Emotions in Schools

There are few places where this contagion effect is more evident than in schools, where emotions – both positive and negative – can spread like brush fires. The educational researcher Andy Hargreaves (2001) refers to schools as emotional geographies, which he defines as “the patterns of spatial and experiential distances that help shape, configure, and color the feelings and emotions about ourselves, our world, and each other” (p. 106). Students are physically close to one another every day for long periods of time, and so these patterns exert themselves recursively throughout the school day. Anyone who has spent significant time in the classrooms and hallways of a brick and mortar school will recognize how quickly anger, fear, excitement, or laughter can spread across the building.

Under ideal conditions, this is a good thing. Strong learning communities are rich with achievement emotions, such as interest and enjoyment (Pekrun, Frenzel, Goetz, & Perry, 2007). Learning is a social act with social purposes, and so the spread of these positive emotions can create and amplify opportunities for all children in a school.

This effect is also true for negative emotions, however. Students who experience unhealthy levels of family or community conflict, for example, without the developmental assets to learn coping skills to manage these experiences will manifest fear, mistrust, and anger in the classrooms and hallways of their school. Because of the contagious nature of emotion, other members of the school community will also experience the repercussions of these experiences, an effect called vicarious traumatization.

While the affective-behavioral manifestations of traumatic experience are at the severe end of the continuum, this effect is not exclusive to extreme circumstances. As Hargreaves points out, every school interaction is laced with an emotional valence. Therefore, the entire school is subject to this transfer of feeling states. Ideally, the shared emotional understanding is a learning-directed encounter between an adult and a child, like the excitement of a new idea or the congratulatory feeling of a good grade on a test. This effect, where two or more people experience a shared emotional understanding, has been referred to by Walter Denzin as emotional intersubjectivity (2007). Most effective teachers have the capacity to sync with their students’ emotions in this way by offering activities and regulatory strategies to help them stay in the sweet zone of learning.

Positive or negative, large or small, there is no doubt that emotions reverberate across campuses. Like a stone being thrown into a lake, the ripples are largest that are closest to the stone. It is doubtful, for example, that mild anger or anxiety in an art class will be felt in the main office unless accompanied by a troubling behavior. To that point, the “size” of the emotion matters, as well. Large rocks make large ripples, while pebbles make ripples that can scarcely be seen spreading. Less extreme emotions are less likely to spread, while strong emotions (positive or negative) are quite likely to impact those in close proximity.

The Emotional Labor of Teaching

Teachers are particularly subject to the contagion effect. And while more severe behaviors are more likely to impact teachers more severely, they can also experience vicarious manifestations even in mild or generally positive cultures because teachers work in close proximity all day, nearly every day, to children whose regulatory capacity has not fully developed! Like math or reading, it takes time and experience for them to learn effective strategies to manage their emotions. My three-year-old son, for example, literally fell on the floor crying this morning because I asked him to put on socks. While older children and adolescents certainly have more advanced skills than that, the emotional pendulum does swing wide for many years before they develop the social-emotional competencies to modulate and moderate affect-based behaviors.

It is impossible for teachers to avoid being impacted by those emotions. In fact, it is an implicit part of their job description. Take a second to think about our cultural stereotypes of teachers and the role expectations that they carry: We expect our teachers to care for their students and we frown on educators who do not exhibit the patient and optimistic behaviors that we would demand, given the nature of their profession. We romanticize self-sacrifice and expect our teachers (understandably) to be emotionally invested in the well-being and success of every one of their students.

That being the case, teachers have a high bar every day regarding their emotional regulatory capacity. At a minimum, they are required to put away their negative feelings in the service of forming and maintaining quality learning relationships with their students. But not only are they asked to be in close proximity with small under-regulated humans, they are also expected to utilize all available pedagogical and interpersonal skills to infect them with feelings of motivation, and even inspiration. As such, emotional regulation is central, not peripheral, to the teaching experience. In fact, it is a fiduciary job requirement that is often overlooked by school leaders as a foundational and teachable skill set.

