COVID-Related Impacts on Teacher Mental Health and Teacher Care for Student Mental Health

• In Event: COVID Lessons: What the Pandemic Is Teaching Us About Teacher Innovation, Collaboration, and Leadership

Abstract

Purposes
This paper explores teacher mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research indicates that not only children, but also the adults charged with their educations, have been more likely to experience “high rates of depression and anxiety” “during and after enforced isolation” (Loades et al., 2020). Furthermore, teachers experience profession-specific mental health risks, including internalization/reproduction of “the public’s suspicion of [teachers’] abilities” (Webb, 2005), stress (Roy, 2003), and physical health manifestations associated with punitive accountability policies (Author, 2014). These factors have been compounded by the need to care for students’ mental health during COVID-19; however, teachers have continued to meet students’ mental health needs despite numerous challenges.

Theoretical Framework
This paper draws on educational psychology concerning teacher mental health, postqualitative methodologies that question the discursive construction of mental health and teacher accountability within schools, and anti-racist theories that illustrate the “importance of intersectionality in research on social stratification and mental health” (Rosenfield, 2012).
Teachers working with students in poverty often play multiple roles including coach, friend, counselor, and advocate. During the pandemic, teachers have described the added role of supporting students’ caregivers to facilitate distance/virtual education. Thus, the role of teachers extends well beyond instruction (Cross & Hong, 2012). While this role-comprehensiveness is motivational for many teachers, it also elevates work-related stress. Teachers of students from racially oppressed groups often experience additional stress, pushing back against systemic bias, and experiencing what Sarah Stapleton calls “marginalization by association” (Stapleton, 2018). These teachers often express mental fatigue due to lack of systemic support (McGee, 2015; Allen et al., 2016).

Data Sources and Methods
The data on which this paper draws includes semi-structured interviews with current k-12 public school teachers across the United States and internationally, conducted by the authors and a team of researchers, and National Center for Educational Statistics data. Thematic cross-interview elements concerning teachers’ and students’ mental health and targeted follow-up interviews with select teacher-participants concerning mental health during the pandemic specifically informed this study.

Results and Substantiated Conclusions:
During the pandemic, teachers have played roles typical of counselors, social workers, caseworkers, and emergency relief coordinators in addition to roles in their personal lives. Often, teachers undertook these roles of their own accord, or coordinated with other teachers to support students and one another. Teachers grieved the lack of in-person relationships with their students, struggled to find healthy work-life balance, and sometimes received mixed expectations from administration, yet found ways to ensure they monitored students’ mental health and provided care by making themselves available to students and by coordinating informally with other teachers.

Scholarly Significance:
This work will contribute to literature concerning teacher professional knowledge and professional working conditions, expectations, and evaluations of teaching practice. It will explore the impact of funding and administrative/policy support for school-based mental health access. In addition to the need to support teacher collaboration and innovation, implications of the study include the need to support the emotional labor of teaching during the pandemic through financial, policy, and structural support for student and teacher mental health.

Authors

• Mary R. Adkins-Cartee, University of Oregon

• Dana Cohen Lissman, University of Oregon