Examining Special Educators' Well-Being When Working With Students With Mental Health Needs

• In Event: Teacher Stress and Coping: Teacher Preparation and Professional Development for Students' Mental Health Needs

Abstract

Educators report that behaviors of students with special needs can have deleterious effects in their classrooms, including reducing time for instruction and negatively impacting the learning of other students (Westling, 2010). Furthermore, teachers report feeling unprepared to manage the emotional, behavioral and mental health challenges that students face in the classroom (Maras & Weston, 2011), particularly when working with youth diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders (Adera & Bullock, 2010; Cassidy, 2011; Conroy, Alter, Boyd, & Bettini, 2014). Consequently, the field of special education is plagued with staggeringly high turnover rates (Billingsley, Crockett, & Kamman, 2014), with 98% of school districts nationwide reporting shortages amongst their special education staff (Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education, 2005). Several factors contribute to these high attrition rates, including job-related stress (Stempien & Loeb, 2002), student conduct (Ash, 2014), and lack of preparation for the demands of the job (Whitaker, 2001).

Limiting educator turnover rates improves student achievement and increases overall teacher quality (The Study of Personnel Needs in Special Education, 2002), however, many factors influence special educator attrition. One understudied influence is educators’ emotional experience in the special education classroom and how navigating those emotional exchanges with students with special needs influences their personal well-being. These emotional exchanges can be studied through the lens of emotional labor, a theory from organizational psychology that focuses on the deliberate expression or suppression of emotions to achieve organizational goals. Evidence supports that educators’ performances of emotional labor impacts their perceptions of professional identity (Brown, Horner, Kerr, & Scanlon, 2014), their feelings of stress on the job (Kerr & Brown, in press) as well as their retention in the field (Zhang & Zhu, 2008). Special educators’ expression of negative affect is also related to higher levels of stress and burnout (Banks & Necco, 1990; Hamama, Ronen, Shachar, & Rosenbaum, 2012), and recent studies suggest that the emotional practices of special educators influence their ability to forge healthy relationships with students (Brown, Valenti, & Kerr, 2015).

Extending this line of research, this study examined how special educators’ emotional labor influences their perceptions of personal well being and in turn working alliances with students with special needs. Fifty special educators from three alternative educational placements completed measures on emotional labor, well being and teacher-student interactions. Results highlight that educators’ reported performance of emotional labor is highly intertwined with their sense of well being. Specifically, classroom-based surface acting (faking emotions not genuinely experienced) is related to increased levels of educator burnout and secondary traumatic stress, as well as decreased levels of self-acceptance, autonomy, and environmental mastery. Conversely, educators’ reported use of natural emotions is related to increased compassion satisfaction and environmental mastery, as well as decreased burnout.

Findings allude to implications for research, practice and policy in the fields of teacher well-being, special education and teacher emotion. Implications speak to how improvement in these educators’ well being and emotional exchanges in the classroom could ameliorate stress and address the attrition concerns commonly found in alternative educational settings.

Authors

• Michael W Valenti, Pressley Ridge

• Elizabeth Levine Brown, George Mason University

• Christy Suzanne Galletta Horner, University of Pittsburgh