The Well-Balanced Teacher

How to Work Smarter and Stay Sane Inside the Classroom and Out

Mike Anderson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781416612377
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

You've probably heard the advice "put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others." This is true both in airplanes and in classrooms—you have to take care of yourself before you can help someone else. If teachers are stressed out and exhausted, how can they have the patience, positive energy, and enthusiasm to provide the best instruction for students? Author Mike Anderson asked that question as a teacher himself, and the answers he found form the basis of The Well-Balanced Teacher. He found that teachers need to take care of themselves in five key areas to keep themselves in shape to care for their students.

In addition to paying proper attention to their basic needs for nutrition, hydration, sleep, exercise, and emotional and spiritual refreshment, teachers also need

Belonging: Teachers need to feel positive connections with other people, both in school and outside school.
Significance: Teachers want to know that they make a positive difference through the work they do.
Positive engagement: When teachers enjoy their work, they have great energy and passion for their teaching.
Balance: Healthy teachers set boundaries and create routines so that they can have rich lives both in the classroom and at home.

Anderson devotes a chapter to each of these needs, describing in frank detail his own struggles and offering a multitude of practical tips to help readers find solutions that will work for them. When teachers find ways to take care of their own needs, they will be healthier and happier, and they will have the positive energy and stamina needed to help their students learn and grow into healthy adults themselves.

Chapter 1

The Importance of Managing Stress

About 10 years ago, I had a revelation—I could not do everything that I was being asked to do in the classroom. This was only part of the revelation, though. At this point, I had been a teacher for six years. The full revelation was not just that I could not get everything done that I was being asked to do, but that I still could not do it. My first few years, I had assumed that my inability to complete all of the teaching I was supposed to do was mostly due to inexperience and that one day I would have it all figured out. I had this vague vision of myself feeling relaxed and confident as I delivered perfectly timed lessons and units, one flowing into the next in a seamless transition that had me finishing all curricula in the middle of June. Not only was I nowhere near this vision after six years of teaching, but I actually seemed to be farther from it than I had been a few years before. Instead of getting closer to that magical, mystical place where I had time to teach and time to relax, I seemed more hopelessly swamped than ever. I was working harder, putting in more time and energy than ever before, but still having to sift through the remaining content I had not yet reached each April, deciding what not to teach.

I decided to do a little information collecting. For one whole year, I tracked every minute that was taken away from my teaching. I kept a very simple log on the computer, and every time we had a fire drill, a visit from Officer Friendly, a half-day for professional development, or any other interruption that took time away from my time with students, I recorded the date, the activity, and the time lost. I made no attempt to judge whether I felt the time lost was valuable or a waste of time. In fact, quite a few of the activities, such as our artist-in-residence program, were quite valuable, and I would hate to lose them. I simply wanted to track how much time I really had to teach. Figure 1.1 shows what I found.

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Figure 1.1. Total Time Lost: 1999–2000 School Year

Activity: Band

Total Minutes: 1,260
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 4.67

Activity: Chorus

Total Minutes: 1,640
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 6.074

Activity: Literacy PD

Total Minutes: 310
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 1.146

Activity: Early release for professional development

Total Minutes: 600
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 2.22

Activity: Early release for holidays

Total Minutes: 600
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 2.22

Activity: Morning announcements

Total Minutes: 900
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 3.27

Activity: PM safety patrol

Total Minutes: 900
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 3.27

Activity: Delayed openings (snow)

Total Minutes: 600
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 2.22

Activity: All-school meetings

Total Minutes: 125
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.4628

Activity: Other assemblies

Total Minutes: 440
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 1.629

Activity: Guest speakers

Total Minutes: 170
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.63

Activity: Fire drills/lock-down drills/bus safety

Total Minutes: 41
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.15

Activity: Artist-in-residence

Total Minutes: 65
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.407

Activity: Nurse visits (scoliosis, hearing, etc.)

