A mentor, an IT expert, a life coach – teachers often have to play many roles during the working day, and that’s on top of teaching! With the pressure to be everything for your students, there’s a risk that you don’t have chance to look after your mental health. Covid-19 has only exacerbated this for many people.
To help spot and manage stress in schools, we spoke to a thought leader on resilience in the workplace. In an exclusive webinar for the Cambridge Panel, Dr Rachel Morris, looked at how teachers and school leaders can combat stress. Here are her top tips.
1. Identify problems
To some degree, we all need a little bit of pressure to be at our best. However, if the pressure becomes too much, it has a drastic effect on our performance. The graph below is a handy way to assess workload. If you’re a school leader, you might want to introduce this to your team and get them to plot where they think they are on the graph, and talk about what would help them to function at peak performance. You can find this exercise and other helpful tools free on Rachel’s website, Shapes Toolkit.
In addition, if you are looking for strategies to support your students and their mental health, you might want to watch this webinar from Cambridge International.
2. Visualise your zone of power
Stress often comes from feeling powerless. Particularly for teachers, it’s important to think about what you can and can’t influence, e.g. you can create a revision lesson that focuses on the most important parts of the assessment, but you can’t ensure that all your students will get 100%! Once you visualise and accept what you have influence over, it becomes a lot easier to let go of other things.
3. Notice the signs and be there
Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. There are three symptoms of burnout – lack of empathy, tiredness, and poor performance. Checking in with people can sometimes be all it takes to let someone know they have support.
Have a 5 minute check-in chat:
- How are you?
- How are you REALLY?
- What are you worried about?
- What’s going well?
- What do you need?
4. Remember ‘ABC’ when teaching remotely
We know when teaching remotely or home schooling, it can feel like the school day never ends. Prioritising time for ‘ABC’ can help.
Active
Breaks
Connect
Staying active is incredibly important. When you exercise, your body releases chemicals called endorphins. These endorphins interact with the receptors in your brain that trigger a positive feeling in the body.
Taking regular breaks not only helps avoid fatigue, but helps us solve problems too. Because our brains are fantastic at problem solving – even when daydreaming. When we allow our thoughts to wander, they make connections at random, unlocking threads of thought we wouldn’t have explored otherwise. This is called the diffused mind and it’s the reason you’ll suddenly think of that actor’s name when you stop trying to remember it!
Humans are social beings; we need to connect with other people. A recent study showed that having close social ties can add years to your life! So even if you are teaching remotely, make sure you are still keeping in touch with your work friends. You could set time every week for a virtual coffee break, have regular video calls to exchange ideas, or simply talk about how the week has gone.
5. Prioritise your time
“I can do anything but not everything”
You have the same number of hours in the day as everyone else; you cannot teach synchronously for five hours, mark 24 pieces of homework AND troubleshoot your online platform! The diagram below is helpful for planning the things that are a priority and the things that can wait.
6. Productivity hacks
This is a simple one. Turn off all distractions, prioritise three things a day, limit email checking, and batch similar tasks.
7. Be more gazelle
When a gazelle is grazing and it spots a lion, its reaction is to run away (quickly!). When it successfully avoids the danger, it goes back to grazing. The point here, is that it’s easy to dwell on things long after the stressor has gone, when what we should do, is learn from the experience and move on to the next thing.
8. Happiness is the goal
Teaching can be one of the most rewarding jobs in the world, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t come with its stresses. Try to remember at the end of a long day of juggling roles (teacher, IT technician, life coach) that you’re doing an amazing job at inspiring the next generation of children. Remember why you became a teacher in the first place.
Dr Rachel Morris runs resilience workshops with Shapes Toolkit and has a great podcast called you are not a frog. Check out these resources for more information about looking after your team’s mental wellbeing.
This blog was originally an exclusive webinar for our global teaching community, the Cambridge Panel. If you’d like to join the Panel, apply now!
