Mandy Froehlich's Blog: Leadership, Innovation & Divergent Teaching, page 12

Why Do Teachers Disengage?

A few months ago, I wrote a piece called The Rules of Teacher Engagement which discussed teacher engagement and what it means when teachers become disconnected from their profession like I did some years ago, and how I took control and turned it around. Educator disengagement is stronger than just not being interested in what your learning or teaching at the time. It’s the complete disconnection to the why behind teaching. It gives people’s minds the opportunity and permission to do things like incessantly complain about students’ laziness, roll their eyes at the teachers who are excited and still engaged, and either do anything they can to work against the administration or just do nothing exciting to fly under the radar. And sometimes the teachers who are the most disengaged expect the highest level of engagement out of their disengaged students, even though they don’t feel that connection themselves.

This came to my attention a few years ago when I disengaged. It was a terrible feeling. I hated my job, looked forward to the end of the day or end of the week, took only what I had home and rarely found interest in anything education-based. I like to tell myself that my students didn’t notice because, for me, it wasn’t the students but the politics of education that disengaged me, but that’s probably not true. They probably knew. And even though I had the sweetest, most hard-working class I had ever had my last year I was in the classroom, I couldn’t pull myself back into the groove to even really appreciate it. It’s seriously one of my biggest professional regrets. Because when the students don’t feel like we care even when they’re struggling (especially when they’re struggling) we have truly failed as educators.

I feel like many of us can think about someone who fits this description. And, like with everything, there’s a continuum of feeling this way. On one side, there is the completely engaged educator, and I feel like I am almost there today (some of the tactics I employed to get there can be found in The Rules of Teacher Engagement). So, the first question is: how do people get this way? I think there are a few possibilities to what brings this on, but part of the difficulty of “solving” the issue is that it’s so deeply personal to whoever is experiencing it. That’s why the best prevention is self-awareness and knowing if you’re beginning to fall into the trap.

Personal Hurt

Sometimes, I think what emotionally removes people from education has nothing to do with education at all. It is a personal trauma or adversity that needs a person’s full attention, and it is either so deep or takes so long that people don’t know how to get back into the education groove and find that happy place again.

Professional Hurt

One of the biggest takeaways I had from Rick Jetter and Rebecca Coda‘s book Escaping the School Leader’s Dunk Tank was that when we suffer adversity in the workplace, it emotionally hurts us. We become a little more disheartened with every time it happens. Sometimes, it’s simply about having more put on our plates than any one person can be expected to do. It could also be workplace bullying (which can come in the form of colleagues, parents, administration), an administrator or colleagues who are against risk-taking, or policies that are compliance-based and stifle creativity and innovation. Even a lack of trust for the people around you can cause hurt. And depending on their level of resilience, everyone will have a maximum that when they reach it, they may give up. Even the most resilient people have a breaking point, and reaching that point may cause them to become disengaged.

Burnout

Sometimes, we overuse the term burnout. We say things like, “I’m so burnt out after the tough week.” But, professional burnout is absolutely a real thing, and one of the feelings that true burnout can lead to is detachment. In 2016, Psychology Today posted the article The Teacher Burnout Epidemic (Parts 1 and 2) on teacher burnout which included data that said:

About half a million (15% of) U.S. teachers leave the profession every year (Seidel, 2014).

More than 41% of teachers leave the profession within five years of starting, and teacher attrition has risen significantly over the last two decades (Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey, 2014). This provides clarification to Ingersoll’s (2012) oft-cited estimate that 40%-50% of new teachers leave within their first five years on the job.

TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) reported almost 66% of the nation’s best teachers continue to leave the profession for careers elsewhere (Chartock & Wiener, 2014).

It is clear our teachers are struggling, but we should refrain from placing the blame on them. Rather, consider the demands and unsustainability of the job.