Total Minutes: 15
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.06

Activity: State testing

Total Minutes: 255
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.94

Activity: End-of-year trips and activities

Total Minutes: 720
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 2.67

Activity: Meetings/trainings

Total Minutes: 320
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 1.184

Activity: School pictures

Total Minutes: 30
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.12

Activity: Book fair preview

Total Minutes: 30
Number of 4.5-Hour Instructional Days: 0.12

Total
9,021 minutes
33.41 instructional days

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During that year, children in Portsmouth, New Hampshire had a six-hour school day. Each day, students had 45 minutes for lunch and recess and 45 minutes for special classes, such as physical education, art, music, computer, and library time. After that time was spent, teachers had 4.5 hours available for classroom instruction. In our school, we were expected to spend one hour a day reading, one hour a day working on math, 45 minutes a day writing, about 20 minutes a day running a morning meeting, 15 minutes a day working on word study, and 15 minutes a day reading aloud. These times were stated verbally or in writing by either administration or our literacy team. Forty-five minutes a day for science and social studies would have given us a chance of getting in all of our teaching objectives, though few 5th grade teachers taught both science and social studies at any one time.

When you add up all of these times, you get a total of five hours and five minutes a day. Already we see a problem: a deficit of 35 minutes a day. Figure 1.2 illustrates this time challenge. When you consider all of the time lost to chorus practice, guest speakers, and other activities, we actually had an average of 3 hours and 40 minutes per day of teaching time. And this was before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act hit the fan and tripled the amount of time spent on testing.

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Figure 1.2. Real Time to Teach

Time to Teach: 5 hours and 5 minutes

Explanation: This is the total expected instructional time when all of the separate expectations (e.g., 60 minutes for reading or 60 minutes for math) were combined.

Time to Teach: 4 hours and 30 minutes

Explanation: This is the amount of teaching time in a normal school day (a 6-hour day minus 45 minutes for lunch/recess and specials).

Time to Teach: 3 hours and 40 minutes

Explanation: This is the average amount of instructional time we actually had when all interruptions were factored in.

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Have you noticed the total at the end of Figure 1.1? Over one-sixth of the school year's instructional time was actually spent on other activities. Again, some of these activities are valuable and should not be removed, but it is important to consider that as these various activities divert our class time to other places, the amount of curriculum that we are expected to teach rarely decreases. Something else important to recognize about these numbers is that they only reflect the impossibility of actually delivering the amount of instruction we are supposed to. These data do not track the planning and record keeping required for this amount of instruction or the other tasks that teachers have in addition to planning and teaching, which grew significantly during my first six years in the classroom.

On the one hand, these results might seem disheartening, but at the time I collected them, they actually had the reverse effect on me. I was positively elated. It was not my fault! My inability to catch up and teach everything was not just a series of personal defects accumulating in failure. I was, in fact, being asked to do the impossible.

On the other hand, having the information did not do much to alleviate the problem. I still had too much to do, too much to teach, and too many other responsibilities—and that problem was not going away, either. Other than forwarding my research results to my principal and my superintendent, who responded with a polite if somewhat bland "thanks for the information" type of response, there was not much that I could do to lessen my workload and stress. Or was there?

Research on Stress and Teaching

Teaching is one of the most stressful professions. I have always believed this. But then again, I might be biased. My mother was a 3rd grade teacher for 19 years before becoming a literacy consultant and mentor teacher in her district. My father was a college professor for 37 years. His father was an elementary school administrator. I taught at the elementary level for 15 years and have worked with other teachers throughout the country as a consulting teacher for many years. My wife, Heather, taught 2nd grade for seven years before staying home full-time with our two children. Our very good friends and neighbors across the street teach 5th grade and kindergarten. Many of my other good friends are teachers, too. I have always been surrounded by teachers.

I have other friends and family who are not teachers, and their careers and lives are also stressful. When I talk with them about the difficulties and stresses of teaching, I get a mix of sympathy and "Oh, give me a break—every job is stressful" looks. So I began to wonder: is teaching really more stressful than most professions, or does it just seem that way to someone who is a teacher and is surrounded by teachers?