The responsibility to apply social-emotional competency as a part of their job description has been described by educational researchers as emotional labor. Originally described by Arlie Hochschild in her book The Managed Heart (1983), emotional labor is the management of feelings to create bodily displays in accord with organizational norms and enacted for institutional goals – usually profit. Early work on emotional labor focused on customer service occupations, such as flight attendants and restaurant servers, in which workers interact intermittently but consistently with consumers. During those interactions, they are required to both amplify positive and suppress negative emotions. The motto “service with a smile” is the prototypical example of emotional labor. Teachers enact emotional labor, then, when they are not feeling excited but act as if they are as they greet children at the beginning of the school day, or when they stuff away their frustration at student misbehavior in order to model the virtue of patience. In other words, any time a teacher up-regulates or down-regulates an emotion to serve the institutional goal of learning, it is a form of emotional labor.

In and of itself, this is not a good or a bad thing. Teachers are drawn into the field precisely because they receive tangible psychological benefits from the role, often in the form of enhanced self-esteem (Isenbarger & Zembylas, 2006). Most teachers perform caring tasks willingly and reap some measure of reward from maintaining the identity of a caring professional. For all of the stresses of teaching, it is an honorable career that is authentically democratic and invariably optimistic.

Sadly, this optimistic sensibility can compound stressors when unmet academic standards, disruptive student behavior, and limited resources create a wide gap between the archetype and the reality. This can be especially true for new teachers and teachers in high need communities. The subjective experience of this gap can lead to micro-interactional dilemmas, because teachers may be forced to choose many times every day between sharing their real feelings of disappointment or frustration and self-regulating towards a demeanor that is congruent with their professional expectations. Most teachers choose appropriately, of course, by working to psychologically vacuum pack inappropriate responses to challenging situations. When this incongruence reaches intolerable levels, however, they can be faced with feelings of in-authenticity and dissonance (Oplatka, 2009). This incongruence, discussed at some length below, can result in physical, psychological, and behavioral manifestations of stress that impact not only the teacher, but also their classroom and school community.

Teacher Stress as an Indicator of a National Concern

The implications of this truth are far reaching. There is a growing body of literature that emphasizes the negative consequences of large scale cognitive and emotional dissonance – a pattern that has contributed to an epidemic of teacher burnout and turnover, particularly in high poverty schools.

While not every teacher is suffering, many are. In 2017, “Teachers reported having poor mental health for 11 or more days per month at twice the rate of the general U.S. workforce. They also reported lower-than-recommended levels of health outcomes and sleep per night” (Educator Quality of Life Survey, 2017, p. i). Based on a Gallup poll, Greenberg, Brown, and Abenavoli (2016) note that “46% of teachers report high daily stress, tied with nurses for the highest among all occupations” (p. 2). The toxic national discourse on education has compounded teacher worry, with nearly half of the teachers in a national survey reporting that their stress has increased significantly as a result of “the national political environment” (Rogers, 2017, p. 3). As a result of these factors, job satisfaction in the teaching profession is at an all-time low (Metlife, 2013).

There is a sense of unease that national reports of teacher stress may be a canary in the coal mine regarding public education. Teachers are at the heart of the very mission of public schools – providing a social and economic safety net for our democratic institutions through access to quality learning opportunities. That so many of them report high levels of stress and low levels of satisfaction should precipitate both data-informed reflections on the most common symptoms and research-based approaches towards the most effective solutions.

The remainder of this chapter, then, will emphasize the importance of awareness and self-advocacy in light of these distressing trends. To jumpstart that approach, we will describe key research on two of these symptoms, high teacher turnover and low student achievement, which educational research has identified as indicators of unhealthy levels of teacher stress where they occur. In doing so, we draw a link between the national picture and the micro-experience of teachers, who experience stress as the neurological, physiological, and psychological manifestation of a low-control, high-stress career.

The purpose of this work is not to discourage, but rather to find avenues towards wellness through validating the true teaching experience, providing them with tools and strategies to have essential conversations with school leadership as we begin to think through practical solutions to a problem that is both local and national. As a solution, we present the growing consensus that mindfulness-based professional development can help teachers improve their social-emotional competence and their capacity to regulate emotions in the service of forming and maintaining relationships with the children they serve.