…teachers are less likely to be able to deliver high quality instruction when they are not able to decompress (Neufeldnov, 2014). Stressed, overworked, frustrated teachers are less able to connect in positive ways with students and to offer students the best instruction. (Rankin, 2016)

Some of the symptoms of burnout include:

Consistently being emotionally and physically exhausted accompanied with dread of what might happen the next day
Impaired concentration that can get worse the longer it continues
Weakened immune system (ie you get sick easier)
Other mental health issues like anxiety or depression
In the beginning, constant irritability and later, angry outbursts

Many of the symptoms of burnout can affect both a person’s personal and professional life. I thought one of the most interesting ways to handle burnout was found in this article by Mayo Clinic. Among other suggestions to handle burnout like seeking support and identifying stressors, it said:

Adjust your attitude. If you’ve become cynical at work, consider ways to improve your outlook. Rediscover enjoyable aspects of your work. Recognize co-workers for valuable contributions or a job well-done. Take short breaks throughout the day. Spend time away from work doing things you enjoy.

Burnout or not, something I think we could all remember this.

Secondary Traumatic Stress

Secondary traumatic stress (STS) (also known as compassion fatigue or vicarious trauma), as discussed in my book The Fire Within, is when people who hear of other’s trauma and who work with others who have experienced a trauma and exhibit trauma behaviors begin to develop the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) even if they have never suffered a trauma themselves. I included this chart in my book from the US Department of Human Services as the symptoms to look for:

Cognitive

Lowered Concentration

Apathy

Rigid thinking

Perfectionism

Preoccupation with trauma
Emotional

Guilt

Anger

Numbness

Sadness

Helplessness


Behavioral

Withdrawal

Sleep disturbance

Appetite change

Hyper-vigilance

Elevated startle response
Physical

Increased heart rate

Difficulty breathing

Muscle and joint pain

Impaired immune system

Increased severity of medical concerns

STS and burnout have both similar symptoms and ways to handle them. For both, it’s important to recognize when you need professional help.

Regardless of the reason for disengagement, the most important step to take is developing self-awareness and being mindful of how you feel in order to catch it in the early stages. I want people to understand that these feelings are real, and they are not weird or terrible teachers for having them, but there is an underlying cause to their disengagement. Many times I find that educators who are disengaged aren’t necessarily truly happy people, at least not in their profession. And I do believe that it is so much more rewarding to love your job and what you do, and in turn, the students you teach and love will be better people for it, and that’s really why we got into education in the first place.

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#ItsTime

The world is finally beginning to wake up to the issues of mental illness and the far-reaching effects that it has on everyone’s life. Nobody is immune. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how “social” you appear to be, or how many times you smile. There are people out there who cannot control their thoughts and that’s not due to a personality flaw or a mental weakness. Mental illness is an illness. For some, it is one that never goes away. For many of us, it is something that we live with and find strategies to deal with in order to keep ourselves functioning, and in many cases, alive on a daily basis. We would change it if we could.

For people who don’t experience these things, please understand: it is not your job to judge if we “should” be feeling this way. We know we shouldn’t. That’s not a question. What we really want is your support and understanding. We want to be like you without these feelings. Show us your compassion and empathetic sides. We just want to know we are not alone and you don’t think we are weird. We want to know that when we get enough courage to tell you about our sickness that you don’t look at us with pity or distain but instead with an understanding and strategic side that will help us make it through our bouts.

I’ve written about this many times, trying so hard to destigmatize mental illness and to forget the look on the face of the one person who didn’t understand what I was going through; the catalyst for this mission. That face is ingrained in my head. When I saw this tweet from Emily Thomas

Can we start a MeToo campaign, but for mental health ? I would love to hear everyone’s untold stories so we can all support each other

— Emily Thomas (@emitoms) June 8, 2018

regarding beginning a #metoo campaign for mental health, I knew I was all in. I had been racking my brain to try to find another way to shed light on the topic but didn’t know how. It was a lightbulb moment, and I’m all in.

[image error]#ItsTime is going to be used for stories of how mental illness has affected lives: maybe it’s yours, maybe it was a family member, maybe your best friend, maybe your student or teacher; everyone has been affected. It’s to show support and offer true compassion and empathy should anyone need to talk. It’s taking it one step further from just posting the National Suicide Hotline number or offering condolences after the fact.

#ItsTime to remove the stigma.

#ItsTime to recognize the far-reaching effects mental illness has on people.

#ItsTime to do something more than nothing.

The more we talk about it, the less of a stigma it will have, and less of a control that it will have on all our lives. I don’t want myself or the people I love to feel like they need to keep it all inside because they are well respected in the community/profession and they don’t want to show that as a weakness. #ItsTime to take control and stop allowing these illnesses to control us.

