions, effective lessons, teachers’ collaboration, and school management. We will also consider emotional health, looking at the negative realm of the DMHN model and how personal balance and self-awareness are essential in today’s schools. Our analysis will blend contemporary research with historical stress-related research, accompanied by the Five Pillars of Effective Classroom Management and the Classroom Management Restorative Chart. In this article, we will explore the impact of four main stressors on the leadership pillars of teachers. To achieve this, we will integrate contemporary and historical research on stress, as well as the Five Pillars of Effective Classroom Management and the Classroom Management Restorative Chart.
Our analysis will cover crucial aspects of teaching and learning, including classroom management, student interactions, effective lessons, teacher collaboration, and school management, with a focus on the effects of stress.
Additionally, we will examine the Negative Realm of the DMHN to highlight the significance of personal balance and self-awareness in the current school environment. The Stress and Fear area will be examined in detail, and we will also share personal experiences to complement our reflections.
To underscore the prevalence of stress among teachers, we conducted several digital surveys on the LinkedIn social media platform. Our survey received responses from 500 educational professionals within 24 hours of posting the question, “As a Teacher What is The Level of Stress In Your School?” The respondents were given four options to answer, ranging from non-existent to extremely high stress. The survey welcomed opinions from all educational stakeholders and received responses from a diverse range of professionals in the educational field, including college and university professors, K-12 teachers, principals, deans, curriculum supervisors, headmasters, and counsellors. The survey had a global reach, with responses from educational professionals with 53% of the participants based in the US and the remaining 47% from other countries, including in countries such as India, Kuwait, Philippines, Lebanon, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia, Pakistan, UAE, and Kenya.
We created a pie chart to represent the educational level of the survey participants, where each segment of the pie highlights a distinct degree of education, with the size of each piece corresponding to the percentage of participants that fall into that level. Grades K-8, High School, Colleges/Universities, and Private education Organization are the four divisions of the chart. The chart shows that the majority of professionals who participated in the survey work in Grades K-8, accounting for 44% of all participants. Participants who work in High school make up the second-largest group of participants, accounting for 40% of all participants. Colleges and universities account for only 5% of total participants, while participants working in private education organisations account for 11%.
The survey revealed that 97% of the participants claimed there was some form of stress in their school, with only 3% claiming stress was non-existent. Of the total participants, 73% of the participants claimed there was significant and extremely high stress, and 32% said they were experiencing extreme stress.
This data suggests that stress is a systemic issue in the educational world, regardless of position or geographical location. The survey provides a global perspective on the issue of teachers’ stress and highlights its implications on health, teaching, and learning.
In a subsequent survey, we delved deeper into the sources of teachers’ stress by asking participants to identify the causes of their stress. We asked the question, “As a teacher, what causes your stress the most?” with response options including administrators micromanaging, paperwork/data deadlines, teachers’ conflict, and lack of discipline plan. A total of 277 participants responded to the survey.
The survey results revealed that 38% of participants identified administrators micromanaging as the primary cause of their stress, while 30% cited a lack of discipline plan as the source of their stress. Paperwork and data deadlines were the main cause of stress for 25% of participants, while only 8% of participants indicated that teachers’ conflict was the most significant source of their stress.
These results suggest that micromanagement by administrators and a lack of discipline plan are major sources of stress for teachers.
Finally, we will identify and analyse potential four potential stressors that can impact teachers’ health, teaching, and learning: Micromanaging, Paperwork-App Deadlines, Lack of Discipline Plan and Teachers’ Conflict.
Administrators micromanaging
Leadership encompasses numerous professional and personal attributes that define the leader and guide them throughout their operations. We see managing as a combination of actions, behaviours, and communication carried out by an individual in order to maximize the personnel abilities and execute organization operations.
Micromanaging is an excessive, overly controlling form of managing. A micromanaging leader would often check in for progress and updates, monitoring every aspect of teachers’ work.
Micromanagement by administrators can have a detrimental effect on teachers’ well-being and job performance, and can harm the quality of education that students receive.
This type of management style, involving excessive control and monitoring, takes away teachers’ autonomy and creativity and can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. As a result, teachers may feel inadequate and suffer from low self-esteem. The constant pressure can result in burnout and a toxic work environment, causing high turnover rates among teachers and impacting the quality of education. Furthermore, when teachers are stressed and demotivated, it can negatively impact their ability to provide high-quality education to students (Finnigan 2012, Snow and Williamson 2015, SOLAJA, OYALAKUN et al. 2022).
