Understanding and Promoting Educators' Well-Being and Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Finding Resilience During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives From Different Stakeholders in Schools

Abstract

Objectives
During the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures and the shift to online instruction have posed new challenges for educators in how they perceive their roles and how they support their own social and emotional wellbeing. The objectives of this paper are to understand how educators’ perceptions of school connectedness and the frequency with which they attempted to contact others at the school influence their teachers’ compassion fatigue and teaching self-efficacy during the pandemic and distance learning.

Theoretical Perspectives and Framework
The study is guided by the Jobs Demands – Resources (JD-R) model, which argues that job demands and job resources influence individuals' wellbeing and performance through the motivational process and the health impairment process, respectively (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007; Bakker & Demerouti, 2017). Based on the JD-R model, attempts to connect are conceptualized as a factor related to job demands, and school connectedness is considered as a factor related to job resources. Although prior literature has documented the linkage between teachers’ feelings of self-efficacy, connectedness to school staff, and compassion fatigue, little is known about how school connectedness and attempts to connect influence teachers’ wellbeing and performance in a distance learning context imposed by a global pandemic.

Methods and Data Sources
Participants included 321 educators recruited from PreK-12 schools in a large urban school district in Northern California. Educators’ online teaching self-efficacy and school connectedness were measured by the modified Teacher Subjective Well-being Questionnaire (Renshaw et al., 2015). Compassion fatigue was measured by a modified subscale of the Professional Quality of Life Scale (Stamm, 2010). Educators were also asked to respond a Likert scale measuring how frequently they attempted to contact other teachers/staff, administrators/supervisors, students, and family members, as well as their demographic information. Reliability analyses and confirmatory factor analyses showed that all Likert scale/subscales achieved adequate construct validity and reliability. Regression analyses were conducted using SPSS to estimate the main and moderation effects.

Results
Upon controlling for educators’ demographic factors (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, years of teaching, and grade levels), educators’ self-reported school connectedness had a negative association with their compassion fatigue but a positive association with online teaching self-efficacy, whereas educators’ attempts to make contacts with other school members had a negative association with compassion fatigue, but a positive association with self-efficacy. Moreover, the magnitude of the positive association between school connectedness and online teaching efficacy was stronger among educators who attempted to make more frequent contacts than educators who attempted to make less frequent contacts.

Significance
The findings highlight the significant role of school connectedness in promoting educators' online teaching self-efficacy while reducing the risk for compassion fatigue. Results also showed that teachers’ attempt to make school contacts differentiates the relationship between their perceived connectedness and online teaching self-efficacy while increasing the risk for compassion fatigue. Practical implications for school-based assessment of educators’ online teaching efficacy, compassion fatigue, and sense of school connectedness and conducting research-practice partnerships during the pandemic will also be discussed.

Authors

• Chunyan Yang, University of California, Berkeley

• Jenna Greenstein, University of California - Berkeley

• Sarah Kiran Manchanda, University of California - Berkeley