When Molly Lane was a school social worker, walking down the hall with colleagues sometimes turned into impromptu therapy sessions.
It became clear, she says, that the school system wasn’t doing enough to support teachers’ mental health. Those experiences led her to open Teacher Talk, a therapy practice that caters to the needs of educators.
“People sometimes think, ‘Teachers get the summers off and they have better work hours, and it must be so much easier,” Lane says. “Teachers are working many more hours outside of their contracted work hours or doing extra things to make sure that the students are engaged and are really feeling supported. There’s a lot of catch up happening, so they’re working on building all those [student] academic skills and the social-emotional pieces, and it’s just a lot to come back from after the pandemic.”
That’s why it made sense to Lane that, in a recent poll on workplace satisfaction, teachers largely reported being happy in their jobs even while feeling various levels of burnout. But she says the energy put into buoying student mental health isn’t extended to teachers.
“A more holistic approach around support for teachers and [working] together to create a more sustainable workplace will help to alleviate some of that,” she says, “and not put all the onus on the teachers to figure out their own care. Unfortunately there’s still a stigma around speaking about mental health care in general, so sometimes it can be hard for them to ask for help when they feel like they should be the helpers.”
EdSurge reached out to experts to learn how these two seemingly contradictory sentiments — teachers generally being content in their work while feeling frayed — can be true at the same time.
Fulfilled and Frazzled
Katharine Strunk, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate College of Education, wasn’t surprised by the study’s findings about teachers’ feeling toward their workplace versus their workload.
“On its face, I can see where it feels contradictory,” she says, “but I think on average teachers have a lot on their plate, and that’s only increased in the past 10 to 15 years. That doesn’t mean they don’t like their jobs.”
The report found that teachers who were satisfied with their workload and pay were more likely to be part of the group that was content with their overall jobs — but they weren’t the most important factors to workplace happiness.
“Although important to the employee experience, both workload and total pay have less of an impact on teachers’ engagement than whether they feel their job gives them the opportunity to do what they do best every day,” the researchers write.
Strunk says the 5 percent of teachers who said they won’t return to teaching in the fall is normal, but 13 percent saying they were undecided was higher than expected.
“Part of that may be the ambiguity of the question, and this is a time where we see ESSER dollars have been running out,” she says of fall 2024 when the data was collected. “This was prior to the election, but we still were worrying a lot about fiscal cliffs that districts might be facing. It may be less about, ‘I don’t know if I want to stay,’ and more about, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay.’”
Black teachers were also more likely to say they were leaving the profession, according to the data, which Strunk says could be a function of where they are employed.
“Usually you see Black teachers overrepresented in charter schools, especially in urban areas, [which] have much higher churn of teachers,” she says. “We know that Black teachers are often more likely to teach in urban and high-poverty districts, which also have higher exit rates.”
Mental Health Connection
Lane says that while it’s hard to generalize the reasons teachers seek therapy, many of her clients know they are burned out and want help setting boundaries so they can “do the work they love without feeling so overburdened.”
“They feel a lot of tension on both ends coming from parents and families, and then also from the administration and all the systemic pieces,” Lane says, “so they’re kind of caught in the middle of this tension between both of those pieces and are often the ones that have to solve the problem.”
It wasn’t surprising to Lane that the data showed teachers frequently work outside their contracted hours, with 53 percent working 10 or more hours beyond the 40-hour work week. For many teachers, she says, that work goes beyond tasks related to their lesson plans.
“They’re always wanting to make sure [their students] are okay and have everything that they need,” she says. “They’re not only their teacher but now their therapist or their additional support on all these different pieces, supporting students in what they’re coming into the building navigating. That definitely, I think, weighs on teachers’ minds a lot.”
Strunk was intrigued by the research’s companion report on Gen Zers, particularly the finding on what students said made school interesting.
“Middle and high school students consistently share that their experiences in the classroom often do not feel interesting, important or motivating — but that when their schoolwork is engaging, it is often due to their teachers making it so,” researchers said.
To Strunk, that signals a need for more efficiency in anything that takes teachers away from working on engaging classroom plans. One much-discussed technology offers a potential solution: artificial intelligence.
“This is actually something that we should be thinking about when we think about how AI will change education,” Strunk says. “AI can do some of the rote stuff, but my feeling is actually it’s going to increase the need to have very high-quality teachers who can shepherd students through this technological shift in ways that are exciting and engaging, and not just make them bored by doing 16 different problems the same way.”
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