Exaggerated monitoring for teachers causes excessive worries and preoccupations. The excessive monitoring comes along with numerous deadlines that are expected to be met. So, we have to stressors here feedback off each other in a worrisome spiral. The continuous checking also causes a sense of inadequacy when teachers are attempting to be validated and recognized for their performances in fact they are demeaned and put on the defensive worrying about all the deadlines and paperwork that need to be met just to survive.
In the Domenico Model of Human Needs Negative Real we see the sense of inadequacy right below the Stress and Fear ring. In this area it becomes very difficult for the educator to exercise physical and verbal de-escalation as highlighted in the Classroom Management Restorative Chart (Meschino 2023). Maintaining a clear mind and thoughts becomes very difficult creating the risks of escalating conflicts with the students. Stressed teachers are not in the position to carry out restorative and effective classroom management. Stressed teachers are less likely to respond appropriately to challenges coming from students at any time of the day. Our Teacher Leadership pillars criteria includes the following:
“An effective educator understands the importance of involving students in the rules creation rules , which gives them ownership of the classroom climate and operations” (Meschino 2023).
If we expect students to participate in this process, should administrators lead by example and encourage teachers to collaborate with their students? Should the school’s mission of collaboration extend to both teachers and students, and should conflicts be addressed early on?
Should administrators give teachers that freedom to operate in a way that makes them feel professionally trusted and competent. Micromanagement creates a sense of incompetence in teachers, making them become more fearful and less self-reflective about their teaching effectiveness. This can result in an even deeper feeling of defeat and failure emphasized by a lowering self-esteem as well as a lower instinct of self-preservation.
Paperwork/Data Deadlines
I experienced professionally and personally the evolution of education since 1999 where it was merely about teaching and learning in the classroom following the paper generated lesson plans. Technological educational applications began to appear over a decade ago impacting every aspect of the teaching profession: attendance, lesson planning, online educational programs, discipline.
School Districts began to insert more and more tech applications followed by subsequent deadlines. While numerous educational programs have been adopted, not all of them have been fully utilized, other at times only represent additional digital paperwork without being fully analysed. This digital paperwork which is synonymous with data analysis which, over the last few years, has taken, an important and time consuming, role in the lives of teachers. Over assessing is another issue of the current educational system, directly connected with the data analysis aspect resulting in additional work that needs to be completed at certain deadline. Deadlines that create tensions and stress in teachers who are now worried about meeting deadlines in fear of discipline actions, taking energy away from the needs of the students and creating effective lessons.
The increase of educational apps has basically created an additional profession within a profession. Teachers are required now to be data collector and data analyst. This is a unique social and educational phenomenon where a profession has essentially doubled the number of requirements over time.
Our advanced technological society is responsible for much of the stress overload from which we suffer. General environmental and social stressor which affect all people to some degree including living and working conditions, increased mobility, and the constant information from mass communication (Pellettier 1974).
Hundani and Toquero found that excessive paperwork is a major problem for teachers, causing stress and negatively affecting their personal and professional lives. Paperwork, including grading, recording, and planning, is the top administrative task for teachers, leading to exhaustion and difficulty in teaching and learning. Studies indicate that 41.5% of teachers report high levels of stress due to their work environment (Mehrenberg 2013, Hundani and Toquero 2021).
According to our Teacher Leadership Pillars “Teacher leadership is an ever-evolving concept; educators can start considerable academic and personal growth in all students by maintaining a growth-geared and self-reflective attitude infused with enthusiasm” Excessive apps/paperwork deadlines significantly impede teachers’ personal and professional growth. Creative thinking is obstructed by multiple deadlines and excessive number of applications.
Imagine teaching as building a house as an analogy. Building a house as direct teaching with the students. As we are focused on building foundation and laying brick after brick, we would have to build another structure not really necessary nearby at the same time. So simultaneously the builder now has to focus on another project while focusing on the main construction site which is direct teaching with the students. Forty-Five minutes to plan out of a seven hours direct teaching time? The devolution of the educational system has been slow, steady, and relentless. The implications of this regression have greatly affected the student’s population This is a unique subtle overtime transformation of a profession which has gown within another profession along with its own set of requirements and deadlines.
According to Friendmann and Rosemann, 1974 the “Hurry Sickness” or unnatural preoccupation with time means that many people tend to be thinking of what they have to do or are going to do next while engaged in a activity that should be absorbing all their attention. Time pressured activities is highly stress inducing.
Do teachers experience Hurry Sickness? Are they being overly pressured by Apps/Deadlines?