Starting a Self-Advocacy Toolbox

One of the goals of our book is to give educators a toolbox of information and simple practices to effectively advocate for their well-being. Stigmas associated with mental health can be a barrier to address emotional well-being at work, and employees often hide anxiety and depression for fear of professional repercussions. A large U.K. study, for example, found that 86% of the British workforce would hesitate to approach a colleague about a perceived mental health concern, and 35% did not approach anyone for help the last time they experienced a significant mental health issue (Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, 2017). Feeling comfortable to have essential conversations about stress with supervisors, in particular, is an important step towards self-care, especially when its manifestations may be impacting job performance. According to a 2017 report, however, only 36% of employees believe that they could rely on the support of their supervisor if things get difficult (Hellebuyck, Nguyen, Halphern, Fritze, & Kennedy, 2017).¹

Having conversations about stress and wellness can be very challenging for teachers. First, they are responsible for the well-being of children and may be disinclined to share perceived vulnerability with school administrators for fear that misconstrued or exaggerated concerns could impact their employment. In general, teachers have not traditionally wielded sufficient institutional power to self-advocate with confidence.

These conversations are also constrained by the structure of schools and the policies required to operate them. Broad responsibility for adult supervision at all times makes it a logistical challenge to block out enough time to unpack stress, which can be a messy topic (recall the fire hydrant analogy). For some of the same reasons, policies are often in place that make it difficult to practice self-care, such as human resource policies that make clear distinctions between sick days and personal days or school-based policies that treat Monday and Friday teacher absences punitively. More abstractly, the topic can be difficult to address because of the misperception that summers off are a luxurious perk, and that the mental health benefits of this perk extend across the entire school year like some kind of time release medication. Finally, the ever-present cultural assumption of archetypal self-sacrifice infuses the prospect of caregiver guilt when teachers do assert their right to self-care opportunities.

The conversation can also be challenging for school administrators, who are responsible for fully ensuring competent adult supervision and instruction at all times, particularly given the significant drop-off in substitute performance (through no fault of the substitutes, themselves). It can be hard for administrators to have conversations about social-emotional competence without extremely high levels of interpersonal competence, themselves, especially when they are dealing with significant stressors, themselves.

There is also an implicit barrier to the style of feedback that administrators are used to giving. In our consultations with school Principals, we have found that those who are ready and able to give highly effective instructional feedback are often quite hesitant to address performance related concerns about mood, demeanor, or emotional expression. This makes some sense if you consider the difference between how you might perceive a supervisory suggestion that you need organizational coaching and a suggestion that you need to work on your expressive demeanor. In other words, it is difficult to give and receive effective feedback in the social-emotional domain because it can feel personal rather than technical.

These are the exact conversations that must happen, however, for the sake of all of the stakeholders in a school’s ecology. First, it is vital to recognize that stress has clear and identifiable symptoms that often take the form of unproductive workplace behaviors (McLean & Connor, 2015). These symptoms impact the culture of the classroom and the learning of individual students, most often by harming the learning connection between student and teacher, discussed more at length below. In that way, stress does ultimately lead to impaired job performance. Too often, however, behavioral issues that surface as a result of chronic stress are treated exclusively as performance issues rather than as manifestations of stress that can be mitigated with stress reduction strategies (Hughes, 2001). Focusing exclusively on instructional techniques with a low-performing teacher who exhibits symptoms, for example, is not likely to yield desired improvements in performance because the unhealthy behaviors are both a cause and a result of the stress and are thus likely to continue in the absence of treating the root concern.² When a teacher struggles to keep her emotions together because of job-related stressors, then, it is a necessary conversation to have – in the best interests of the teacher, the administrator, and the children.

Research shows that the consequences of unaddressed stress operate across all levels of our educational ecology, from the micro, such as individual student achievement, to the macro, such as national policy conversations about educational equity. Because the stakes are so high, we have to be able to see both the forest and the trees. As you are reading, then, we hope that you will consider how to present this information to colleagues and supervisors in a way that will advance a call for teacher wellness, both locally and nationally.

The Individual Impact of Stress on Teachers

In this section, we address both the individual impact of stress (the trees) and highlight the broader implications (the forest) for public education and school success. Before we start talking about the negative elements of stress, however, it is important to note that worry is not bad, in and of itself. When we experience small, manageable doses of stress or anxiety we become motivated to alter our behavior. If a student is not worried about her performance on a test then she is unlikely to study for it. Ideally, anxiety serves an important function.

Similarly, work-related stressors can carry important performance-related information and lead to effective professional development when managed effectively. Although there has been a significant amount of pushback on the now ubiquitous reliance of public education on standardized testing, for example, there is little doubt that teachers generally work hard to improve their instructional practices as a result of those scores (although the argument rages about which instructional practices are improved, and to what end).

