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Recently, it's not uncommon to hear us, teachers, complain about a
lot of things--from student discipline to lack of support to having no one to
attend to our concerns to our heads "thinking only about the students and
not the teachers" etc.
This phenomenon is threatening because as years pass by, the
complaints become more numerous and frequent and they start to emerge from
people who possess great influence to others--either because of their long
tenure in the school or due to their persuasive persona. As colleagues, we
all grab every little chance to talk and listen to each other and try to
redirect our own and others' perspectives. Whenever there's
time, we allow each other to vent out without any judgment what we feel and
think about our job, about our experiences as teachers. We offer our ears and
a pat at each others' back. Yes, we can always try to motivate and
encourage each other. However, sometimes, the magnitude of stress and
dissatisfaction becomes so high that it already requires some special
attention.
I'm a licensed teacher myself, I taught in regular school for a
year and handled cases of learning dysfunction for three years before finding
myself as a counsellor. I understand that most of the time, as teachers, we are
supposed to go extra mile to make sure the students are gaining from our
learning relationship with them. This entails extra time, extra effort and
extra responsibilities. On the other hand, being a HR professional, I also
understand that stress and pressure are a reality to every vocation. And just
like in any other careers, there are occupational hazards in teaching which
must be resolved.
Unfortunately, the growing dissatisfaction and stress among
teachers is not just anymore a personal concern. It is rapidly becoming an
occupational concern. Since we are handling people--specifically people who are
in their formative years--the
adverse effect is grave when we allow stress to overpower us.
In some cases, a cycle of rejection takes place: Teachers
experience mismanaged pressures from numerous stressors. Stress manifests in
teaching and trickles down to students. Students take it against the teachers
and they start to build negative feelings and attitude towards teachers and the
schoool. They "act out" indifferently in the class. Teachers begin to
face discipline problems. Teachers become more stressed. The vicious cycle goes
on and on (blame cortisol!).
Somewhere along the line, this cycle must break. There's no other
option but to end it or else the negative feedback will just become worse.
Thankfully, there are ways. It's not that we are left alone without any trick
to respond to this concern. On a personal level,
we, teachers, can cope with occupational stress. In the organizational level,
there are also approaches to alleviate the stress level within the team.
In succeeding posts, I will be going back to these personal and
organizational techniques in detail to allow us more insights on what we can do
to ease away the discomfort and dissatisfaction.
All these being said, a couple of things are direly required: a paradigm shift -- a change in the way we look at
things on a personal level and a
political will -- a
team commitment to achieve goals to alleviate stress in the organizational
level.