Are we putting our teachers in the best place possible? Are teachers teaching with Passion, Self-Awareness, Positivity, Creativity? Are we helping teachers in creating a classroom a safe, positive, and 100% learning-oriented environment”
These are the questions that anyone in the educational world should ask.
Teachers’ Conflict
As teachers work with their colleagues on a daily basis, interpersonal conflicts can arise from various sources, including disagreements with colleagues, conflicts with parents, or issues with students. These conflicts can significantly impact a teacher’s work life, leading to a negative work environment and causing stress. (Del Principe 2004, Anderstaf, Lecusay et al. 2021, Bongco and Abenes 2023). The negative implications of teacher conflict include excessive monitoring, negative conversations, and the formation of cliques, which can affect the school climate, mission, and ultimately, students’ learning.
Interpersonal conflicts among teachers can have deleterious effects on the school climate and mission, as well as students’ learning. When colleagues do not collaborate or share ideas, their teaching abilities, data analysis, and creativity are limited, and their classroom management skills become less effective. Additionally, conflicts can lead to a negative work environment, causing teachers to feel overwhelmed and stressed.” This revision provides a more detailed explanation of why conflicts are deleterious and how they impact different aspects of teaching and learning. As far as our Teacher Leadership Pillars: High-quality instruction demands a high degree of self-awareness. Self-awareness provides a fertile ground for professional and personal growth and improvement in both areas. The ultimate goal is to instil this personal and professional trait in the children. When children are aware of their own learning and academic and personal growth, and social- emotional development, the stage is set for impressive advancement (Meschino 2023).
Conflict and self-awareness are indirectly proportioned, the higher the conflict among teachers the lower the self-awareness. It becomes more difficult to transfer those social-emotional skills to the students when their own social-emotional balanced is being compromised.
As teachers dive deeper into the Negative Realm their feeling of disconnection becomes stronger and stronger. Unappreciated, unvalidated teachers are more likely to displace their internalized anger toward colleagues.
Educators who dwell in the negative realm of the DMHN are less likely able to build a constructive, productive relationship with their colleagues. As they struggle to meet deadlines in a micromanaged environment the tendency is to bunker up, to make it through the day. This inevitably impacts teachers’ effectiveness. Growth-geared, self-reflective, and enthusiasm belong to the positive real of DMHN here knowledge where the emotional and physiological needs are met along with a sense of connection.
In order to carry out restorative practices we must possess restorative attitudes. To have restorative attitudes we need in an emotional and psychological “good place” where fear, stress and worries are absent.
Studies have shown that a less-pressured orientation toward work may lower the incidence of myocardial infarction, so it is crucial for school administrators to create an environment where peers are motivated to share ideas, strategies, and everything else that can benefit the team (Rahe and Theorell, 1970).
As school administrators must create an environment where peers are motivated to sharing, ideas, strategies and everything else that can benefit the team. Since working in teams importance and collaborative work is being emphasized schools cannot allow nor tolerate teachers disunity. Over the last few years many schools have adopted the Professional Learning Communities and collective commitments to enhance teachers collaboration aimed to increase students learning. It’s important for school districts to remain coherent with their mission and operations. Coherence comes with prioritizing teachers’ collaborations and professionalism.
School districts should certainly veer away from tolerating teachers’ conflicts and establish serious restorative practices to guarantee enhanced collaboration and mutual professional respect among all educators.
Lack of Discipline Plan
A school discipline plan is a series of rules, regulations and subsequent actions taken educational organizations and its employees aimed to manage students’ behaviours effectively and to ensure that the least number of disruptions occur in the classrooms.
It sets the standards of conduct and creates a safe and positive learning environment for all students. A school discipline plan often includes specific consequences for breaking rules, such as detention, suspension, or expulsion. It is important for students to understand the expectations and consequences of their actions to promote accountability and responsibility. Effective school discipline can lead to improved academic performance and overall success for students. However, when discipline becomes too strict or when teachers are forced to enforce rules that are unreasonable, it may lead to stress and burnout.
Dealing with discipline problems in schools is a major source of stress for teachers. Teachers often report that they spend a significant amount of time and energy dealing with students’ inappropriate behaviour, which can interfere with their ability to focus on instruction and lead to negative emotions such as frustration, anger, and helplessness. These discipline problems have been found to be linked to negative consequences for teachers, including decreased job satisfaction, increased burnout, and decreased commitment to teaching.
Circling back from the introduction, the teaching profession is an emotionally and psychologically draining job. The continuous interaction with students of any age requires a significant amount of emotional energy. Every student brings to the classroom their particularly own life experiences, current family situations, current challenges, past negative situations. Teachers engage in many different types of communication with students throughout the school day. These verbal interactions have different goals, depending upon the situation.