Conversely, too much stress, or stress that is unaddressed or occurs without functional control mechanisms, like mindfulness tools, has negative implications. On an individual level, it has tangible, health-related consequences that are biological, psychological, and relational. Our nervous systems place a high value on creating alarms that echo throughout the body when we experience subjective distress. These alarms precipitate chemical (and neurological) responses that are often long-lasting. Because of their responsibility for the well-being of children, and depending on context, teachers can spend a good portion of their day on high alert, making them subject to these chemical responses. Some of these responses are discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.

The important piece to recognize for this conversation is that the lived experience of stress is not just “in our heads.” Instead, it has concrete, physiological components that intersect with the psychological well-being and job-related behaviors of teachers who are experiencing it. Bellingrath, Weigl, and Kudielka (2009), for example, found that teachers who report high levels of stress also have high levels of Allostatic Load (AL), which is found by measuring the ten biological factors commonly associated with stress (like cortisol, blood-pressure, norepinephrine, etc.). AL can be conceptualized as the physiological measure of the “burden exacted on the body through attempts to meet life’s demands” (p. 37), which can serve as a measure of job-related stress.

This same research also found that AL was higher in teachers who perceived a greater imbalance between the work that they put into teaching and the rewards that they received as a result. Termed effort-reward imbalance (ERI), the gap between our expectations of work and our reality of work predicts higher levels of emotional exhaustion, one of the three primary components of burnout. The larger the gap, the more likely we are to experience the thoughts and feelings associated with emotional exhaustion (e.g. lack of energy, feeling stuck or trapped). Burnout, which is chronic stress that occurs as a result of working directly with people (Schwarzer & Hallum, 2008), is a serious concern for teachers, particularly those in high need schools (discussed below). In addition to emotional exhaustion, teachers suffering from burnout would also experience some combination of reduced job-related self-efficacy and student depersonalization (Berryhill, Linney, & Fromewick, 2009).

Educational researchers are focusing an increasing amount of attention on these components of teacher burnout, and also some ways of countering them. Failing to address high levels of stress in the workplace generally has two outcomes, both undesirable. The first is turnover, which occurs when a teacher exits a school, a district, or the teaching profession entirely. The second – and perhaps even more toxic – occurs when teachers who are stressed stay in the classroom because of financial or identity considerations and continue to teach with the behavioral manifestations of unmanaged burnout.

It is important to note that high stress levels are not easy to tolerate. Understandably, people will seek some kind of resolution to feelings of exhaustion or ineffectiveness. Depending on job market fluctuations, professional qualifications, and personal considerations, however, it may be quite difficult to change jobs or careers.

The chances of attempting a change are significantly higher, though, for those teachers who are suffering. Once stress becomes unmanageable, then a teacher has a difficult choice to make (either consciously or unconsciously); that is, she can stay in her current position and increase her effort, or she can leave for another school or district. If she leaves, she might also choose to leave the profession, taking her acquired experience and skills with her.

The Problem of Teachers Leaving

Unfortunately, more and more teachers are making the choice to leave the field. Survey data over the past several decades shows that teacher attrition has been increasing steadily since the 1990s and that this attrition accounts for nearly 90% of the demand for new teachers.

Teacher surveys are shedding an uncomfortable light on this shift. While salary is one component of teacher attrition, dissatisfaction (not retirement) accounts for at least 55% of teacher turnover (Carver-Thomas & Darling-Hammond, 2017). Teachers report that discipline issues and localized administrative concerns top the list of reasons for that dissatisfaction, suggesting that the increasing levels of teacher turnover is not an “inexorable demographic trend” that are coming as a result of changes in the overall workforce (Ingersoll, 2004, p. 4); Rather, it is coming because of an enormous increase in systemic pressures on teachers that are occurring at the same time as their role is being politically and professionally devalued. If we keep in mind our previous discussion about the high value that teachers place on affirmations and support, combined with the information about the costs of effort-reward imbalance, then it is easy to see how a teacher who is experiencing emotional exhaustion without expected benefits would opt to try her luck elsewhere.

The Problem of Teachers Staying Despite Burnout

While teacher turnover is a problem of national significance, it is not the only option available to the teacher who struggles with unmanaged stress; she also has the option to stay in the classroom in spite of her struggles. As it relates to school quality, this might actually be the more concerning choice, because teachers who stay in the classroom tend to negatively impact the culture and climate of their school by distancing themselves from their students and/or their craft. In fact, they often lower their academic expectations in order to reduce the gap between their ideal and their lived experience (Ronfeldt, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2013).

