Supporting stressed teachers - five practical strategies for school leaders

School leaders are asking me a lot lately about how to support stressed and overwhelmed teachers, and this query usually means school leaders are themselves feeling exhausted as well. Stress and feeling overwhelmed is usually not about working hard, but it is about feeling that the bulk of expectations is impossible to achieve. So often school leaders implement additional mental health or wellbeing activities but be careful that this is not just more for teachers to do. They don’t need more! Here are the five things I always say to school leaders when they ask me about managing stressed teachers:

1. Take something away! Teachers are generally conscientious, compliant and appreciate structures. This can be a positive but often means that teachers are following all the accumulated rules from their years at a school, including the outdated ones! Often I hear a mis-match between what teachers believe are the rules and expectations they should follow, and what school leaders think. Please…when you introduce something new to teachers (a new practice, policy, instruction etc.), be sure to explicitly tell them what this is replacing and what they can stop doing! This sounds simple, but so often when the rules and work expectations are clarified for teachers, their workload feels more manageable and stress decreases.

2. Don’t give contradicting messages. Frustration is a huge source of stress and it is not helpful or fair to give teachers conflicting information or mandates. For example on the one hand teachers are often told they should differentiate for and support students, and at the same time are reminded that all students should be sitting the same test at the same time, in the same way. This is just one example of teachers feeling they need to choose between contradicting expectations. An overwhelmed teacher is often one who feels disillusioned about the work they doing. No teacher likes to give a student a test they know that student is going to fail, and yet they keep hearing messages that this is what they should do. School leaders often feel disillusioned themselves about the tension between perceived and actual system ‘rules’ and good practice, but please do not pass this along to your teachers. Tell them how to be wonderful teachers, teach them how to interpret policy to be able to teach well, and review policies and messages if needed to remove contradictions wherever possible.

3. Listen and find out (and solve if possible!) the thing/s tipping them over the edge. Recently I spoke with two early primary teachers who were feeling very overwhelmed and were feeling stressed about meeting with me to plan differentiated strategies. We stopped planning, and I just started asking them about their students and workload. It emerged that they were feeling stressed and guilty because they didn’t feel able to implement differentiated strategies and they gave a clear reason…they felt their students were not able to work independently, including a couple of students with disability. I asked them if they would like some professional learning on how to teach young students independence and they eagerly said they would. We used our half hour to do this and we planned explicit strategies to teach and practice independent learning with the students. Two weeks later they emailed me to say how delighted they were with the change in the students and felt they were ready to try implementing some other differentiated strategies we had previously discussed. It is not always this simple, but I encourage school leaders to try to get to the bottom of what teachers really need. This can be tricky as overwhelmed teachers tend to not be in a good space to articulate their tipping point. Be patient, listen openly, don’t take any comments personally, and pinpoint something tangible that can be changed, removed or managed.

4. Ensure manageable assessment load. During the past few years, this continues to be the key source of additional of additional workload according to the teachers I speak to. Sometimes this happens when digital data sharing, assessment/reporting protocols to parents are introduced without appropriate consideration of teacher workload. Sometimes this is because teachers are assessing or marking inefficiently and feel they are expected to assess everything in the curriculum. Sometimes this is simply because there are too many summative assessments scheduled, or teachers feel under pressure to choose preparing students for inappropriate assessments over high quality teaching. It is essential that teachers are supported and coached to use pre and formative assessment strategies efficiently in order to reduce the summative marking load and ensure summative assessment design is appropriate. Ensure teachers are not double-handling assessment design, marking processes or uploading to data sharing systems. The solution here is not to increase the automation of assessment processes at the expense of meaningful differentiated assessment! The key is to teach teachers how to assess appropriately and efficiently and to remind them that they are not required to assess the entire curriculum.

5. Don’t expect everyone to work as hard as the person working the longest hours, including if that person is you! Everyone’s tipping point is different, and all staff have different pressures within and outside their workplace. Too often staff work harder because it is modelled by leadership and their colleagues. Too often staff have experienced scepticism when they say they are stressed, and so they learn not to complain. This only leads to burnt-out staff who are not performing at their best, or to burnt-ut staff who quietly plan their departure from teaching altogether. Just because you or others arrive earlier, stay longer, work every weekend, only need 6 hours of sleep etc etc, doesn’t mean this should be the expectation for everyone. In fact, why not look for ways to model wellbeing and rest time. For example, let staff know that if you send them an email on the weekend, they are not expected to reply until the end of Monday. Or better yet, hold off on sending your emails on the weekend and schedule them for Monday or during the work week. This might even help you to manage your own workload and stress levels as a school leader!

Of course, for some teachers, it is not this simple and they need more specialised support. Be sure to remind teachers how they can access further counselling if they need it, and have information about available services clearly visible for staff.

Above all, ASK staff what is tipping them over the edge, LISTEN to their answer and CHANGE something.

Additional teacher wellbeing resources:

Wellbeing in Australian schools (aitsl.edu.au) (Scroll down to Supporting Educator Wellbeing)

Home - Teacher Wellbeing (teacher-wellbeing.com.au)

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