truth about the teaching profession: the peaks of our profession are extraordinarily high, and the valleys are inordinately low. For typical teachers, the peaks and the valleys are almost always oriented around the lives of the students they teach, not the emotional states experienced by the teachers themselves. Notions of well-being and mental health are almost never discussed because such a discussion would place the teacher at the center of the educational universe. Many teachers, to their detriment, and until the end of their teaching days, are loath to think in these terms.
This job can and will make us weep, because sometimes, students disappoint or hurt us; colleagues frustrate or anger us; a nagging feeling tells us we are not the teachers we always dreamed we would be; and we feel powerless. Certainly, on my last day, far into the future, I will remember my dear friend and closest colleague, with whom I taught for almost two decades and who tragically died of cancer at the young age of forty. I will remember the agony of going into work the next day, of sitting in a classroom surrounded by the hundred students we had in common. I, like many teachers, will also remember decades of students who the world did not treat particularly well, who were victims of mental illness, substance abuse, or their own poor decisions. Indeed, a full account of a teaching career stares down into the valley of one’s pain and disappointments, and the closing of my career will surely bring these feelings and experiences to the surface.
But upon retiring, I won’t forget to look up at the many peaks that I traveled, recalling the classroom moments brimming with hope and transformation. I will almost certainly take pride in the contributions of my former students, some of whom are Broadway stars and some of whom are entrepreneurs and moguls within their professions. Hundreds are now teachers, and thousands do their part every day to make the world just a little bit better. Most of all, I will take delight in how many of them I now consider my friends.
Getting to the last day of one’s teaching career—no matter if it is forty years or one year away—in a positive and impactful manner requires that one honestly assess just how difficult teaching can be for individuals within the profession. Teachers are often hesitant to reveal their struggles during their careers for fear of ever distracting from a student-centric learning environment, but this hesitation must end for a simple reason: an era of constant and unending change in education places unique pressures and burdens on teachers as individuals.
Learning how to conquer these challenges is no small task. But teachers can conquer them if they have the tools and wisdom necessary to address their struggles and maintain a positive, productive outlook during their career. Fortunately, we have wisdom in our midst—wisdom found in fellow teachers, voluminous educational research, and a shared and common profession. In this chapter, we’ll make their wisdom our own by examining the cumulative toll of the 21st century, considering teacher stress and the symptoms of burnout, and identifying the positive effects of self-care.
The Cumulative Toll of the 21st Century
In Take Time for You, educational consultant and author Tina H. Boogren (2018) eloquently explains through a series of powerful inquiries why self-care ought to be at the forefront of educational concerns. She asks, “What if teachers learn to take care of themselves while taking care of their students? What if it weren’t an either-or situation? What if you split your time between your own and students’ needs in a new way?” (Boogren, 2018, p. 4). But why these questions? Why now? Why is self-care quickly becoming an increasingly talked-about subject in the realm of professional development?
Teachers in previous eras certainly encountered their share of high hurdles. As education historian Dana Goldstein (2014) observes in The Teacher Wars, at different times in American history “teachers have been embattled by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, business leaders, social scientists, activists on both the Right and Left, parents, and even one another” (p. 5). In the 1960s, national paranoia swept the land as Americans feared their Soviet counterparts would triumph over them in the disciplines of mathematics and science. The 1970s were embroiled in racial tensions stoked by concerns about integration and busing. The 1980s bemoaned a lack of cultural literacy. While many of these concerns have faded into the background of the nation’s consciousness, the essential role the teacher plays in the maintenance of a growing and vibrant society firmly remains. This is why it is important to explore why there is something fundamentally different about the nature of teacher morale and strain in the 21st century.
As Patricia Jennings, a professor of education, notes (as cited in Garrison Institute, 2009):
We ask an awful lot of teachers these days.… Beyond just conveying the course material, teachers are supposed to provide a nurturing learning environment, be responsive to students, parents, and colleagues, juggle the demands of standardized testing, coach students through conflicts with peers, be exemplars of emotion regulation, handle disruptive behavior and generally be great role models.… The problem is we rarely give teachers proper training or resources for any of them. (p. 1)
In April 2015, Steven C. Ward (2015) of Newsweek sought to answer the question, “Why has teacher morale plummeted?” In his article, he offers a variety of diverse and insightful explanations, ranging from teachers’ “lost control of curricula” and the embrace of “edu-fashions” claiming to be one-size-fits-all solutions (for example, competency-based education, flipped classrooms, and the charter school movement) to “enrollment declining in teaching programs” (Ward, 2015). And as 2012 Connecticut Teacher of the Year David Bosso (2017) writes, “For a variety of reasons, but most certainly due to the increased demands of the evolving educational landscape, teachers often experience a discrepancy between the moral and affective purposes of their work and the external forces that affect it.”
All these explanations have an element of truth to them. The constancy of policy changes is disorienting and frankly demoralizing—another common observation of new retirees. The frequency with which teachers are asked to absorb and master new trends (in technology, instruction, or social experimentation) is exhausting. In 2012, MetLife released a study titled The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, and the study’s executive summary and major findings sections both support the contention that teachers are battling the strains of endless reform yet are receiving a woeful lack of support (MetLife, 2012). Some disheartening highlights from this study’s surveys, conducted in 2011, reveal the following (MetLife, 2012).
Clearly, classroom teachers are having to make do with insufficient materials while educating more and more students, many of whom are struggling outside school and may require extra care at school. Add all these factors together, and teaching in the 21st century has a psychological toll. The changing policy landscape coupled with the psychological stresses of education highlights the extent to which classroom instruction and teachers’ perceptions of their place within the profession have categorically changed between 2010 and 2020 alone. The American Federation of Teachers (2017) reports that half of all teachers have experienced a significant decline in their enthusiasm for the job. Moreover, a significant portion of them (26 percent) do not even feel safe on the job, as they have been “bullied, harassed or threatened” (American Federation of Teachers, 2017, p. 4).
Teachers