Indeed, research by Hughes (2001) found that underneath the alarming data on teachers who turn over is another group of teachers (ranging from 30% to 60%) who would prefer not to continue but feel trapped because of life situations (finances, age, retirement, fear, etc.). This conundrum is challenging for a teacher who begins to experience emotional exhaustion and attempts to recalibrate her professional identity; she can either reduce her effort in order to decrease her anxiety, or increase her job responsibility in hope of increasing her rewards. If she does the former, then her job performance will likely decrease and raise her anxiety about the prospect of job loss. If she chooses the latter – but her efforts are thwarted by low student performance or lack of administrative support – then her frustration will increase along with her emotional exhaustion.

Without supportive interventions, teachers who continue under these circumstances will likely experience the most insidious component of burnout, the depersonalization of their students. Depersonalization, “refers to feelings of cognitive distance, indifference, or cynicism” towards the students, who are the primary recipients of teachers’ efforts (Arens & Morin, 2016, p. 800). Depersonalization is often tied to emotional exhaustion, because teachers who suffer from burnout simply do not have the energy to examine the feelings underneath challenging student behaviors and are thus more likely to be excessively punitive in their responses, even during relatively mild interactions (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Teachers who generally carry with them an angry or impatient demeanor are likely to damage connections with their students. And because teachers are the holders of the academic content in traditional educational settings, students require interpersonal connection with them for formal learning to occur.

It is through this broken connection that teacher emotional exhaustion and student depersonalization take their toll, often resulting in lowered academic achievement. Teachers who have difficulty maintaining functional learning connections with their students because they convey an overly frustrated, anxious, or depressed demeanor have a hard time teaching them effectively. McLean and Connor (2015), for example, found that teachers who exhibited more symptoms of depression were “less likely to maintain high quality learning environments,” and that students in their classrooms scored lower on standardized math tests than peers at the same skill level with teachers who did not report symptoms. In this study, the effect was particularly significant for students with low math skills. Math is a particularly scaffolded subject, with one level building on the next, and so teachers who are not interpersonally accessible for students cement and compound their previously existing skill deficits.

The effect is not exclusive to math, however. Arens and Morin (2016) also found a strong relationship between emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and poor student outcomes, but for standardized scores in English and Writing. Furthermore, students with depressed teachers may become disengaged because emotional contagion literally depresses the room. Oberle and Schonert-Reichl (2016), for example, found that students who spend time in the morning with teachers who exhibit symptoms of burnout have significantly higher levels of stress-related cortisol in their own blood than students who spend the morning with teachers who do not.

The Antidotes: Social-Emotional Competence and Positive Relationships

Thankfully, the converse is also true for teachers who exude excitement, interpersonal warmth, and a generally positive demeanor. Positive emotional experience forms the basis of how students perceive support in the classroom, so approachable teachers who create a culture of emotional safety, belonging, and enjoyment (including laughter) are more likely to gain access to students’ academic pathways. Indeed, Arens and Morin (2016) found that students who feel greater support from their teachers do better in school. Frenzel, Goetz, Ludtke, Pekrun, and Sutton (2009) also found that greater teacher enthusiasm produces greater student enjoyment, which positively impacts academic achievement. In essence, teachers who show a respect for the subjective experience of students and who are at least moderately enjoyable to spend time around are also more likely to gain students’ prolonged attention regarding academic matters.

The mediating variable between teacher stress and student outcomes, therefore, seems to be student-teacher connection. This is not a new finding, but one that has been building evidence for quite some time. Developing children are thirsty for adult connection, even if they do not show it (especially during the transitional years of middle school). It takes an adult who is mindfully aware of their own biases and assumptions to display the non-judgmental attitudes and behaviors that students require for those connections to occur.

