The impact of Innovation School on teachers’ burnout

• In Event: Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Round-Table Session (English): School reform movement toward social responsible education in South Korea

Proposal

Introduction

The Innovation School is a new model of public education that aims to change the learning environment in school by breaking from the grade-driven, i.e., cognitive skills-centered paradigm. The positive effects (e.g., an increase in school satisfaction) of the innovation school system have been reported since they were initially implemented. However, it is also argued that in order to better understand the effectiveness of innovation school policies in promoting students’ academic success, attention should be paid to the real difficulties that can be encountered while operating innovation schools. In particular, it is necessary to focus on practical problems and difficulties that teachers are being confronted in the process of operating innovation schools as teachers are one of the core actors of innovation schools.

The practical problems teachers are encountered can lead teachers to what is called teachers’ burnout. Considering the findings of previous studies that teachers’ burnout is a mental, physical and emotional exhaustion caused by such factors as individual teachers’ characteristics, the organization of schools, and work-related factors, unnecessary overwork may increase teachers’ exhaustion level. Also, certain educational activities and policies that are being widely implemented in innovation schools (e.g., a requirement of joining teacher learning community inside the school and class disclosure to others), but not in general schools, may increase teachers’ burnout levels as well. In other words, as the innovation school system appears to impose more requirements upon teachers, teachers working at innovation schools may burn themselves out more than teachers at general schools.

On the contrary, there is a possibility that there is little difference between innovation schools and general schools, so that the burnout levels of teachers in innovation schools may be lower than those of teachers in general schools. In some cases, innovation schools have rather tried to reduce requirements teachers should accomplish by reorganizing their work structure in school. An exemplary case is to allow teachers to raise their voices when making policy decisions regarding teachers’ work within the school. Consequently, teachers can devote their time and energy to their own tasks such as teaching, teaching-related academic activities, and student counseling and that may reduce teachers’ burnout level.

Given these understandings, the purpose of this study is to empirically analyze the relationship between implementing innovation schools and teachers’ burnout levels. This empirical study will be significant, particularly for policy makers, in that it is projected to provide complementary measures for the successful establishment of innovation school policies.

Methods

To achieve the purpose of this study, we used the third year of teacher, school and principal data of Busan Educational Longitudinal Study (BELS) for analysis. In order to examine the relationship between implementation of innovative school, which is called the Dahangbok School in BELS data, and teachers’ burnout level, we controlled the teacher-level variables and the school-level variables that influence teachers’ burnout. A hierarchical linear model was used for this empirical analysis.

Results

The main results are as follows. First, when running the basic model of the hierarchical linear model with the teachers’ burnout as the dependent variable, the difference of the teachers’ burnout between the Dahangbok schools and general schools was verified. This implies that the school characteristics are associated with teachers’ burnout levels. Second, it was confirmed that the Dahangbok schools were negatively related to teachers’ burnout level, which was statistically significant. The result of this study suggests that some efforts at the school level to reduce teachers’ burnout levels in the Dahangbok schools are actually achieving what it intends to do so.

Author

• Dongsun Kim, Pusan National University