Tired and Emotional - Teachers Need Support but are Often Silent

Teaching is a caring profession, it's emotional if it is being done well, but there is a toll, teachers give and give but their emotional needs are often left by the wayside.

Every school day, across the country, education professionals labour emotionally in the classroom, in the staffroom, online, yet the language available for talking about these experiences in public conversation has a history of being fragmented, inadequate and polarised as either overwhelmingly negative or unrealistically positive.

The emotional realties of the profession create difficult conditions for teachers to work in, yet many continue and strive to be professional and ethical in their practice. Teachers wish to share their emotional burdens with the community, they want to be heard and seen by the public and to be recognised as full professionals who labour under difficult conditions.

However, there exists a culture in the profession that expects teachers to buffer, mask and regulate their emotions in front of student or parents, and often in front of colleagues and leaders.

This has led to teachers being unable to access safe and open spaces where they can decompress and debrief about their emotional labour.

“We are hearing that many teachers experience profound emotional events in their working lives and often do not have the language, concepts or theories to interpret and unpack these experiences,” says Saul Karnovsky from Curtin University who has researched the phenomenon and edited a book on the issue with Nick Kelly from Queensland University of Technology (Teachers' Emotional Experiences - Towards a New Emotional Discourse, Springer).

Teachers are often in environments that do not support sharing emotionally intense experiences that take place in the school.

“The teachers we spoke to experience emotions such as guilt, demoralisation, helplessness, alienation and anger. Many of these feelings are generated from the systems, processes and structures of schooling which teachers have little agency and autonomy over. They also speak to the nature of teachers’ work.

“Only very recently have we begun to publicly acknowledge that teachers are struggling under the weight of unrealistic expectations and mounting responsibilities of modern teaching,” says Nick Kelly.

So, what can be done to help teachers unburden themselves of intense emotion? It begins with conversation.

“If we were to advise a school department, we would suggest that practitioners need to come together as caring colleagues to share their emotional labour, where vulnerability is welcomed, and difficult emotional conversations can occur in a supportive, non-judgmental way. There are a range of approaches that have been successful in contributing to this kind of space,” says Karnovsky.

Students, families and communities have to value, understand and collaborate with teachers in meaningful ways to work together on shared values, ethics and practices. This becomes more difficult when schools adopt standardised assessment and curriculum regimes.

“Teachers and students often end up in oppositional relationships, but this is not the case in all countries and communities. We need to learn from democratic school models where students have agency in their learning and are not just passive receivers of education. In this way teachers and students become partners in the educative process, able to design and calibrate learning to meet the needs of diverse communities,” says Kelly.

There are many wellbeing programs, but ‘emotional wellbeing’ is an inadequate lens through which to address teachers’ emotional experiences. Commonly teachers are cynical of wellbeing programs, and it can be cruel to expect overworked teachers to adopt these practices, which become a further load on top of whatever was already there.

“The primary issue is that the ‘wellbeing’ approach typically places responsibility for positive emotional practice back upon the shoulders of individual teachers. We advocate in the book that workplace emotions ought to be a shared responsibility. We suggest that a more productive approach would be to focus upon reshaping the ways emotions are discussed, interpreted and communicated in the school context,” Karnovsky says.

“The book demonstrates that although teachers strive to be ethical, empathic, passionate, and committed professionals, at present this work is threatened by a range of issues including unnecessary administrative burdens, workload and time pressure, poor work-life balance, vicarious trauma and emotional burn out,” says Kelly.

Although ‘solutions based’ leadership is in vogue within school management practice, this approach can be an impediment that fails to connect with the complexity of context. Sustained collaborative and collegial work are required to improve teachers’ working conditions and school climates.

Many teachers experience work environments where they feel silenced for fear of speaking out, so they retreat to online spaces to decompress and talk to one another about shared concerns and problems. Leadership structures within school spaces need to trust their staff and cultivate practices which allow them time and space to decompress, take time away from the business of their work, find solitude when needed and come together in a spirit of honesty and of collective, localised strategic thinking.

Policy makers must create the conditions for this important change to occur in schools by trusting our education professionals to create local solutions to issues present in their communities.

“Many teachers feel that their work in undervalued in the Australian community. If you are an educator reading this, we would encourage you find ways to resist, transform or refuse those wellbeing practices in schools which only burden you further,” Karnovsky says.

“You are not alone, and you certainly don't have to be quiet about it. You may find tools within our book to equip you with new concepts and ideas with which to think through your work and the emotional problematics this entails. You may also find a language with which to speak these problematics back to your leaders and administrators. There is great power in using research-based concepts and theories, when done in a balanced way.”

Book link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-82259-9

Image by Anna Shvets