Compassion Fatigue, School Connectedness, and Online Teaching Efficacy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: The Cascading Educational Impacts of COVID-19

Abstract

In recent months, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has led to rapid changes in school systems across the world. School closures and the shift to online instruction and distance learning have posed new challenges for teachers, which likely have exacerbated the levels of occupational stress and burnout and undermined their teaching efficacy. Researchers argue that teachers’ occupational wellbeing, including compassion fatigue, plays a vital role in teacher retention (Christian-Brandt et al., 2020). Compassion fatigue is conceptualized as a construct that includes burnout, stress, and secondary traumatic stress (Stamm, 2010). Although over the past decade, the understanding of teacher stress and burnout became more clear, currently teachers may face the unique sets of stressors caused by the new changes in school systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, understanding of educators’ stressors and fostering teachers’ resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic may be critical to support teacher and students’ outcomes and their well-being. To address this need, this study investigates the association between compassion fatigue and online teaching efficacy.

Furthermore, this study will draw from the relational resilience theoretical model. Relational resilience is defined as resilience that is promoted by the capacity for connection and mutually empathetic, responsive relationships (Jordan, 2003). Relational resilience as it applies to teachers has been defined as a dynamic process between risk and protective factors that produces the outcome of teachers feeling connected while moving beyond the common stressors of the teaching profession (Gu & Day, 2007). There has been a small amount of research that has focused on the role that personal and professional relationships play in teacher resilience ( Le Cornu, 2014) and even fewer studies have examined the topic within the context of the new school system caused by COVID-19. Therefore to address this gap, the second goal of this study was to explore the role of teacher connectedness as a moderator of the relationship between compassion fatigue and teaching efficacy.

Participants included 321 educators in Northern California during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results showed that after controlling for demographic variables (i.e., race, gender, years of teaching, and position), compassion fatigue has a significant negative influence on online teaching efficacy (𝛽 = -0.33, t = -5.85, p < .001). In contrast, school connectedness was positively associated with online teaching efficacy (𝛽 = 0.16, t = 2.20, p < .05). Moreover, school connectedness mitigated the strength of the negative association between compassion fatigue and online teaching efficacy (𝛽 = -0.30, t = -3.19, p < .001). These results suggest that the educator’s sense of school connectedness plays an important role in response to stress, burnout, and online teaching efficacy. Therefore, it is important to target fostering educators’ sense of school connectedness during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors

• Maedeh Golshirazi, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Chunyan Yang, UC Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author