This authentic non-judgment – complete with the social-emotional competencies that are needed to keep that non-judgmental demeanor in the face of challenging behaviors – can be exceptionally difficult to maintain for teachers who may be experiencing low energy or high stress. This is especially true for teachers who already lack the cognitive or emotional skills to engage and motivate their students (Klusmann, Kunter, Trautwein, Ludtke, & Baumert, 2008). While this is true for all teachers, burnout concerns are even more acute for those who have a low frustration tolerance, strong authoritarian beliefs, or who are highly self-critical (Bernard, 2016). These teachers are generally less likely to maintain the interpersonal flexibility to stay engaged with students during times of high stress (particularly students who might challenge their self-beliefs) to the point that academic content cannot be accessed. Teacher stress is most toxic, then, when it damages existing social-emotional competencies because academic performance suffers when students cannot or will not connect with them.

It is important to note that in strong learning communities, educators do not have to rely on pre-existing social-emotional competencies. SEC can be also built through professional development opportunities that focus on interpersonal skill-building. Unfortunately, high stress schools too often shy away from committing sufficient resources towards these opportunities because they are more complicated to implement and monitor (than instructional PDs) and generally viewed as peripheral to the essential function of schools.

A Note on Equity

We hope that we have made it clear that unmitigated stress can impact teachers who work in even the mildest of school settings because of the nature of the role, which is interpersonally dense. It is important to emphasize, however, that schools in high stress communities are substantially more likely than their counterparts to experience the systemic consequences of stress – high turnover and low academic achievement. Teachers who work in high need schools have the same role demands, but the emotions and behaviors that they encounter are often on the severe end of the continuum due to the embodied stress that students bring into the school building with them.

Students of color are disproportionately impacted by this reality. Indeed, Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond’s extensive research on the impact of stress on turnover found that “turnover rates are 70% higher for teachers in schools serving the largest concentrations of students of color” (2017, p. 3). Not only that, but teachers who leave are particularly challenging to replace because of recruitment barriers associated with serving low-income and minority students. So while it costs around $4,000 to replace rural teachers, it typically costs from $17,000 to $20,000 to recruit, develop, and train every teacher who exits an urban school. For a variety of reasons, however, schools continue to focus on recruitment efforts rather than retention efforts – a strategy that does not typically yield positive results for either school climate or achievement (Ingersoll, 2004).

The reasons for the uninspired results of recruitment steer us back to the impact of relationships in learning. When teachers encounter and become saturated by the manifestations of community stress without an outlet, they are more likely to leave. And because turnover is far more likely in high-need schools, interpersonal continuity is annually disrupted between students, teachers, and parents in the low income communities that usually surround them. When we add this piece to what we have already discussed regarding the impact of relationships on academic achievement, we can surmise that high turnover amplifies developmental and resource deficits in communities where the vital links to learning opportunities are often frayed or broken. In this way, the cumulative stress does more than just impact teachers; it also contributes to a cycle of underperformance and the long-term destabilization of schools for those children with the most need, making teacher stress an equity issue with national significance.

Working towards Solutions

Teacher burnout, then, can be conceptualized as a cycle. At the teacher level, unsustainable dissonance is created when outcomes (rewards) are not commensurate with inputs (effort) or when expectations are not aligned with reality. This results in emotional exhaustion and contributes to low job-related self-efficacy, the depersonalization of students, and ultimately disengagement. This disengagement takes the form of teachers who exit the profession, move to a different school, or stay in their own school with significantly reduced performance and a depressed or toxic demeanor. All of these outcomes have negative implications for student engagement and achievement. Furthermore, the shared stress of high stakes testing feeds the cycle by pressurizing instruction at the expense of solutions that build the social-emotional competencies that support learning connections.

It is not enough for teachers, school administration, and district administration to be aware of this cycle. To effectively address it, they need to collaborate on when and how to intervene in the cycle in order to stabilize and reverse it, starting with proactive approaches that build social-emotional competencies and help to emotionally vaccinate teachers from the predictable stressors that they face.

In their research on the impact of teacher stress and how to address it, Greenberg et al. (2016) found three approaches that schools and school systems can take to mitigate the negative impacts of stress and produce positive outcomes: organizational interventions, like increased salary, a participatory work environment, and job restructuring, are designed to prevent high levels of stress from occurring; organizational/individual interface interventions, such as mentoring programs, wellness programs, and social-emotional learning programs, focus on skill-building and social support; and individual interventions, for instance mindfulness and stress management programs, focus exclusively on skills and strategies that help teachers cope internally with stressors through mindfulness and cognitive reframing techniques.