I know that my blog is primarily education focused, and it will continue to be that way. I love the work I do, but I also am 100% positive that we are not immune to these issues. I will continue posting about issues in education once a week, as is my goal. However, I will also try to post a second time during the week regarding anything I’ve learned about mental illness from writing my book or just being me and living with it. But in the meantime, let’s get this going. #ItsTime.

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Kids These Days

I truly believe that part of being an advocate for kids is believing that all of them, no matter what, possess redeeming qualities. I know that I see kids do absolutely amazing things with talent and grit and an awareness of other people that I don’t remember myself or my classmates having when I was their age. On the flip side, I know we have students who are so angry and struggling and do things that are unkind and frankly, sometimes violent. But, instead of asking why the students are so poorly behaved, I think the better question is what support did we miss as parents/educators/society and how can we bring out the goodness? My point being…no matter the child, if we don’t believe that there is a place inside of them that has the potential for greatness then that is more about our shortcomings than it is about them.

I often hear adults speaking about kids like they are some lost group of souls; that they make bad choices, they have terrible attitudes, they’re impolite and spend all their time doing inappropriate things on social media. While there are many lines of thinking where I am very open to listening to the other side of the coin, believing that kids these days are inherently bad is just not one of them. If that’s truly what I believed, I clearly don’t belong in education. What I believe people sometimes miss is that kids live in a world that adults created for them and are just trying to survive the reality we concocted.

For every time that I have seen a child not say thank you, I have held the door for an adult who has given me about the same attention as a doorstop.

For every child I have seen bully someone on social media, I have seen an adult get personal and nasty over political posts on Facebook or Twitter.

For every student I have seen lash out physically at another person, I have seen an adult grab their child too roughly in a grocery store or watched brutal shows on TV.

For every inappropriate song that I’ve heard a student listening to, I have been listening to my own 80’s playlist with Pour Some Sugar On Me and She Shook Me All Night Long.

Do students make poor choices? Absolutely. As do adults, and we are supposed to be the models. But deviant or socially unacceptable behavior does not equal worthlessness. What we believe for students could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I would so much rather believe that our students have greatness in them and take the chance that that’s the prophecy that comes true than believe that they are inherently awful and perpetuate that thought into the universe. Students learning differently, speaking differently, listening and communicating differently, does not mean that the way they do it is wrong. If I have to be the one person that believes in a student when it seems hopeless I will be that person because that’s why I got into education and that’s what teachers do. If you ask me about kids these days, I will tell you about all the kids I know that are already better people than I ever was at their age.

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The Opportunity for Improvement: “We’ve always done it this way” isn’t a why

So many times in education I think we gravitate toward one idea or teaching strategy and hold onto it like it’s the only way to do things, but I think there is always a balance between change and tradition. Change for the sake of change is just as dangerous as never having the desire to move forward because it causes people to become immune to the prospect of growth and the excitement of moving forward, and sometimes become disillusioned with the inherent uncertainty of constant change. However, whenever I’m in a new situation, whether it’s working with a district or in my own, and I ask why a process is being done (particularly if it doesn’t seem to be working or is inefficient), I never feel like “Because we’ve always done it that way” is a legitimate answer to why it’s being done. After all, there are many things we have spent years doing that we know don’t work: generally ignoring some of the social-emotional needs of students and staff, complete seclusion, treating the learning needs of all kids as being the same…there are consequences for never reviewing a process or practice to look for ways to improve. The use of “We have always done it that way” can feel like a blanket reason not to look for room for improvement.

Because I value balance, I understand that reviewing a process, policy or even a teaching strategy does not always mean that it’s going to change. If the reasons for keeping them the way they are is solid and understandable and the outcomes are always positive, there may not be a reason for a change but that doesn’t mean that reviewing that process or policy wasn’t valuable. But, if the dominant reason for maintaining the status quo is that it’s always been done that way, to me that’s a red flag that it’s time for a review and possibly some tweaks or change so we truly understand the why behind why we are doing things the way we are.

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The Fire Within is Now Officially Launched!

Find more information on The Fire Within page or by going to Amazon here!