Emerging from the COVID-19 Pandemic: Planning to Mitigate Educator Stress

By Kristen C. Wilcox & Jessie Tobin

For school and district leaders, the end of the 2020-21 school year may come with a combination of exhaustion and a sense of relief, but also foreboding.

What can education leaders expect with regard to the impacts of the pandemic on frontline educators in the coming school year? How might teachers and other staff be affected in the long term? And most importantly, what can be done to prepare?

The research on stress and job satisfaction provides some insight and is highlighted in this blog, which is part of our series related to NYKids’ COVID-19 educator response study.

Risk and Protective Factors

In recent research, Prilleltensky and colleagues define stress “… as an imbalance between risk and protective factors”. These researchers discuss how the psychological dynamics of anxiety, fear, isolation and inadequacy elevate stress and educators’ stress often results from conflict with colleagues, supervisors, family members, and students.

Clearly the work of educators comes with high demands for what some call emotional labor and, therefore, a fair dose of risk factors for stress.

In the Prilleltensky et al. study the authors make a call for leaders to work to create a climate of emotional and professional support to in turn help protect frontline educators from the negative impacts of stress.

How to do this requires a nuanced approach taking into account the unique characteristics of each educator and their roles (personally and professionally), the school, and the community served.

As a starting point, leaders might set aside time over the summer to do the following:

1. Identify top concerns regarding educators’ well-being and needs for support (NYKids survey can help do this).
2. Commit to use at least one research-based recommendation for helping staff cope with the effects of stress and secondary traumatic stress in the coming school year.

Mindfulness as One Strategy to Reduce Teacher Stress and Burnout

Scholars have begun to highlight the need for more practical and accessible mindfulness-based interventions in educators’ professional development. According to existing research, practicing mindfulness can promote higher order thinking and what some call “soft” skills (e.g. self-regulation) and build working memory capacity. These skills and capacities are correlated with increased job satisfaction and lower rates of distress among educators.

In a recent study, Taylor, Roberts, & Zarrett (2021) tested the efficacy of a brief mindfulness-based intervention (bMBI) on secondary school educators in an attempt to improve existing mindfulness strategies which have often been deemed too lengthy, unrealistic, and unattainable.

Researchers evaluated cortisol (main stress hormone) samples and teachers’ survey responses to measure the impact of their bMBI on teachers’ physiological, mental health, and emotional well-being. The mindfulness intervention occurred across four, 90-minute group sessions over 16 weeks and encompassed the following activities:

1. Attentive Awareness: identifying goals, learning about the types of attentional demands for teachers and students
2. Receptive Attitude: learning about “curiosity, openness, and acceptance” towards situations
3. Intentionality: reviewing goals, identifying core values of educators, understanding compassion, learning about the barriers to intentionality (competing thoughts), and developing time management skills
4. Integration: establishing ways to act on learned mindfulness strategies both personally and professionally

Each session involved reflections, group discussions, journaling, and sensory exercises (e.g. meditation).

By the end of their investigation, researchers found that their bMBI for educators had significant effects on reducing stress, burnout, and depression. They also noted that the emphasis on self-efficacy through group sessions may have played an indirect but important role in reducing teacher stress. These findings signal that less time-consuming mindfulness interventions are both possible and effective.

Take Advantage of Opportunities to Learn More…

• For more information and resources on mitigating educator stress and secondary traumatic stress, stay tuned to our resources webpage and blogs.
• Reach out to participate in our NYKids survey which includes receiving a unique school report. Contact nykids@albany.edu.
• Get a preview of NYKids’ study of educator responses to the pandemic at the June 21^st and 28^th (8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.) 2021 Summer Symposium: Differential Impacts of COVID-19. Register at https://healthequity.ctg.albany.edu/registration.html.
• Sign up for an opportunity to engage with NYKids’ research and researchers over the summer through partner organizations such as Questar 3.
• As always, contact us directly at nykids@albany.edu for direct support in your school improvement efforts using our unique positive outlier research-based process COMPASS-AIM.