Stressful school conditions cause burnout in teachers, resulting in dissatisfaction, absenteeism, turnover, and a range of psychological, physiological, and behavioural issues, including anxiety, depression, headaches, tachycardia, stress, hypertension, alcoholism, smoking, lifestyle problems, and sleep problems (Torsheim and Wold 2001, Roeser, Schonert-Reichl et al. 2013, Friedman-Krauss, Raver et al. 2014, Lian, Guo et al. 2021).
Discussion
Based on our own teacher leadership pillars a Learning-conducive environments are those where students feel safe and motivated to learn and to grow. Ultimately, the students will be the ones reinforcing the classroom rules and policies. Therefore, every moment should be a teaching and learning opportunity, even those spent dealing with disruption.
Effective teacher-student communication becomes essential when dealing with disruptive students who aim to engage in negative confrontations. Altercations in educational settings, like in any other environment, may potentially escalate to dangerous scenarios. The final goal of classroom management for teachers is de-escalation and restoration of behaviours, which involves changing negative behaviours to positive ones (Meschino 2023). Restoration is quite a powerful concept that veers away from the punitive method of managing the classroom and moves toward a more logical, beneficial way of handling conflicts. In order to carry out restorative practices, stress must not be present, as a stressful educator may not have the assets to respond to challenges in a positive fashion.
In our classroom Management Restorative Chart, the first two levels are self-awareness and emotional control, which are the basic two steps/mindsets necessary for educators to begin to establish restorative routines, dialogues, interactions, that are deemed positive, logical, disciplined and compassionate (Meschino 2023).
Stress impedes all the above strategies and makes them very difficult to implement. Stress is basically the variable that complicates the teaching and learning process in my ways and many areas.
Another important strategy to maintain a safe and conflict free classroom is De-escalation. De-escalation involves a series of actions, behaviours, and communication intended to defuse a potentially dangerous station. It is a necessary strategy to preserve the safety of staff and students, as well as an opportunity to model conflict resolution. Teachers overwhelmed by stress would be less capable of de-escalating challenging situations and be easily triggered, with serious implications for student safety. Teachers under a significant amount of stress can build a conscious and subconscious sense of failure as well as dissatisfaction. The build-up anger and resentment may be displaced at the workplace or can be internalized. This internalization takes off the issue from a conscious level and to the unconscious, laying the ground for further increase in a feeling on inadequacy and insecurity. Funkestein called Anger-In where it was found people blamed themselves, turned their anger inward, and suppressed their hostile feelings.
Similarly, to Funkestein Pelletier (1974) talked about considerable evidences that internalized anger induces prolonged stress reactivity, which is more damaging than the transient strain involved in the immediate expression of aggression.
When educators have that internalized anger, it will likely be displaced when challenged by high needs students. Teacher in high-needs schools need to engage appropriately in challenging situations thus creating a safe environment for all parties involved.
Teachers need full support in the implementation of a step-by-step discipline plan where students and teachers are aware of the consequences of each of the disruptive behaviour. Discipline Plan is a natural sequence to the teachers’ restorative practices. A well-elaborated, step by step discipline plan supported by following Five Pillars of Effective Classroom Management (Meschino 2023) including restorative goals, supported by discipline, compassion, positivity and logic-based techniques, with a solid parental participation, is needed in schools nowadays.
It must be a fully cooperative effort of all the educational stakeholders in school with much involvement of the parents.
Conclusion
In conclusion, teachers play a critical role in shaping the lives and futures of children. However, the teaching profession has become increasingly stressful in recent years due to various factors such as school organization, job demands, work resources, social and emotional competence, and mindfulness to stress management. The consequences of teacher stress impact not only the individual teacher but also students, schools, and communities.
To address the issue of teacher stress, it is important to recognize the intricacy of emotions and view them as multi-faceted constructs. Micromanagement by administrators, excessive paperwork, and lack of clear performance targets can lead to stress and negatively impact job satisfaction and the quality of education. Therefore, it is crucial for administrators to create a supportive and empowering work environment to reduce stress and improve job satisfaction for teachers and better outcomes for students. Additionally, further investigation is needed to understand the relationship between paperwork and stress levels and its impact on teacher performance. By addressing the sources of stress in the teaching profession, we can support teachers in their important work and improve the educational experience for all.
Author Name: Dr. Domenico Meschino
Title: Teacher, Author, Business Owner
Email: luminosaglobal@gmail.com
Address: Chicago IL, USA
Website: drmeschino.net
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