All three approaches can be effective depending on context. In the private sector, for example, there is an increasing focus on broad wellness programming with a focus on improving employee productivity. Giant tech companies like Google and Apple, as well as numerous Fortune 500 companies, have developed an important understanding that inspired employees are more productive employees than those who are simply satisfied to have a job (Vozza, 2017). Thus, they consciously show commitment to their workers by providing them access to health, wellness, and quality of life resources ranging from flex work schedules to on site exercise equipment. Although schools usually lack the financial resources to provide in-kind benefits, awareness of the value of such programs has started to trickle down to the educational sector, where a quick scan of the internet reveals numerous mindfulness-related stress management programs targeted towards teachers. While a discussion about how to select programs is beyond the scope of this book, it is clear that every institution should begin with a thorough needs assessment in consultation with relevant stakeholders before large scale implementation. It does not help either the employees or the bottom line for companies to invest in canned programs that do not specific to context because they will simply not be used.

Education is a good example of the need for programmatic specificity. As discussed above, schools have a unique responsibility to provide adult supervision and student instruction at all times. It is a part of the job description of teachers and administrators, which they accept when they pursue and take a position in their chosen field. These scheduling needs place unique constraints and affordances on traditional schools as they balance and integrate systems that meet the needs of their students with those that meet the needs of their staff.

Partly for this reason, the following two chapters focus on individual mindfulness interventions and practices that can be folded into the everyday work of teaching before turning to a discussion about system-wide approaches. Schools and school systems may have large scale processes that provide benefits, content, or structures that pave the way for well-being, but at the end of the day the thoughts and behaviors that give us satisfaction are enacted individually. Through the chapters that follow, then, we provide tools and strategies for educators who would like to improve their capacity to regulate stress and consciously work towards experiencing the compassion, enjoyment, and gratitude that should ideally be a part of our work every day with children. As importantly, we seek to provide readers with ways to frame mindfulness that will help them advocate for both district-wide systems and school-based practices.

The Argument for Mindfulness in Schools

The use of mindfulness-based approaches to address these concerns has been growing. Mindfulness has been defined simply as “Paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 2). The process of developing mindful habits is neurologically akin to developing physical skill sets that build muscle memory, like riding a bike or playing the guitar, and building cognitive schemas, like improving math skills or connecting narrative themes across literary genres. This is more than just an analogy, because practicing acute and sustained awareness over time builds neural connections that fundamentally alter networks in the brain in the same way as developing those skills (Roeser, 2014). Practicing mindfulness is not, therefore, a “soft skill,” but a concrete mechanism to improve focus.

Improving mindfulness is important for teachers because it allows them to exert more effortful control over their own thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Because negative thoughts can lead to distressing emotions, and because distressing emotions can lead to unproductive or disruptive behaviors, improving control in these domains can improve the chances that a teacher will make thoughtful and strategic choices when students are misbehaving or underperforming. Indeed, a thorough meta-analysis on the impact of Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) found their broad positive impact on both the well-being and performance of educators to be “encouraging” (Lomas, Medina, Ivtzan, Rupprecht, & Eiroa-Orosa, 2017, p. 139).

Jennings and Greenberg (2009) suggest that the primary mediating variable between mindfulness training and teacher well-being and job performance is SEC. As discussed above, unmanaged stress leaves teachers emotionally exhausted and significantly less likely to exert the efforts necessary to form and maintain positive learning relationships. It also makes them more likely to have negative reactions to challenging situations, thus creating a “self-sustaining cycle of disruption” (p. 492). Jennings and her colleagues found that teachers trained in mindfulness techniques raised their ability to emotionally adapt to challenging situations and lowered their psychological distress, as well as their time urgency (Jennings et al., 2017). Harris, Jennings, Katz, Abenavoli, and Greenberg (2015) found that mindfulness training increased positive affect, improved classroom management, and decreased distress tolerance. And Kemeny et al. (2012) found that a 42-hour course on meditation and emotional regulation course actually increased teachers’ level of compassion towards their students.

In this way, the effective practice of mindfulness functions both to prevent and heal the symptoms of stress. It serves a preventative function by allowing teachers to maintain their own regulatory capacity even in the face of challenging behaviors, thus minimizing the severity of conflict when it occurs. It also serves a healing function by allowing the autonomic system to more thoroughly reset when stress does occur. For this reason, we view the conscious development of mindfulness-based practices in schools as the solution that is both the most practical and the most powerful of the interventions to educator stress.