Investigating Variable Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Educators

By Fang (Lisa) Yu, Aaron Leo, Jessie Tobin, & Kristen C. Wilcox

The COVID-19 pandemic has added more stress to the already high-stress profession of educating children and youth. Unfortunately, the experiences of educators – including school instructional and support staff—have received little attention until recently. To gain a better understanding of educators’ experiences of the pandemic, NYKids staff and research colleagues have designed and implemented a mixed-method study. This study holds practical import for district and school leaders as they plan to re-engage staff in the coming school year.

In this blog, which will be part of a series related to our current study, we share related research that foregrounded the study design including research by NYKids’ colleague and University at Albany Professor Hal Lawson, on secondary traumatic stress. We also provide detail about how the study is designed to investigate disparities of pandemic experiences in different communities in alignment with the University at Albany’s task force on the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities. We conclude with a final call for participation in the survey as the 2020-21 school year closes.

COVID-19 and Educator Experiences

The effects of the pandemic and attendant school shutdowns for over a year have undoubtedly impacted children and adults in different ways. While the bulk of educational researchers’ attention has focused on the effects of the pandemic on children and youth, and for good reason, a Center for Disease Control (CDC) survey found that nearly one-third of U.S. adults reported worsening symptoms of anxiety or depression since the beginning of the pandemic. Recent research indicates that for educators, the compounding effects of personal and professional stressors appears to have taken a significant toll on their wellbeing.

These effects can be seen in the rising numbers of educators who are considering leaving or have already left their profession. In a recent Rand Corporation study, for example, nearly half of all participants voluntarily stopped teaching in public schools because of the pandemic. School leaders have not been spared these effects either; a survey conducted by The National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) found that 42% of surveyed principals were considering leaving their position.

Even for educators who have managed to weather the calamity of the past year relatively well, the impact of the pandemic on their students means that teachers will likely incur lingering stressors in the months to come. As they try to assist students who have experienced social isolation, learning challenges, and even trauma over the past year, educators may experience secondary traumatic stress. In one study, 77% of students were found to have experienced trauma and nearly the same proportion (75%) of their teachers reported symptoms of secondary traumatic stress.

Simply put, when students experience stress, their teachers are likely to as well.

Though vaccinations have helped provide some light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel, educational researchers warn that the pandemic’s impact on students’ and educators’ mental health and wellbeing will be lasting.

Studying Educator Stress, Job Satisfaction, and Performance Adaptation

We launched NYKids’ latest mixed-method study in March 2021 with the recruitment assistance of our advisory board partner the School Administrators’ Association of New York State (SAANYS) and with supplementary recruitment through NYKids’ researchers’ networks.

Our interdisciplinary team of researchers (including all authors on this blog and Dr. Hal Lawson, Dr. Kathryn Schiller, Dr. Francesca Durand, and Dr. James Caringi) have drawn upon brain science, trauma, secondary traumatic stress, job satisfaction, and performance adaptation research in this study’s design.

• Stress and secondary traumatic stress

The survey we developed utilized previously validated survey instruments such as the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). We also used items from the Coronavirus Impact Scale (CIS) developed by scholars at Johns Hopkins University to offer respondents opportunities to rate how COVID-19 has impacted their personal and professional lives. Each of these were included as stress indicators and are correlated with job performance.

• Job satisfaction

Another instrument we employed is the Turnover Intention Scale (TIS) and this was to help us investigate educators’ job satisfaction before and after the pandemic. Job satisfaction measures are important as they can provide an early warning sign of potential educator attrition.

• Performance adaptation

We also included some items from the NYKids’ College and Career Readiness Study rooted in our prior performance adaptation research. This was included in order to explore educators’ understanding and feelings about instructional and programming innovations in a dynamically changing context and also to evaluate the organizational facilitators for their adaptations (e.g. qualities and frequencies of opportunities for interactions with other educators in their schools).

Finally, we designed the survey to allow us to identify variability of educators’ experiences by community served in terms of urbanicity (i.e. urban, suburban, rural) and by demographic characteristics of their school’s population (i.e. socioeconomic status and ethnic and linguistic diversity). In addition, to determine if individuals’ experiences differed we included educator-level characteristics such as gender identification, ethnic background, whether the educator has school-aged children, years of experience, grade levels taught, and role (e.g. classroom or specialist teacher or support staff).

Since NYKids seeks to work in partnership with leaders and educators in translating research into improvements in practice, we provide survey reports (de-identifying individual educator responses to protect their anonymity) and a recommended set of research-based resources to each participating school.

We hope this information can help leaders and educators prompt discussions about mitigating the deleterious effects of the pandemic in their schools and plan any support systems they will put in place in the coming school year.

There is still time to participate!

If you are interested in participating in this survey research, please contact us at nykids@albany.edu as soon as possible as we will be closing the study in late June.

For more information on workforce stress and secondary traumatic stress, stay tuned to our webpage for more resources and blogs as well as sign up for new summer professional development opportunities to engage with this and other NYKids’ research through partner organizations such as Questar 3.