How Teachers’ Competing Demands of Practice Inform Their Well-Being

• In Event: Beyond Stress, Coping, and Resilience: Exploring Organizational Support for Teachers' Wellness Practice and Well-Being

Abstract

As student mental health rates rise (Bitsko et al., 2022) amid growing concerns about teacher attrition and job-related stress (Steiner & Woo, 2021), examining how schools and teacher education programs can best prepare and support teachers to meet this influx of demand is pressing. Despite recognition of teachers’ contributions to student wellness, wellness work remains largely informal and unsupported in PK-12 schools (Mazzer & Rickwood, 2014). Literature reveals that teachers’ capacity for wellness work is inconsistent, due to scattered professional learning experiences (Brown et al., 2018) and inconsistent implementation of wellness school-based supports (Ball & Anderson-Butcher, 2014).
Schools remain crucial sites for recognizing and responding to students’ wellness concerns, with up to 75% of students receiving wellness support in schools (Merikangas et al., 2020) and millions of students receiving medical care via school-based health centers, community schools models and school nursing services (Centers for Disease Control, 2022; Sanders & Galindo, 2020). Even before the pandemic, teachers often occupied the defacto role of frontline wellness screeners. They identify and refer students with wellness support needs (Schonfeld et al., 2015) and can recognize, and identify differences in severity of, those needs (Splett et al., 2019). At times, wellness support professionals (e.g., nurses, school psychologists) collaborate with teachers to deliver and assess the impact of student wellness support services (Bates et al., 2019).
Despite teachers’ engagement in wellness work, they frequently feel unprepared for, overwhelmed by, and ineffective at this area of practice (Mazzer & Rickwood, 2015). They report a lack of skills and knowledge to support their students’ health and wellness (Kraft et al., 2015; Roeser & Midgley,1997). Nevertheless, wellness-related learning opportunities for teachers remain limited, impairing their ability to respond to student wellness concerns. Teacher preparation programs and professional development specialists struggle to incorporate wellness work into curriculum or to exceed superficial coverage of social and emotional development and urgent student situations such as eating disorders, substance abuse and suicide and (Ohrt et al., 2020;). Further, U.S. teacher certification and licensure standards rarely include wellness competencies (Brown et al., 2019), creating a disconnect between the explicit expectations that guide teacher preparation, and the implicit expectations inherent in teachers’ roles as helping professionals (Rodger et al., 2018).
In this study, we describe PK-12 U.S. teachers' perceptions from a survey that inquired about wellness work and supports during the pandemic’s early months (N=2117). One write-in question asked what respondents would like their school leaders to know about their wellness work. Preliminary findings draw from our analysis of responses to this question (N=1,017) situated within Weston et al.’s (2018) model on teacher mental health literacy: (1) readiness of systems, (2) readiness of individuals, (3) social and organizational support, (4) collaborative and embedded professional learning, and (5) a teacher-driven pedagogy for resiliency. Findings expand discussion on teachers' role in wellness work, extending beyond extant hypothetical vignettes (Green et al., 2018) and highly structured interventions (Franklin et al., 2012). Implications for teacher education, school-based multi-tiered organizational systems and teacher well-being will be highlighted.

Authors

• Elizabeth F. Levine-Brown, George Mason University

• Megan C. Sharkey, George Mason University

• Naomi Brown, George Mason University

• Kate L. Phillippo, Loyola University Chicago