Teachers need a say in their work to stay healthy in lockdown

A recent study by Associate Professor Rebecca Collie at UNSW Sydney examined teachers’ experiences during and after the pandemic lockdown. She found that teachers were healthier and coped better when school leadership supported teacher initiative and empowerment.

Dr Collie surveyed 325 teachers from across the eight states and territories of Australia in May 2020, using an online questionnaire.

The study comes at a time when concerns are swirling about teacher burnout.

Existing research shows that teachers experience a range of positive outcomes when they believe their schools promote their initiative and empowerment by, for example, encouraging their input, supporting their resourcefulness, and seeking their perspectives. These outcomes include buoyancy (handling the challenges and setbacks of work), lower levels of stress, and lower emotional exhaustion.

“Teachers who are able to effectively overcome adversity at work are able to avoid the physical or emotional load of that adversity, resulting in fewer physical symptoms, less stress related to change, and less emotional exhaustion,”Dr Collie said.

The COVID-19 pandemic placed teachers in a situation likely to increase the challenges they already faced, potentially heightening the risk of negative personal outcomes, such as illness and exhaustion.

“During COVID-19, most teachers would have experienced challenges at work, including potential difficulties in rapidly shifting in-class learning to remote settings, challenges with making online software work effectively for remote learning, setbacks in maintaining a work-home distinction, and difficulties in differentiating learning for diverse students.”

Although the shift to online teaching was unexpected and disruptive, teachers who taught completely online suffered fewer negative outcomes than their peers who taught half online and half in-person.

School leaders may want to invite teachers to have input in decisions and school policies, provide choice and control over when and how teachers undertake their work, acknowledge teachers’ perspectives and listen to their needs, and provide rationales for the purpose of work tasks.

“Teaching half remotely and half in-person was associated with greater stress related to change,” Dr Collie said.

Dr Collie suggests that teachers whose workload was split between online and in-person classes may have struggled with needing to perform two jobs at once, teaching in the classroom while also supporting their online students.

School leaders and senior teaching staff can promote teachers’ initiative and empowerment by encouraging their participation in decisions and making general efforts to support them in their work. Faced with the additional obstacles of online teaching, such support could reduce teacher burnout and stress.

“School leaders may want to invite teachers to have input in decisions and school policies, provide choice and control over when and how teachers undertake their work, acknowledge teachers’ perspectives and listen to their needs, and provide rationales for the purpose of work tasks.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, teachers whose workloads decreased during the pandemic reported higher buoyancy. It’s worth noting, though, that Australia’s COVID-19 situation was relatively mild, and that the research might only expose “the tip of the iceberg”.

“It will be important to bolster the findings here with studies conducted in other countries either in subsequent waves of COVID-19 or during other major disruptions to understand the ramifications where the illness rates are much higher.”

Reference

Rebecca Collie. (2021). ‘COVID-19 and teachers’ somatic burden, stress, and emotional exhaustion: examining the role of principal leadership and workplace buoyancy’. AERA Open.