As it turns out, teaching is one of the most stressful professions. In study after study on workplace stress that I analyzed, teaching came out at or near the top in nearly every one. Try this: Google "most stressful jobs" and look at what comes up. At the time of this writing, nearly every entry cited teaching as one of the top 10 most stressful professions. Some recent studies are particularly interesting.

A study done in the UK reports that 41 percent of teachers have high levels of stress at work (Baker, 2004). This figure was double the average amount of occupational stress reported in the rest of the survey group. The next two highest groups reporting extreme workplace stress were nurses and managers (Baker, 2004), which is interesting because many teachers frequently find themselves in these roles on a frequent basis in the classroom. A recent study of special educators in Greece found extremely high levels of stress among this group, citing emotional burnout, heavy workloads, challenging collegial relationships, and many other factors that contribute to high teacher stress (Antoniou, Polychroni, & Walters, 2000). In a study focused on teachers in the Midwest, 40 percent of teachers reported high levels of stress, while only 12 percent reported low or very low levels of stress (Block, 2003). The National Association of Head Teachers conducted a survey of their own and found that 40 percent of head teachers reported visiting a doctor with a stress-related problem during the previous year. According to the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2006), inner-city high school teachers are more likely to get an ulcer than any other professionals.

I could go on, but I am preaching to the choir. You don't need any convincing that teaching is stressful. Now we need to ask, So what?

So What?

Okay, teaching is stressful. You might say that it has always been stressful, so what's the big deal? Stress is a part of the job, and we should all just suck it up and stop whining, right? Wrong!

The Cost of Stress

There are multiple reasons why we should care about our emotional selves. Workers who report high levels of stress have 46 percent higher annual health costs (Ingebretsen, 2005). Teachers who are stressed out also take more sick days and are less productive when they are at school (Van Der Linde, 2000). These conditions cost school districts enormous amounts of money. In addition, multiple physical ailments come with repeatedly high doses of stress. In the short term, people have fight-or-flight physical responses when under stress: increased heart rate, quicker breathing, sweating, a rise in blood sugar, and greater muscular tension are just a few. Long-term effects of stress "can lead to serious health problems. Chronic stress disrupts nearly every system in your body. It can raise blood pressure, suppress the immune system, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, contribute to infertility, and speed up the aging process. Long-term stress can even rewire the brain, leaving you more vulnerable to anxiety and depression" (Smith, Jaffe-Gill, & Segal, 2009).

These conditions can be enormously costly for us and our school districts. Let's do a little simple math as an illustration. What if every professional in a school district needed to take just one sick day a year because of stress-related issues? Imagine a moderately sized district with about 1,000 professional staff members. Substitute teachers are paid about $75 a day, so one stress-related sick day for everyone would cost the district $75,000. This figure is roughly the equivalent of two new teachers' salaries in many places. And that is only for one sick day each!

Our Friends and Families

More important than the actual monetary cost of illness and stress is the damage that can be done to our personal relationships. When we are overburdened with work, it can be hard to make enough time to spend with our friends and family. When our stress level is high, we may not be able to give them the full attention they deserve, or our mood may sour to the point where people don't enjoy our company. If we allow our personal relationships to slip, it becomes even easier to retreat into our work, and the problem worsens. The added stress of strained personal relationships of course has a negative impact on our ability to be joyful and energetic at school, which can deepen the downward spiral. We must make time for friends...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Linda Lantieri
• Preface
• Chapter 1. The Importance of Managing Stress
• Chapter 2. Meeting Our Most Basic Needs
• Chapter 3. Belonging: Becoming an Important Part of a Community
• Chapter 4. Significance: Teaching with a Sense of Purpose
• Chapter 5. Competence: The Importance of Self-Efficacy
• Chapter 6. Fun: The Importance of Positive Engagement
• Chapter 7. Balance: The Importance of Planning Our Time and Energy
• Afterword
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright