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Getting Serious About Teacher Burnout | NEA

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Getting Serious About Teacher Burnout | NEA

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Getting Serious About Teacher Burnout | NEA

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To avoid a “Great Resignation,” districts need to make substantive changes to reduce stress and improve morale in schools. Educators don’t need any more chair massages or Casual Fridays, says one expert. “This is about support and autonomy.”

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Schools, Not Teachers, Must Reduce Stress and Burnout-Here's How

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Schools, Not Teachers, Must Reduce Stress and Burnout-Here's How

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Schools, Not Teachers, Must Reduce Stress and Burnout—Here’s How

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Educators’ health and well-being should be prioritized in school culture; school leaders can help create the conditions for that.

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Why It’s So Hard for Teachers to Take Care of Themselves | Cult of Pedagogy

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As a whole, teachers aren’t great about taking care of themselves. But that can change, and these four steps can help make that happen.

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When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too

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When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too

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Alysia Ferguson Garcia remembers the day two years ago that ended in her making a call to Child Protective Services. One of her students walked into drama class with what Garcia thought of as a "bad attitude" and refused to participate in a script reading.

"I don't care if you've had a bad day," Garcia remembers saying in frustration. "You still have to do some work."

In the middle of class, the student offered an explanation for her behavior: Her mom's boyfriend had been sexually abusing her. After the shock passed, the incident provided an opportunity for the class-and Garcia-to provide the student with comfort, and to cry.

When Garcia first started teaching, she wasn't expecting the stories her students would share of physical and sexual abuse, hunger, violence, and suicide. The stories seemed to haunt her all the way home, she says, recalling nightmares and sleepless nights spent worrying about her students. They also dredged up deep-seated memories of her own experiences with abuse.

"When you're learning to be a teacher, you think it's just about lesson plans, curriculum, and seating charts," said Garcia. "I was blindsided by the emotional aspect of teaching-I didn't know how to handle it. I was hurt by my students' pain, and it was hard for me to leave that behind when I went home."

The Real Costs of Trauma

Data shows that more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma in the form of abuse, neglect, violence, or challenging household circumstances-and 35 percent of children have experienced more than one type of traumatic event, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can have impacts that extend far beyond childhood, including higher risks for alcoholism, liver disease, suicide, and other health problems later in life.

Trauma in children often manifests outwardly, affecting kids' relationships and interactions. In schools, the signs of trauma may be seen in a student acting out in class, or they could be more subtle-like failure to make eye contact or repeatedly tapping a foot. (To learn more about how trauma impacts students, read " Brains in Pain Cannot Learn! ")

For teachers, who are directly exposed to a large number of young people with trauma in their work, a secondary type of trauma, known as vicarious trauma, is a big risk. Sometimes called the "cost of caring," vicarious trauma can result from "hearing [people's] trauma stories and becom[ing] witnesses to the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured," according to the American Counseling Association.

"Being a teacher is a stressful enough job, but teachers are now responsible for a lot more things than just providing education," says LeAnn Keck, a manager at Trauma Smart, an organization that partners with schools and early childhood programs to help children and the adults in their lives navigate trauma. "It seems like teachers have in some ways become case workers. They get to know about their students' lives and the needs of their families, and with that can come secondary trauma."

When you're learning to be a teacher, you think it's just about lesson plans, curriculum, and seating charts. I was blindsided by the emotional aspect of teaching-I didn't know how to handle it.

Vicarious trauma affects teachers' brains in much the same way that it affects their students': The brain emits a fear response, releasing excessive cortisol and adrenaline that can increase heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration, and release a flood of emotions. This biological response can manifest in mental and physical symptoms such as anger and headaches, or workplace behaviors like missing meetings, lateness, or avoiding certain students, say experts.

Yet many teachers are never explicitly taught how to help students who have experienced trauma, let alone address the toll it takes on their own health and personal lives. We reached out to trauma-informed experts and educators around the country to get their recommendations for in-the-moment coping strategies and preventative measures to help teachers process vicarious trauma. We share their tips below.

Talking it Out

Garcia, now a teacher of eight years, says she's found that confiding in others-either a therapist, her boyfriend, or colleagues-helps her process students' trauma and her own emotions.

Connecting with colleagues to talk through and process experiences can be invaluable for teachers coping with secondary trauma, according to Micere Keels, an associate professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the TREP Project, a trauma-informed curriculum for urban teachers.

"Reducing professional isolation is critical," said Keels. "It allows educators to see that others are struggling with the same issues, prevents the feeling that one's struggles are due to incompetence, and makes one aware of alternative strategies for working with students exhibiting challenging behavior."

It doesn't serve anybody to pretend that we're teacher-bots with no emotions, which I think sometimes teachers feel like they have to be.

Finding a wellness-accountability buddy-a peer who agrees to support and keep you accountable to your wellness goals-or using a professional learning community as a space to check in with other teachers are also ways to get that support, offers Alex Shevrin, a former school leader and teacher at Centerpoint School, a trauma-informed high school in Vermont that institutes school-wide practices aimed at addressing students' underlying emotional needs.

At Centerpoint, time for a monthly wellness group-where teachers, administrators, and social workers support each other on their personal wellness goals like exercising and creating work-life balance-is built into the professional development schedule. Staff also use in-service time to focus on taking care of their health together, by hiking, biking, going to the gym, or even learning to knit.

"If I had one wish for every school in the country, it would be that they made time for teachers to really sit down and talk about how they're feeling in the work," said Shevrin. "It doesn't serve anybody to pretend that we're teacher-bots with no emotions, which I think sometimes teachers feel like they have to be."

Building Coping Strategies

Students affected by trauma can have combative personalities and learn which buttons to press to upset you in class, says Garcia. When a student acts out in class, Garcia takes a few deep breaths, drinks coffee, or goes to a different part of the classroom to help another student.

"If I get upset, it never goes anywhere," Garcia said. "When you try to have a battle in class, you automatically lose as the teacher."

That's a good approach, says Keck, who suggests developing proactive coping strategies to address stressful situations in advance. A strategy may be counting to five, visualizing a calming place, or responding with an opposite action-like talking to a student quietly when you want to yell. Waiting until you're actually in a stressful situation means you're likely to overreact or to say or do something unhelpful.

Keck also recommends mapping out your school day and taking note of the times of day you feel most stressed, and then integrating scheduled coping strategies into your daily routine. If you feel stressed when students start to lose focus midday, for example, guide your students in a quick group stretch and some deep breathing to shift energy before getting back to work.

"Look at your schedule. If you see a stressful pattern, don't wait for it to happen. Don't wait to feel overwhelmed and stressed," urges Keck.

The important part is customizing the strategy to meet your needs.

Garcia applies this strategy when she's at home. She knows that after she puts her daughter to sleep, the worry for her students creeps in-so she makes sure to take time for things she enjoys, like watching movies and playing video games.

While many teachers say they don't have time for self-care, experts insist that it's necessary to develop long-term self-care practices-and stick to them-to build up your overall well-being and resilience. These self-care activities could be going for a walk, reading, watching a movie, practicing mindfulness, or talking with a friend-whatever invigorates you.
©Shutterstock.com/Dudarev Mikhail
Establishing Coming Home Rituals

It can be hard to leave work at work, but to address vicarious trauma, teachers need to create clear boundaries between work and home life. Part of that can be developing a ritual or routine that signifies the end of a work day, either before you head home, on the way home, or at home.

"For me, sometimes it's just as simple as turning off my work phone before I go into my house," Shevrin says. "I hear the sound of my phone turning off and then I know that I'm home."

After an emotionally difficult day, many teachers will write about their experiences before they leave, or sit down with a colleague to help process it, Keck told us.

Others organize their desk or create a to-do list for the next workday so they can let go of worry before heading home. While driving home, teachers listen to audiobooks, call a friend, or sit in silence to decompress. A ritual could even be as simple as changing clothes or taking a bath once you get home.

For Garcia, it's about putting her daughter's needs first and making the most of the time she has with her.

"It's very easy to get overwhelmed and let the job consume you. But teaching is about balance," she said. "When I come home, I try to just focus on my kid so she gets as much of me as she can. It's not always easy, but I've learned to put my life and my daughter's life first."

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When Students Are Traumatized, Teachers Are Too

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Trauma in students' lives takes an emotional and physical toll on teachers as well. Experts weigh in on the best ways to cope.

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The busyness that comes with starting the new school year can come as a shock to the system when you're still in relaxed holiday mode.

Check out our 10 tips for surviving the shift, and for making your wellbeing a priority.

How to keep that relaxed holiday feeling

1. Reconnect to your purpose

Try to do one thing each week that reminds you why you became a teacher in the first place.

Get started: Use a teaching strategy that you and your students all enjoy to remind you of the difference you're making in their lives.

2. Adopt a growth mindset in your teaching

There's great value in trying new things and accepting mistakes as opportunities to learn. We could all do with a reminder of the power of 'yet'. It can be helpful to see yourself as a learner (just like your students) and to spend time reflecting on new ideas, considering what you have learnt and acknowledging areas that you find challenging.

Get started: Check out Developing a Growth Mindset in Teachers and Staff.

3. Focus on kindness and gratitude

An act of appreciation or kindness produces positive emotions, stronger social connections and improved wellbeing. Consider simple ways you can build gratitude and kindness into your day. And the best thing? Kindness and gratitude are contagious, so imagine the benefit to your classroom!

Get started: Each night, recall three good things that have happened during the day. To make it easy to keep track, check out the Gratitude Journal app.

4. Create clear boundaries between home and school

Set a reasonable time for leaving school each day (and stick to it). Find ways to turn off your teacher mindset, so that you can relax when you get home.

Get started: Try developing an end-of-day 'ritual' to help you switch mindsets. It may include changing your clothes when you get home, heading out for an afternoon walk, or spending time with family and friends. In addition, try to limit the amount of school work you bring home.

5. Set up effective debriefing and mentoring structures

Teaching can be an emotionally taxing job that throws up many different challenges. Set up structures that help you to focus on solutions rather than problems. While a venting session may make you feel better in the short term, it doesn't solve the problem and may make you feel stuck.

Get started: Consider using a debriefing structure to help manage your thinking about challenging situations. Or team up with a supportive colleague and set up a formal mentor relationship structure.

6. Establish good sleeping habits

Good-quality sleep is one of the most important aspects of maintaining your physical and psychological health. This can be a tough ask after the late nights and long sleep-ins you've probably indulged in during your holiday break!

Get started: Develop a regular bedtime routine, which may include taking a warm bath, reading quietly for a while or having a warm milk drink. Consider using a sleep app.

7. Build up your emotional resilience

Think of proactive ways to manage the stress in your life. Meet regularly with friends and family, spend time on hobbies you enjoy, read or watch things that make you laugh, and build into your daily routine proven stress-busting activities such as yoga, meditation or exercises that involve deep breathing.

Get started: There are lots of great (and free) apps to help you manage stress. These include the ReachOut Worrytime , ReachOut Breathe and Smiling Mind.

8. Keep focused on your goals

Setting goals is a great way to give you direction, focus and motivation. Try to ensure that all your goals are achievable, measurable and have an end point. It can be helpful to break a larger goal into more manageable sub-goals.

Get started: Think of something that, if you do it today, will make you feel satisfied and accomplished. Then do it!

9. Reward yourself

The improved physical and psychological health that comes from prioritising your wellbeing is a reward in itself, but there's also value in using tangible rewards when you meet particular goals.

Get started: Consider simple and practical ways to reward yourself whenever you reach a goal or sub-goal: take a walk in nature, soak in a warm bath, cook your favourite dinner or indulge in a massage.

10. Build new connections and relationships

Building new relationships and connections is key to our wellbeing. Take the time to get to know the students, parents and staff members in your school community.

Get started: Consider ways to develop student-focused relationships. See Wellbeing Fives for some practical ways to do this.
Professor Kinman, Gail. "Teacher wellbeing: how to mentally prepare for a new school year". The Guardian. 20th August 2014

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Follow these 10 powerful tips from ReachOut Schools to surviving the shift back to school, and for making your wellbeing a priority.

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What is Teacher Self-Care and How to Practice It

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Discover what self-care is, why it’s important for teachers, and how to bring self-care activities in your daily life and in the classroom.

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It's Time To Take Teacher Burnout Seriously. Here's How.

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It's Time To Take Teacher Burnout Seriously. Here's How.

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As educators, mental health professionals, and authors of a new book on helping students cut through stress and pave the way to purpose, we've spent our careers supporting students to manage their mental health and reach their potential. We've created award-winning high school programs, re-imagined college courses and leveraged technology to meet the ever-growing mental health needs that have been exasperated by the pandemic.

Our work has centered on students-their mental health, their well-being and what it takes to help them thrive.

As we've expanded our work and research to schools and colleges across the country, there's a shift emerging: it's not just students and their families in desperate need of support. It is educators themselves reaching out for our help.

Teachers, school administrators and academic leaders in public and private schools have been seeking our services to cope with their chronic fatigue. Lifelong educators reach out daily to explore possibilities for alternative careers, confiding that they've never felt this bad. Exasperated school leaders request workshops to cope with widespread distress and disillusionment, which are spurring a mass teacher exodus.

It's not just us noticing these trends-recent research reports and surveys from a number of organizations reveal alarming statistics on teacher well-being. According to a national poll by the EdWeek Research Center, sixty percent of teachers are finding their jobs frequently or always stressful, compromising their physical health, sleep and ability to enjoy free time with family or friends. Many say they feel less effective when they're stressed, which research shows can negatively impact the quality of their instruction, classroom management and relationships with students suffer. And only 12 percent of teachers report that they are very satisfied in their roles.

The educational climate is rapidly deteriorating, the ripples of which we have yet to fully feel. Burnout now dominates cultural conversations around school and work. Articles, podcasts and books about burnout are released every day.

As much as we talk about burnout, many people struggle to define it. Is it an occupational phenomenon, a syndrome, a clinical term? American psychologist, Dr. Christina Maslach identifies its three universal symptoms in her book, "Burnout: The Cost of Caring."

Exhaustion-feeling constantly drained of energy ("I have problems that I'm too tired to solve")

Ineffectiveness-feeling like your work doesn't accomplish anything, no matter how hard you try ("I have problems that I can't solve")

Cynicism-seeing the people you are trying to help as the source of your problems ("I have problems that people won't help me solve")

A common response teachers hear when they express their exhaustion is, "practice self-care and put yourself first." And when teachers feel ineffective, they are encouraged to "work smarter, not harder." While well intentioned, this advice fails.

First, it puts the onus of responsibility on teachers themselves, which implies that teachers are to blame for their burnout.

Second, it is difficult to implement. A "self-care" practice can feel counter to the ethos of the teaching profession. Education is a human service: it's about putting others first. Advice encouraging teachers to "work smarter" than they already are isn't actionable for many teachers because they have no additional bandwidth. No amount of effort can solve the morass of challenges facing teachers and students.

Finally, this advice only targets the symptoms of burnout. Not the root cause.

This is akin to seeing plumes of smoke billowing out the windows of a burning building and concluding that we need a fan to blow the smoke away.

The smoke is a symptom of the real problem: the fire we cannot see that is burning everything from the inside out.

Author Jonathan Malesic describes the cause of burnout as "being pulled between expectation and reality."

In our work with teachers, we describe this as simultaneously living in two worlds, the world in our mind (how we think things should be) versus the reality of the world and our lives. The bigger the gap between the two, the more exhausted, disempowered and cynical we become.

Teachers tell us they feel this tension every day. They live in a world where they are expected to uphold pre-pandemic academic standards, while managing widespread student disengagement, chronic mental health issues and increasingly dire societal issues spilling into the classroom.

If we really want to combat teacher burnout, we need more than lip service about resting up and working harder. We need to overhaul the expectations put on our teachers and stop serving students at our teachers' expense.

To do so, we can learn from other industries.

When COVID-19 forced people to work from home, savvy businesses quickly adapted. They shortened work weeks and implemented flexible work schedules. These adjusted expectations paved the way for hybrid work, which is leading to a permanent distributed workforce.

As a result, employees report increased productivity and satisfaction, thanks in part to reduced commute times, more opportunity to exercise and quieter, more convenient work environments. Of course, educators can't, and shouldn't work from home. But there is a wise lesson to be learned from this.

It wasn't going remote that made these companies succeed in the face of adversity. Rather, they shifted what they expected of their employees by adapting the work environment in response to new challenges brought on by the pandemic.

In education, we've done the exact opposite. We've moved the goalposts further away. In an effort to make up for lost time and combat learning loss, expectations placed on teachers have been raised. Not right-sized.

Educators are expected to improve standardized test scores and get students "back on track." All while navigating massive teacher shortages, increased logistical complexities, a culture war in the classroom and a teen mental health crisis.

We've come to expect our teachers to do more with less, at a time when their job is harder than ever. It's time we align the expectations placed upon teachers with reality.

We can start by helping school communities apply a values-based approach to designing their models. This approach serves as a decision-making framework that ensures every decision made adds value to all constituents-students, families and staff.

We must examine every policy, practice and initiative our educators are expected to implement and for each one, we must ask the simple, yet profound question, what's the purpose of this and does it benefit our students and teachers? These inquiries may lead to tough conversations about the role of standardized tests, AP classes, school start time and a host of other entrenched educational practices. But if a policy or practice does not meet the threshold of adding value to both teachers and students, then we must consider: Do the potential benefits outweigh the subsequent costs of teacher burnout?

The future of our teachers, and our students, depends on getting this question right.

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It's Time To Take Teacher Burnout Seriously. Here's How. - EdSurge News

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As educators, mental health professionals, and authors of a new book on helping students cut through stress and pave the way to purpose, we've spent our careers supporting students to manage their mental health and reach their potential.

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Why It'a SO important that teachers practice Self-Care

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Why It'a SO important that teachers practice Self-Care

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Educators encounter hundreds of moments like these every day. We are challenged over and over and over by things that students do, or the unplanned fire drill, or the announcement of a mandatory meeting on Wednesday afternoon, or an upset parent showing up at our door five minutes before school starts, or the broken copy machine, or a request that we cover someone else's class during our prep because their sub didn't show, or any number of other things. Alone, these are minor inconveniences, but the sum total of these moments feels exhausting, depletes our resilience, and contributes to burnout. There is no moment more important for educators to attend to than this one between stimulus and response. If we slow down and examine these moments, if we cultivate new responses, we might just transform our schools into places where we all thrive.

Change is the only thing we can count on. It will rain when we wish it wouldn't, kids will say obnoxious things when we're exhausted, leaders will come and go. However, we have tremendous power in how we interpret what happens and, therefore, in how we respond to big and little incidents that we didn't anticipate, don't want, or don't like. The opportunity for resilience originates in how we make sense of the things that happen, because interpretation dictates actions. There are many ways to interpret a student's obnoxious comment at the end of a rainy Friday, and each of those interpretations will lead us to act in a different way. Each of those actions will have intended and unintended consequences, ripples of impact on ourselves, our class, and our relationship to that individual student. We can make a choice in these moments.

Let this sink in: We can pinpoint the exact moment when resilience can be cultivated. You can actually do something about how you experience every day; you don't have to be a victim of the turmoil and unpredictability of the world. Change is a given in life; how you respond is within your control.

I have no doubt that we all enter this field of work because we want to positively impact young people. The key to achieving our purpose lies in the moment between stimulus and response. We can meet our commitment to educational equity when we examine this moment and cultivate behaviors different than those in which we habitually engage. By cultivating resilience, we can fulfill the intentions that brought us into this profession. In addition, with this knowledge, we can do something about the exodus of teachers who quit because of burnout. We can offer our students more stability and continuity, as well as role models for managing the inevitable challenges of life.
RESILIENCE: THE WHAT, WHY, AND HOW
Simply put, resilience is how we weather the storms in our lives and rebound after something difficult. The most important thing to know is that you can increase your resilience; it's a set of adaptive behaviors. In this book, I hope to guide you in a journey to discover the resilience that already exists within you, and to discover many ways to cultivate your resilience.

Resilience is in great part about our attitude and behaviors; that's what we'll focus on in this book. However, it's also important to acknowledge that our ability to be resilient is also connected to our circumstances, which we may have only limited ability to influence. Furthermore, researchers have found that there are neurobiological underpinnings of emotional resilience (Osório, Probert, Jones, Young, and Robbins, 2017). This research seeks to understand why there's such variation in the way people respond to adversity: Some people overcome unbelievable hardship, whereas others' lives are completely derailed by intense levels of stress. Various mechanisms in our bodies, and specifically our brains, work in concert to make us more or less stress resilient across our life span. Our genetic makeup may play a role: We may actually be born with a set amount of resilience. The emerging field of epigenetics is exploring this question of how stressors that our ancestors experienced might impact our level of resilience.

Although this research is interesting and someday may point to very useful implications, we'll focus on this fact: A substantial amount of our ability to be resilient is fostered in our daily habits. This is good news. Here's an expanded definition of resilience, which forms that basis for this book. Resilience is

A way of being that allows us to bounce back quickly from adversity, and stronger than before, so that we can fulfill our purpose in life.

An adaptive, dynamic process that includes an individual's interactions over time in a complex environment. Context plays a role; resilience is not simply a function of one individual's behavior. Who we are and where we are impact our ability to cultivate resilience.

Cultivated through engaging in specific habits and by fostering specific dispositions.

What enables us to thrive, not just survive.

WHY WE MUST FOCUS ON RESILIENCE
Schools are stressful places. Regardless of whether you teach in an established, well-resourced private or suburban school or in an underfunded school in an underserved community, teaching is emotional work and is inherently stressful. In part, this is the nature of being in a helping profession and serving young people in complex organizations. Healthy stress can be okay; it can challenge us and help us develop. However, in many of our schools, healthy stress is frequently displaced by toxic stress. Toxic stress occurs when demands consistently outpace our ability to cope. Toxic stress first manifests as decreased productivity, and escalates to more serious symptoms such as anxiety, dissociation, frustration, and, eventually, burnout. Roughly half a million US teachers leave the profession each year-a turnover rate of over 20% (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2014).

School leaders-both site leaders and central office leaders-must focus on boosting the resilience of staff as a lever for school transformation. Teacher attrition among first-year teachers has increased about 40% in the past two decades ( Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey, 2014). A range of factors, such as morale, accountability expectations, and salaries, certainly contribute to the attrition problems, but stress and poor management of stressors are also rated as a top reason why teachers leave the profession (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017).

Burnout is physical and emotional fatigue-and surely we can do something about that. This rate is much higher in urban areas, in secondary classrooms, and in hard-to-staff content areas such special education, math, science, and foreign languages (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017). It is estimated that teacher turnover costs school districts upwards of $2.2 billion per year (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2014) and the cost of replacing a teacher in an urban district exceeds $20,000 per teacher (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017). For site administrators, turnover rates may be comparable, particularly in urban areas, but the data is not systematically collected as it is for teacher attrition.

Lack of resilience, therefore, has a financial cost and contributes to staff instability, which in turn negatively impacts student learning and experience. High turnover rates at schools make it hard to accumulate professional capital, hinder the implementation of programs, contribute to low levels of trust among stakeholders, and make staff and student culture fragile. It would simply make good sense, from a financial perspective, to focus on increasing staff resilience.

The end goal, of course, is not just to retain warm adult bodies in classrooms but to meet the needs of our students. Kids need passionate, effective, committed educators. In order to retain such people, school leaders need to provide teachers with resources to meet the challenges they'll encounter in their work so that they can learn from those challenges, surmount them, and fulfill their purpose. And our purpose is to ensure that we are working in, teaching in, and leading organizations where every single child thrives-academically, socially, and emotionally. We must cultivate resilience so that all children feel that they belong to a resilient community, so that all children graduate and are eligible for the college or career of their choice, and so that all children have an expansive tool set to contribute to our society.

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Why It's So Important That Teachers Cultivate Their Own Resilience | KQED

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Educators encounter hundreds of moments like these every day. We are challenged over and over and over by things that students do, or the unplanned fire drill, or the announcement of a mandatory meeting on Wednesday afternoon, or an upset parent showing up at our door five minutes before school starts, or the broken copy machine, or a request that we cover someone else's class during our prep because their sub didn't show, or any number of other things.

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Listen to my interview with Elena Aguilar (transcript):
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When talking about a profession that loses 50 percent of its workforce in the first five years of their careers, it would be an understatement to say teaching is challenging. It traps us in small rooms with an unpredictable assortment of personalities, energies, and needs. It forces us to make hundreds of small, exhausting decisions every day. And over and over again, it puts us in predicaments that test our confidence, wear out our patience, and break our hearts. You can learn all the techniques, plan outstanding lessons, and set up a water-tight classroom management system, but to do this work and stick with it long enough to get good at it, you need a level of emotional resilience most other jobs will never require.

And at this particular moment in history, teaching may be harder than ever. Systems have been put in place that make the work seem almost impossible, and the powers that be seem to be rooting against our success. A lot can be done to change that, to make the challenges of teaching more satisfying and less...soul-sucking, but on most days it can seem like those changes are pretty far outside of our sphere of influence. Finding the courage and energy to push for change despite how hard it is? That requires resilience, too.

And our teacher training never prepares us, never teaches us exactly how to develop that resilience. In fact, in my own training, the topic of my emotional state as a teacher never came up once.

The good news is that we now have a resource that focuses entirely on the topic of teacher resilience. In her book, Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Teachers, instructional coach Elena Aguilar walks us through twelve habits that teachers can develop to strengthen their emotional resilience. The book and its companion workbook are organized around a year-long calendar; Aguilar recommends that teachers work through the book slowly.

"The workbook has over 365 exercises, many of which you'll probably want to repeat more than once," she says. "Ideally people will be engaging in this learning with friends and colleagues so that they can have the kinds of conversations that will make this learning really sink in and stick."

Let's take a peek at the 12 habits now. My hope is that in getting a better understanding of the factors that contribute to emotional resilience, you'll see areas that you can improve for yourself, and this in turn will allow you to not only stick with this incredibly important work, but find new ways to effect change, inspire others, and thrive.

12 Habits that Build Resilience

In the book, Aguilar explains how developing each of these habits contributes to resilience. She recommends focusing on a different habit each month, taking the whole month to learn about, reflect on, and develop practices that strengthen that habit. Below each habit is the month Aguilar suggests as an ideal time to focus on it: This is based on a typical American school calendar, where the school year starts around August/September and ends around May/June. If your calendar is different, you may want to make adjustments accordingly.

1. Know Yourself

Suggested month: June

Taking the time to reflect on and get clear about your values, your preferences, your skills and aptitudes, and your sociopolitical identity can help you develop a strong sense of purpose. This makes you more likely to respond to difficult situations in ways that are consistent with that purpose. "Being really anchored in your purpose," Aguilar explains, "being really clear about what you want to be doing in life, helps you deal with challenges and setbacks."

2. Understand Emotions

Suggested month: July

Emotions "can be tremendous resources and sources of energy," Aguilar says. They key is figuring out "how to have healthier relationships with them, how to understand them, name them, accept them, and then work with them." During this month, Aguilar has teachers examine the way emotions influence our thinking (and vice-versa) and how to work with them, instead of against them.

She's especially interested in how we deal with anger. "There have been times when I've acted from anger, and it hasn't been productive," she says. "And there are other times when I figured out how to use my anger as a fuel and as energy, how to act from a place of kindness and compassion, but not suppress my anger."

3. Tell Empowering Stories

Suggested month: August

"The space where we can have the greatest impact on our resilience is between a thing that happens and how we interpret and make sense of that thing," Aguilar says. That interpretation takes the form of a story we tell ourselves.

"So for example, a student rolls her eyes at you. That's the thing that happens," she says. "How you make sense of and interpret that event is precisely the point where either your resilience can be drained or filled, because you could interpret her eye rolling as This student doesn't respect me, or you can interpret that event as, This is very typical behavior from 12-year-olds, and I'm going to move on to the next part of the lesson. In that moment, if we can hone our ability to expand that space between what happens and how we respond and how we interpret it, we have so much more power then to cultivate our resilience."

4. Build Community

Suggested month: September

If we develop habits that nurture relationships with our colleagues, students, parents, and administrators, we strengthen our resilience. "There's actually medical research saying that isolation is more dangerous to your physical health than smoking," Aguilar says. "Teaching can be such a lonely experience, and I think anything that we can do to begin cementing those connections will just help us so much when things get rough." The beginning of a school year is an ideal time to start, and by putting relationship-building habits in place early, that community can be a source of strength all year long.

5. Be Here Now

Suggested month: October

"Learning how to be in the present moment without judging it can help us to experience acceptance. It helps us to have clear-headedness so that we can make choices in our responses." Developing habits of mindfulness, where we focus on what is happening right now without judgment, can help us to circumvent a "triggered" reaction to daily challenges and instead respond calmly and thoughtfully. Daily meditation or even brief moments of focusing on our breath can help us hit that "pause button" and bring ourselves to that place of calm.

6. Take Care of Yourself

Suggested month: November

"It's really hard to build community or to cultivate compassion or be a learner-some of the other habits-when you're just sick, when you're worn out," Aguilar says. So this month, she recommends focusing on the habits of physical self-care, digging into the reasons why teachers so often fall short in this area. "I think people know what to do," she says. "We know we should be eating more leafy greens and exercising more and so on, but why is it so hard?" Uncovering those reasons can help with developing habits that work.

7. Focus on the Bright Spots

Suggested month: December

During this month, Aguilar guides teachers to practice giving more attention to what is working, rather than what's not. "Our brains have a negativity bias," she explains, "so everything that is challenging, that is potentially a threat, appears really vividly and clearly to us, because of the way our brains are wired, and so one of the skills that we need to hone is the ability to see all the things that are going well or even just okay."

In the classroom, for example, we can prompt ourselves to regularly notice students who are paying attention and on-task, rather than giving all our attention to the few students who aren't. By developing this habit, we increase our sense of empowerment, which in turn builds greater resilience.

8. Cultivate Compassion

Suggested month: January

When we practice compassionate thinking for others and ourselves, we become better equipped to handle difficult situations. "Cultivating compassion, broadening our perspective on how we see a situation, helps us to empathize with others, to see the long view, to take ourselves out of the drama of the moment," Aguilar says. So when students misbehave, a colleague is short with us, or a parent challenges one of our decisions, being in the habit of viewing these situations through the lens of compassion can help you not take that behavior personally, which leads to smarter, less reactive decision-making.

9. Be a Learner

Suggested month: February

"Resilient people are curious," Aguilar says. "Resilient people experience a challenge and turn around and say, Wow. That was really hard. That pushed me to my limits. What can I learn from that? Just that question alone immediately propels you into a place of being able to build your resilience." So this month, teachers are encouraged to reflect on who they are as learners, to better understand the stages of the learning process, and to practice seeing challenges as invitations to curiosity.

10. Play and Create

Suggested month: March

One tool for building resilience that is easy to overlook is the habit of play. "I think it's a human right to be creative, to create, enjoy, and appreciate art," Aguilar says. "Playing and creating can unlock inner resources for dealing with stress, for solving problems...it can help us see different things and find different approaches to tackle challenges." This month-which may hit right around spring break-teachers are encouraged to build regular periods of play and creation into their daily lives.

11. Ride the Waves of Change

Suggested month: April

The end of the school year inevitably brings all kinds of changes; some of these can completely throw us off track if we're not prepared for them. Aguilar recommends teachers spend this month looking at "how we can harness our energies to manage those changes and also direct our energy to the places that we can make the biggest difference." This practice includes slowing down, facing and dealing with fear, and mindfully evaluating situations to determine which responses will have the most impact.

12. Celebrate and Appreciate

Suggested month: May

As the school year winds down, we have lots of opportunities to celebrate our own accomplishments and those of our students and colleagues. This month, teachers are encouraged to develop daily habits of gratitude and to carry those habits throughout the year. "Even in the hardest moments," she says, "if we can shift into a stance of appreciation, we can build our resilience."

Build the Habits Over a Year

The best way to make all 12 of these habits stick is to work through them slowly, over the course of a year. Even better, do it with a group of committed colleagues.

To support you in that journey, Elena Aguilar is offering several resources:

The Onward Workbook is the companion to the book and contains 365 daily exercises aligned with the monthly habits.

The Onward website at onwardthebook.com offers downloadable mediations, printables, a self-assessment and related blog posts and videos.

The Onward Facebook page will offer private groups for each of the 12 habits, so you can study and practice that habit within a larger community.

Come back for more.
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12 Ways Teachers Can Build their Own Resilience

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Listen to my interview with Elena Aguilar (transcript): Sponsored by simpleshow videomaker and Screencast-O-Matic This post contains Amazon Affiliate links. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you.

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Try these quick and easy ways to build resilience and relieve stress.

By this point in the school year, you're tired and don't need another long list of self-care strategies. At the same time, perhaps you're worried about burnout and are experiencing the negative effects of stress. Perhaps you'd also like to do something to boost your reserves of energy so that you can make it through the year, and even experience joy.

I've been studying resilience in educators for a long time-for my own sake and to support the educators I coach. The following are small ways to assist with managing the daily stresses of teaching. When I take action and do any of these, l know that I'll feel better emotionally and physically and also that I'm filling my reserves of resilience.

Strategies for Managing Daily Stress

Sing a song. Perhaps during your morning shower or while you're driving to school, belt out a high-energy song that you find empowering. My latest favorite is Pink's " I Am Here." This tactic works because it makes you use your full lung capacity, and breathing deep is energizing-and there's research on the positive impact of listening to music. Time needed: four minutes.

Eat a handful of almonds or a high-quality protein like a protein bar. Around mid-morning, our blood sugar drops and we can start feeling physically tired. Protein helps to level out our emotions. Time needed: two minutes.

Take 10 deep, slow breaths. Close your eyes, sit with your feet planted on the ground, and focus on the sensation of air going in and out of your nose. Say to yourself, "Breathing in, breathing out." Make your exhale longer than your inhale. Breathe at recess or lunch time, or before school. Just one minute of mindful breathing will help you feel calmer and more grounded. Time needed: one minute.

Describe three good things. Record a voice memo at the end of the day in which you describe three good things that happened and your role in making them happen. This will remind you of your power to influence your life. Burnout is often a symptom of feeling deeply disempowered-remind yourself of your ability to make choices every day. Time needed: three minutes.

Make yourself smile. Try putting a pencil between your teeth and hold it there for 20 seconds. Smiling releases endorphins, and doing this exercise will make it more likely that you'll smile at others during the day. Time needed: one minute.

Have a short interaction with someone at school that you don't usually talk to. The person can be a student, parent, colleague, or other staff member-lunch servers, custodians, crossing guards. This will strengthen and widen your social circles, and community is critical for resilience. And yes, do this every day. Time needed: five minutes.

Notice and name three emotions you experience during the day. Say to yourself, "I'm experiencing sadness (or anger, or joy)." Here's a list of emotions to print out and reference. Circle the emotion when you notice it and note the date. You don't need to dig into the emotion-just notice it. Time needed: five minutes.

Write down something for which you're grateful. It can be just one thing, or more if you find yourself on a roll. But one thing is enough. You can do this at any time of the day. Just do it every day. Time needed: five minutes.

We know there's a difference between feeling stressed or a little burned out and depression. Many educators deal with depression, so if you have any concerns about your mental well-being, please speak to a professional right away.

Resilience is built one thought and one action at a time. It's the slow and steady strengthening of our resilience habits that makes it easier for us to manage challenges and rebound after setbacks.

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Simple Tips for Boosting Teacher Resilience

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Try these quick and easy ways to build resilience and relieve stress. By this point in the school year, you're tired and don't need another long list of self-care strategies. At the same time, perhaps you're worried about burnout and are experiencing the negative effects of stress.

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Not too long ago, many educators who complained of burnout were probably greeted with a collective shrug from school leaders. Teacher exhaustion or stress have often been dismissed as signs of weakness and an inability to cope. With schools and districts providing little in the way of support, the burden was always on educators to deal with whatever was dragging them down.

Although this scenario still plays out in too many schools, districts are becoming more aware and sympathetic to the pressures teachers face in school every day and the adverse impact it has on the profession and students. This acknowledgement leads to - hopefully, eventually - strategies and programs designed to support educators.

Experts caution, however, that policymakers resist a once-size-fits-all approach. Yes, educators are burned out, they are stressed, they are fatigued, they are demoralized, and many are now coping with trauma-all conditions with similar symptoms that require proper diagnosis to treat effectively. The trauma could be their own - or their students'.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), more than half of all U.S. children have experienced some kind of trauma.

Whether you're a teacher, paraprofessional, counselor, or school resource officer, every staff member cares deeply about students. And that means being exposed to the traumas students bring into school every day, including poverty, grief, family problems, racism, drug abuse. The emotional and physical toll is often severe. Even if they have not endured trauma themselves, educators can begin exhibiting symptoms similar to those of their students - withdrawal, anxiety, depression, and chronic fatigue.

Secondary traumatic stress is sort of the consequence of being a good teacher. If you care about your students, you're probably not going to avoid it" - Jessica Lander, teacher

This is called secondary traumatic stress (STS), defined by the National Child Trauma Stress Network (NCTSN) as "the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another."

Secondary traumatic stress has long been acknowledged as a condition affecting professions such as nurses, child welfare workers, first-responders, and counselors. It's taken a while, but STS is "beginning to be actualized as a real condition affecting teachers," says Steve Hydon, clinical professor and director of the School Social Work Program at the University of Southern California.

"What was once referred to as stress or educators 'having a bad day' - which might still be happening - has evolved. Schools are realizing the very real presence of STS."

The condition is likely more prevalent than anyone may realize, says Jessica Lander, a high school teacher in Lowell, Mass.

"Secondary traumatic stress is sort of the consequence of being a good teacher. If you care about students, you're probably not going to avoid it."

'It Drains Us'

Lander likely helped a lot of educators begin to understand STS last year with an article she wrote for the Harvard Graduate School of Education titled "Helping Teachers Manage the Weight of Trauma," a short primer on the condition complete with recommended resources. KQED MindShift picked up the story, which was soon widely shared across social media.

Research examining the impact of STS on educators, however, remains fairly thin.

A 2012 study conducted by the University of Montana did conclude that there is an increased risk for STS in school personnel. The study analyzed over 300 staff members in six schools in the northwest United States. The researchers found that "approximately 75 percent of the sample exceeded cut-offs on all three subscales of STS. Furthermore, 35.3 percent of participants reported at least moderate symptoms of depression."

The tendency to conflate conditions persists, despite the similarity in symptoms, says Hydon.

"Compassion fatigue," for example, is often used interchangeably with STS. Compassion fatigue "generally sets in over time, hence the 'fatigue'." explains Hydon. "Secondary traumatic stress can set in almost immediately because of a student experience."

Like fatigue or burnout, STS quickly spills over into educators' personal lives and likely hastens their exit from the profession.

"It seems like teachers have in some ways become case workers," LeaAnn Keck of Trauma Smart told Edutopia. "They get to know about their students' lives and the needs of their families, and with that can come secondary trauma."

Jennifer Pacatte, a teacher in Rochester, NY, considers herself fortunate that she has a network of support outside the school. When she began her career in the mid-1990s, she admits she didn't quite realize what she was was getting herself into beyond the role she had been trained for.

"I was not really prepared for how my students' lives outside of school would seep into the classroom and how that would so deeply affect me," she recalls.

"Every day, I would go home and think about my kids and their problems. Educators take that on, and it drains us. For newer teachers nowadays, it has to be even worse. They don't have the capacity to deal with the impact."

Keeping Educators Healthy

Data from the 2016 National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH) showed that 46 percent of America's children had experienced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE) with the number rising to 55 percent for children aged 12 to 17. One in five U.S. children have two or more of these experiences.

In the small rural district in eastern Washington where Steve Stroschein teaches, the number of ACEs students have experienced is staggering.

"More of our kids are affected by drug abuse, violence at home, poverty," he says. "We're a different school now than when I started in 1990, or even 2000."

As president of the Clarkston Education Association, Stroschein was concerned by the impact student trauma was having on educators in the district, particularly those just starting out. "As educators, our focus is always on the students, but we have to bring it back to ourselves. Our educators are stressed. They're struggling."

In 2018, he teamed up with the district superintendent to launch a modest initiative to help "keep our teachers healthy," Stroschein says. "We're emphasizing community-building within the school. Giving them a person to talk with, providing them with resources. We're a small district so we can make more of an effort to check in on all our staff to see how they're doing."

"It's important that they know we care. We can't leave our educators out on an island by themselves."

Last May, representatives from 39 National Education Association affiliates echoed Stroschein's concern at a gathering in Chicago to discuss trauma-informed schools. Participants noted that many members felt isolated as they neglected their own mental and physical health while they assisted students dealing with trauma.

In the resulting report, NEA and the National Council of State Education Associations issued a series of recommendations around trauma-informed schools, including advocating for comprehensive mental health and employee assistance program supports for all educators. Acknowledging the need for self-care, NEA and NCSEA also urged affiliates to promote a campaign to counter the narrative that it's somehow selfish to look after yourself.

Not Only About Self-Care

Steve Hydon says educators have a responsibility to be aware of the importance of self-care and be proactively engaged in it.

"But it is also the school's responsibility to understand that trauma is inevitable and can impact anyone," he adds. "If we want healthy teachers in our classrooms, schools must acknowledge the importance of things like staff appreciation, involvement in decision-making, vacation time, mental health awareness and professional development training on ways to build and value self-care."

It's critical that these efforts are school or district-wide, says Jessica Lander, because an inordinate emphasis on self-care or "resilience" without adequate supports places too much of the burden on the individual educator.

"What was fascinating to me when I wrote the article last year," Lander recalls, "was the number of teachers who responded by saying, 'Oh my gosh, I have been feeling these things for years, and I didn't know it had a name.'"

That can be isolating for educators, making it more likely that they think it's just an individual problem that they alone have to address.

"If the teacher doesn't know what he or she is going through," Lander says, "the school or district has an obligation to tell them, 'We are going to name it and we are going to help you.'"

It's the compassionate and right thing to do, she adds, but "no teacher will do their best work if they are suffering from STS. The bottom line is strategies to support educators are always going to help students."

Resources

NEA: Adverse Childhood Experiences and Trauma-Informed Schools
NEA and its affiliates are actively engaged in finding ways for schools and educators to address the issue of trauma and its implications for learning, behavior, and school safety.

National Child Traumatic Stress Network
Understanding the Impact of Trauma Work on Professionals

TraumaAwareSchools.org
Managing Secondary Traumatic Stress

Edutopia
Are You At Risk for Secondary Traumatic Stress?

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'I Didn't Know It Had a Name': Secondary Traumatic Stress and Educators

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Not too long ago, many educators who complained of burnout were probably greeted with a collective shrug from school leaders. Teacher exhaustion or stress have often been dismissed as signs of weakness and an inability to cope. With schools and districts providing little in the way of support, the burden was always on educators to deal with whatever was dragging them down.

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Early in my teaching career, I made my second-grade class cry.

I didn't mean to. I was teaching a lesson on writing with detail. My students-7- and 8-year-olds living in a big city, many of them in poverty-were sitting around me in a circle, notebooks and pencils in their laps. We were at the beginning of the unit, and I was modeling the process of coming up with an idea.

"As writers, sometimes it helps to think of a time when we had a big feeling, like being happy, or angry, or sad." I scrunched up my mouth, nodding: I was thinking really hard. "Like... let's see. Well, I remember how I felt when I heard that my grandma had died. I felt really sad." I uncapped a marker and scribbled notes on the whiteboard in my lap: Grandma died. Sad. "Maybe I'll write about that moment. And I'll include lots of details, like there were tears in my eyes, or how I couldn't stop petting my cat." I wrote on my whiteboard. Details: tears, petting cat.

My students were looking at me with total attention-something that didn't happen often. I pressed onward. "Or, maybe-"

Suddenly, a little voice piped up: "My uncle died." I looked up. It was a boy who often had trouble focusing. "He got shotted and he died."

Silence.

And then I saw that there was a tear running down his cheek.

After a moment, I said, "I'm so sorry to hear that." I took a breath. "Maybe-"

Another voice-a little girl's-chimed in. "My grandpa died," she said. "Because of cancer."

I nodded.

And, then, suddenly, all of my students were talking at once.

"My auntie died."

"My auntie died, too!"

"My cousin's baby died before it even got borned!" And then a sob.

And then all of my students were crying at once. They were sniffling, blubbering, wiping snot on their sleeves. My classroom was filled with the pained, contagious cries of children whose emotional floodgates had burst open.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do.

Clearly, the lesson's ship had sailed: We were not going to be talking about writing. Instead, I had to figure out how to comfort and corral a hysterical group of children-while seeming like I had everything under control. And I had to figure this out within the next 10 minutes, when the bell for recess was going to ring.

Suddenly, a particularly sensitive little boy, his cheeks stained with tears, stood up and ran to the corner, then slid down to the floor and put his head between his knees.

And as I watched him, helpless, I thought, "If only I could do that."

The Emotionality of Teaching

All this time later, years after leaving the teaching profession, the memory of that day still gnaws at me. Had I set students up for emotions they weren't prepared for? What messages had my words-and my actions and reactions-communicated? What should I have done differently? I remember little about my academic instruction that year-the subtraction lessons, the spelling tests-but the memories of that day and so many other deeply emotional experiences that year have lingered.

Because that, more than teaching kids how to read and write, is what teaching is all about: reaching clear to the heart of another human being and using everything you've got to make a difference. It's calming kids when they've had a rough recess, celebrating when they lose their first tooth, absorbing their struggles and their traumas, channeling their joy, and investing the currency of your own emotions in an effort to help them grow.

It's what sociology professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book The Managed Heart, first called "emotional labor": managing one's own feelings in order to manage others'. It's work that is often invisible and almost always undercompensated-and it's also really, really hard.

For Allison Jacobs Friedmann, who has taught elementary and middle school in Boston for 20 years, teaching is walking an emotional tightrope-and her description of a day at work sounds as though it's lifted from Hochschild's book. "Every day, 20 to 25 children arrive at your door, and each is bringing a range of emotions," Friedmann explained to me recently over email. In order to reach each of these students, teachers must not only respond to-and often gently guide and correct-students' behavior, she says, but also do so "with a calm and consistent tone. You have to be unemotional in order to make space for their emotions."

The job description is to provide academic instruction, but the most complex, difficult-to-master aspects of teaching involve guiding students "to be little emotional managers," Hochschild told me. "You're teaching them their ABCs, but also how not to spin out of control, how to forgive, how to negotiate, how to take things one step at a time."

And teachers have to do all of this-for every one of their students, often all at once-while also managing their own feelings. "If you've had a terrible day at home," says Hochschild, "you set that aside for the child in front of you, who comes in with his or her own story." Her comments allude to one of the most difficult paradoxes in education: It's a profession that elicits strong emotional reactions from its practitioners while also requiring that, for the sake of the students' well-being-not to mention the decidedly unappealing prospect of an out-of-control classroom-they demonstrate the illusion of unflappable calmness and control.

Where Power Resides

As I was planning this article, I was thinking I would ask for expert advice on the ways that teachers can avoid this fate by, say, setting appropriate boundaries or examining their own emotions in order to manage them more effectively.

But when I asked Hochschild for some tips, her response took me by surprise. "I wouldn't say that's the right way to look at it at all," she replied. She explained that teachers-who, apart from students and parents, tend to be the furthest from the center of school power-are the "shock absorbers" of an overwhelmed system. "People can blame the teacher because too much expectation has been placed on the school system," she said. In other words, when students fail to get what they need-from their families, from schools, from society as a whole-teachers are expected, unfairly, to pick up the slack. And when they inevitably fail to do so, they feel personal and professional guilt, which they must suppress for the broader good: Emotional labor begets more emotional labor.

And the further you are from the locus of power, the fewer supports in the system and the more emotional labor you wind up doing, according to Hochschild. This is why, for instance, teachers in high-poverty districts-where many feel like they're oppressed by overwhelming systemic obstacles-often report higher degrees of burnout than their counterparts in more privileged districts. This framework also explains why teachers, direct caregivers who are generally undervalued by society, are expected to take their students' struggles personally-while doctors, direct caregivers with a relatively high degree of social status, are not expected to magically cure patients made sick by their surroundings.

Systemic Problems, Systemic Solutions

Because the issue of emotional labor is systemic, Hochschild concludes, the answers need to be systemic too. Although teachers should always expect to bring their humanity and vulnerability to their job, they can't-and shouldn't-be expected to alleviate the pressures that cause them to feel such disproportionate ownership over their students' emotional lives. Instead, we need to address the fact that the system expects teachers to do this in the first place.

That starts, Hochschild says, with creating "an atmosphere in which teachers have a voice and feel respected. What makes emotional labor gratifying rather than burdensome is a functioning care system." Only when this is in place, she says-when teachers are no longer "in a defensive crouch, but feel like they're part of a larger team"-will the proper emotional and psychological support structures be available. This is starting to happen, she says, in forward-thinking districts where, she says, teachers' expertise is respected; as a result, teachers are able to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, manage their well-being more proactively, and pursue their professional growth. In other words, when teachers can shoulder a normal, appropriate range of emotional stress-but are not expected to take responsibility for the ills of society-"it means the system is healthy."

But according to most teachers I spoke with, a healthy system is nowhere to be found. "Because society does not meet all my students' basic needs, they come to school with heavy emotional loads," Friedmann said, reflecting on the growing sphere of her responsibilities and the lack of a proportional response from the school. "And then it becomes my job to help them manage all those very large feelings." Jianan Shi, who taught high school in Boston and Chicago before transitioning into nonprofit work, agrees. "We are fighting in the context of fundamental human rights which are not being delivered."

I often think about my second graders from that year, those children mourning the people they'd lost. I could have done a lot more for them, I know, in that moment, that year.

At times I feel that I failed them. Other times I feel that I did the best I could. Often, I feel both of these things at once.

But what I know with certainty is that I wasn't up to the task of absorbing, reflecting, and redirecting the feelings of wounded 7-year-olds. I was their teacher, and I loved them deeply, but I couldn't compensate for all the injustice in their lives.

To help them-and they're big now, those kids, much bigger and stronger than their second-grade selves-we must be willing to look for bigger solutions too, beyond the narrow confines of classrooms to the broader contours of society itself. And as we check our progress, we should never compromise on the health of our teachers, who are-in every way-the system's vital heart and soul.

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Teaching Your Heart Out: Emotional Labor and the Need for Systemic Change

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Early in my teaching career, I made my second-grade class cry. I didn't mean to. I was teaching a lesson on writing with detail. My students-7- and 8-year-olds living in a big city, many of them in poverty-were sitting around me in a circle, notebooks and pencils in their laps.

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Great research supporting Teacher well being

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Teachers' stress and anxiety have soared and their morale has plummeted during the pandemic, a flammable combination that could burn them out and lead them to leave their jobs. It's more important than ever, experts say, for districts to support their teachers by looking after their mental health.

Even before the pandemic, districts were paying more attention to teachers' mental and emotional wellness, offering sessions on mindfulness, yoga, exercise, and healthy eating. But COVID-19 has created wildfires of mental and emotional suffering across all job sectors, including teaching.

The consulting group McKinsey & Co. surveyed 1,000 employers, and 90 percent reported that the pandemic was affecting the behavioral health of their employees. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that rates of anxiety and depression have quadrupled during COVID-19.

The toll on K-12 teachers appears to be particularly acute. One study found that during the pandemic, teachers were more likely to report feeling stressed and burned out than other state and local government-sector employees. Eighty-four percent of teachers surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center in March said that teaching is more stressful than it was before the pandemic.

RAND Corporation researchers found that between May and October 2020, the proportion of K-12 educators seriously worried about burnout rose from one quarter to 57 percent. In another study, those researchers found that one-quarter of teachers said they were likely to leave the profession when they finish the 2020-21 school year, a rate that-if it were to materialize-would be more than triple the normal rate of attrition.

Teachers' jobs-stressful even before the pandemic-have become even tougher, with longer work hours, struggles to engage students remotely, repeated pivots from hybrid to remote to in-person instruction, not to mention fears that they-or their loved ones-could get COVID-19.

Those dynamics make it "particularly important right now" to tend to teachers' mental health, said Jill Cook, the president of the American School Counselor Association. "Districts need to understand that and take action," she said.

In a joint report last summer, ASCA and the National Association of School Psychologists urged districts to provide "psychological triage" not just for students, but for staff, to address trauma and intense stress caused by the pandemic. A new guidebook from the U.S. Department of Education urged districts to step up emotional support for their staff members, even as they focused intensely on supporting students traumatized by the events of the last year.

So how can districts make their teachers' mental health a priority? EdWeek sought out the advice of workplace mental health experts, researchers, and school districts that are prioritizing the issue. Here's what they said.

1) Talk openly about mental health issues, including your own

"Making mental health visible is key," said Darcy Gruttadaro, the director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. "We need leaders to talk about it. It's the 800-pound gorilla in the room."

District and school leaders should look for every opportunity to talk about how difficult the pandemic, and discussions on racial injustice, have been, and how "we all have mental health struggles," and need support, she said.

Administrators should take care not to overuse email in conveying their support for psychological wellness; there is no substitute for eye contact on such a sensitive, important topic, Gruttadaro said. District officials and principals should use Zoom and face-to-face meetings-schoolwide, or in smaller groups or one-on-one-to express concern, support, and commitment to providing care, she said.

It's also important for leaders to show their own vulnerability, experts say. Sharing their own struggles and self-care practices sends a powerful message that mental health struggles are normal and accepted, experts say.

As a leader, you can include your therapy appointments in your public Outlook calendar, or mention that you see a therapist. Create a storytelling event where colleagues share their experiences with mental illness. Take a few days off and set your out-of-office message to say you won't be answering email so you can fully recharge.

All these things-embedded in a culture of support for a "mentally healthy workplace"-can encourage people to share their difficulties and seek help, said Natasha Krol, head of client services and a principal at Mind Share Partners, a nonprofit that advises organizations on workplace mental health.

Avoid burying your colleagues' emotional difficulties under a blanket of cheerful pep talk, says Carrie Kamm, the senior director of equity in the Oak Park Elementary School District 97 in Illinois.

"What doesn't work is toxic positivity," she said. "You have to respond to the temperature in the room. When you try to push past the energy in the room and just stick with the agenda, that's a problem for people."

2) Train your team to spot early signs of mental health struggles

Experts increasingly suggest mental health training for leadership teams. Kristi Wilson, the superintendent of the Buckeye Elementary school district in Arizona, has engaged a consultant to train district leaders, principals, and counselors in seeing that a work performance issue might be a mental health struggle in disguise. "It's about recognizing when you, or someone else, needs help," she said.

District and school leaders might also consider training a group of willing employees to serve as mental health ambassadors who build awareness and connect colleagues to resources. It's an increasingly popular strategy in the business world, and would translate well to K-12, Krol said.

Conducting regular surveys or using pulse checks such as this burnout self-test, as the Tulsa, Okla., district does, can help leaders track their teachers' wellness.

3) Ask yourself whether you fully recognize your teachers' needs

In a March survey by the EdWeek Research Center, 7 in 10 district leaders said teachers' emotional and physical well-being rank high on their priority list, but fewer than one-quarter of teachers said those things were a high priority in their districts. Asked what their schools or districts had done to support teachers' well-being, only 29 percent of district leaders-and 16 percent of teachers-said their school or district had provided adequate mental health benefits.

Mental health issues often hide in plain sight. Studies show employees are reluctant to share their struggles or ask for help. A 2019 study by Mind Share Partners found that even before the pandemic, 6 in 10 employees had experienced symptoms of mental illness in the past year, but most never told anyone at work about it.

4) Create ongoing systems of support, like virtual groups and call lines

Like most of the district leaders EdWeek interviewed for this story, Chicago's work to support its staff is part of a larger, ongoing program to build strong social-emotional support for students. As a part of that work, Chicago created virtual support groups for teachers, principals, and assistant principals, facilitated by staff from a community mental health partner and the district's office of social emotional learning.

Only a few teachers signed up for the "circles of support" group early in the year, but as more schools have reopened in the district, participation has picked up, said Hellen Antonopoulos, the district's executive director of social emotional learning. Increasingly, teachers are requesting sessions for their own schools, rather than connecting with their colleagues districtwide, Antonopoulos said.

When the district runs its "healing circles" for school administrators, it's careful to allow principals and assistant principals from the same school to sign up for separate groups, and it also has its outside partner conduct the sessions.

"We wanted it to be an opportunity to exhale, to meet with people who get it, and not to worry about something they share in confidence," Antonopoulos said.

The Tulsa district created teacher and principal call lines. District social workers and counselors, and staff from the office of student and family support services, help callers connect with support resources, or pay a visit to help, said Stephanie Andrews, the interim executive director of Tulsa's student-and-family office.

In one recent example, a school leader used the line to report that his teachers, who'd returned to on-campus teaching two weeks earlier, were miserable. Staffers from Andrews' office visited and saw that the teachers were grieving for all they'd lost during the pandemic.

"The trauma they experienced, but also the time they'd lost with their students, and the progress" were taking a toll, Andrews said. "Here they had worked really hard, and their students aren't where they thought they'd be academically."

Andrews' office called in grief therapists from a community partner group, who agreed to provide free weekly sessions to help teachers process their feelings.

5) Build a culture of check-ins

Many employees dread the time-suck of meetings. But they can be a key lever in building a mentally healthy workplace, experts said. For district and school leaders, those gatherings can be an opportunity to engender a culture in which genuine inquiries about colleagues' well-being-and supportive responses-are woven into daily practice.

In the Oak Park district, four "culture and climate coaches" have helped district and school leaders build emotional check-ins into nearly every meeting and professional learning day during the pandemic.

"I've changed how I hold meetings," said Kamm, of the Oak Park district. "I started telling people more often, 'If you're not able to do this today, that's OK,' and asking, 'Do you need a 15-minute coffee with me today?' I also increased my one-on-one check-ins with people from monthly to a few times a week."

6) Recognize that some employee groups may need more support than others

Black and Latinx employees, as well as those in the LGBTQ community, were far more likely to experience symptoms of mental illness, from anxiety and sadness to nightmares or paranoia, according to the Mind Share Partners study. And Black and Latinx employees are also much more likely than their white peers to have lost loved ones to COVID-19, or to have been sick themselves.

Don't assume all employees need the same supports or services, experts say. Through conversations, surveys, and other methods, inquire.

7) Reduce barriers to getting services within your employee assistance and health insurance programs

Leaders should find out how widely these services are used, and investigate what might be standing in the way, experts say. Teachers might have a tough time getting counseling through their health insurance plans, for instance, because in-network counselors are often booked months in advance or not taking new clients.

Gruttadaro advises district leaders to press their health insurers to beef up those networks. "Leverage your buying power," she said.

The Hamilton County school district, which serves Chattanooga, Tenn., tried to reduce barriers a different way. It waived the typical 60-day waiting period for full-time employees to use their health benefits, which include mental health care.

"We could see the stressors on our employees, the weight of the pandemic," said Penny Murray, the district's chief talent officer.

The district also made free, same-day virtual counseling available to all 6,000 employees, including its 1,000 part-timers, through the community partner that runs its school-based clinics.
EdWeek Librarian Maya Riser-Kositsky provided support for this article.

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Teachers' Mental Health Has Suffered in the Pandemic. Here's How Districts Can Help

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Teachers' stress and anxiety have soared and their morale has plummeted during the pandemic, a flammable combination that could burn them out and lead them to leave their jobs. It's more important than ever, experts say, for districts to support their teachers by looking after their mental health.

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10 Commandments for Self-Care + Guide to helping others

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10 Commandments for Self-Care + Guide to helping others

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Everyday Self-Care for Educators: Tools and Strategies for Well-Being

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Everyday Self-Care for Educators: Tools and Strategies for Well-Being [Tantillo Philibert, Carla, Soto, Christopher, Veon, Lara] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Everyday Self-Care for Educators: Tools and Strategies for Well-Being

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Lindsay Prendergast (Author), Piper Lee (Author)

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Habits of Resilient Educators: Strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, Doubt, and Constant Change (Corwin Teaching Essentials)

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Habits of Resilient Educators: Strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, Doubt, and Constant Change (Corwin Teaching Essentials) [Prendergast, Lindsay, Lee, Piper] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Habits of Resilient Educators: Strategies for Thriving During Times of Anxiety, Doubt, and Constant Change (Corwin Teaching Essentials)

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Self-Help podcasts to listen to Right Now

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Self-Help podcasts to listen to Right Now

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When you consider the number of hours we put in at work, with our family, at home, and other daily responsibilities, it makes sense that more of us are turning to self-help podcasts to fine-tune our lives. They are informative, engaging, relatable, and best of all, you can tune-in when you have time.

And with topics ranging from anxiety and depression to grieving, addiction, and weight control, there's a good chance you'll find the right podcast that fits your needs. And the best part? We've done the digging for you! All you have to do is grab a pair of headphones or turn up the volume in your car, and get ready to learn from some of the best self-help podcasts.

For Procrastination

The Joy of Procrastination

What if procrastination could be reframed as something positive that would help you get more done in life? Well, that's exactly what Dean Jackson and Dan Sullivan try to accomplish each time they host The Joy of Procrastination podcast. By removing the shame associated with procrastination, Jackson and Sullivan help listeners take develop tools for using procrastination in a positive way.

Beyond the To-Do List

If procrastination is keeping you from being productive, then Beyond the To-Do List is for you. Host, Erik Fisher talks with guests on all aspects of productivity in order to reach the end goal of living a meaningful life. In each episode, he takes a deep dive into why we are not meeting our goals at work and life and how we can implement productivity strategies to get unstuck and move forward.

For Anxiety or Depression

The Hardcore Self-Help Podcast

Psychologist, and host of the Hardcore Self-Help Podcast, Dr. Robert Duff knows a thing or two about living with and treating mental health conditions. He also knows how to answer questions about anxiety, depression, relationships, sex, perfectionism, PTSD, eating disorders, and countless other topics without making listeners decode all the psychobabble and medical jargon in order to understand what he's talking about. Plus, since he goes live each Thursday, you can count on a weekly date with Duff the Psych.

Not Another Anxiety Show

"A podcast for all," is how host Kelli Walker describes Not Another Anxiety Show. While not a mental health expert herself, Walker does an excellent job of interviewing psychologists, doctors, and other experts to give listeners guidance and practical tips on managing the day-to-day struggles that come with living with all ends of the anxiety spectrum.

For Eating Disorders

The Eating Disorder Recovery Podcast

Licensed psychologist Dr. Janean Anderson not only knows how to treat eating disorders, but she also knows firsthand what it's like to live with and recover from anorexia. Twice a month, she hosts The Eating Disorder Recovery Podcast, where she covers the psychology of eating disorders, what the recovery process looks like, and how the cultural context of eating disorders impacts recovery. Through personal stories and insight from expert guests, Anderson helps listeners unpack and begin to understand the seriousness and complexity of eating disorders.

The Recovery Warrior Show

Think of The Recovery Warrior Show as your monthly dose of motivation and inspiration to help guide you through the recovery process from an eating disorder. Host Jessica Flint interviews eating disorder recovery warriors and treatment experts to get their take on how you can begin to heal your relationship with food and your body.

For Grieving

Terrible, Thanks for Asking

Nora McInerny shares her personal stories of loss, and there are several, along with countless stories from others in her podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking. Each episode, McInerny interviews guests and explores issues around emotions, trauma, loss, mental health, and finding community, hope, and happiness after grieving.

Grief Out Loud

Grief Out Loud tackles the challenges many people face when discussing grief with others. Hosted by Jana DeCristofaro, this podcast comes from The Dougy Center for Grieving Children & Families, which specializes in grief and loss. Through expert tips from bereavement professionals and personal stories from the real people she interviews, DeCristofaro brings awareness to the importance of talking about grief.

For Making a Major Life Change

What It Takes

We all know people that have "made it" in life, despite obstacles or major changes that might have prevented them from achieving their goals. What most of these people have in common is a desire to tackle major life changes with the mindset that growth will occur regardless of the outcome. What It Takes shares stories of perseverance from some of the most famous visionaries and leaders of all time.

The Tony Robbins Podcast

"Why live an ordinary life, when you can live an extraordinary one?" This is undoubtedly the most famous line from life and business strategist Tony Robbins. It's also the foundation from which he has built The Tony Robbins Podcast, a weekly show that tackles major life changes related to business, health, finances, relationships, and more. Through interviews and stories from some of the most influential people in the world, Robbins gives listeners proven strategies and tactics for how to help live your best life.

For Forming New Habits

The Habit Coach

If you need encouragement to make permanent changes in your life, then The Habit Coach With Ashdin Doctor is for you. Each episode is centered around tips and motivation that encourage you to create new habits that impact your daily life. Host Ashdin Doctor covers topics like nutrition, fitness, health, sleep, and productivity. And the best part? The majority of the episodes are less than 10-minutes long.

Tiny Leaps, Big Changes

Forming a new habit takes time. It also requires tiny leaps along the way, and no one knows that better than the host of Tiny Leaps, Big Changes, Gregg Clunis. This personal development podcast dives deep into the most common daily behaviors and looks at how those behaviors determine results, both positive and negative.

For Weight Control

Food Heaven

It takes both diet and exercise to lose weight and keep it off. Unfortunately, it's the diet part of the equation many of us struggle with. The good news? Each Wednesday, you can get the most up-to-date information about all things food, health, and nutrition on the Food Heaven podcast. Co-hosts Wendy and Jess are both registered dietitians with master's degrees in nutrition, and they are also BFFs who share a passion for helping people live a healthier life.

Cut the Fat podcast delivers science-based strategies and facts about weight loss along with a message of hope and motivation to help listeners find their own formula for weight loss. Co-hosts Dr. Ray Hinish, a pharmacist, and Blythe Wagner, a personal trainer, break down the complex and often conflicting information about fitness, fat loss, and wellbeing.

For Coping With Addiction

Recovery Unscripted

Recovery Unscripted, a podcast powered by Foundations Recovery Network, takes a deep dive into the most complex topics related to addiction and recovery. Through guest interviews with some of the most influential figures, like Glennon Doyle and Herschel Walker, and expert advice from clinicians, host David Condos takes listeners through the ins and outs of addiction treatment, mental health care, and recovery.

That Sober Guy

When Shane Ramer got sober in 2013, he decided to share his story, along with many others, on his podcast, That Sober Guy. Relatable, real, and raw, Ramer gives listeners a glimpse into the world of addiction, alcoholism, recovery, and so much more. While his focus is on the person coping with or recovering from addiction, he also provides family and friends a place to get information, tips, and support.

For Improving Relationships

Where Should We Begin

When you don't have time to go to couples counseling, why not bring the therapist to you? Where Should We Begin, the brainchild of relationship therapist Esther Perel, tackles complex issues many of us face with our partner including sexlessness, infertility, communication problems, infidelity, trauma, regret, roles, and so much more. And the best part? Each podcast features a different couple, so listeners get to be a part of a private therapy session as the couple shares the intimate details of their relationship.

Savage Lovecast

When it comes to talking about sex, Dan Savage leaves nothing off the table. And we mean nothing! In his long-running, incredibly popular podcast, Savage Lovecast, Savage, answers the most intimate questions about love, sex, and relationships. Plus, listeners can call in their most-burning questions for Dan to answer in a later podcast.

For Spiritual Growth

The Chasing Joy Podcast

When Georgie Morley talks, people listen. Through her own struggles with an eating disorder, depression, and bipolar ll, Morley guides listeners as they take a look at their own spirituality on The Chasing Joy Podcast. She explores a new topic each week related to spirituality, wellness, and personal growth. Her hope? That you leave each episode feeling more joyful, energetic, and focused on your journey.

Oprah's SuperSoul Conversations

If you need a weekly dose of inspiration and spiritual awakening, then Oprah's SuperSoul Conversations podcast is for you. With guests like spiritual pioneer Eckhart Tolle, Father Richard Rohr, Gretchen Rubin, and Brené Brown, Oprah takes listeners on a unique and purposeful journey of spiritual growth.

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20 Best Self-Help Podcasts to Listen to Right Now

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When you consider the number of hours we put in at work, with our family, at home, and other daily responsibilities, it makes sense that more of us are turning to self-help podcasts to fine-tune our lives. They are informative, engaging, relatable, and best of all, you can tune-in when you have time.

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Onward: Stories and Resources to Cultivate Emotional Resilience

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Your first stop for resources, inspiration, and guidance on cultivating emotional resilience. The perfect site for anyone who is feeling burned-out and beat-down. Don't just survive. Thrive with Onward.

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You may think you're not very resilient.

The word "resilient" might bring to mind all the struggles and setbacks that have plagued you in your life.

You might be thinking about how hard it is to recover from some of the worst ones. You may be thinking, "I'm not resilient at all. Look at how often I've struggled to get back up!"

If you're thinking any of these thoughts, then you are probably one of the most resilient people. You have suffered, you have struggled, you have waded through a seemingly unstoppable tide of difficulty - and you have survived.

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo - far more flexible than you'd ever believe at first glance.

Jodi Picoult

We tend to think of resilient people as those who are unaffected by the challenges of life, or who take a setback with a smile and laugh in the face of their obstacles. But this is not resilience.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, again and again, with every obstacle we face.

Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our three Resilience Exercises for free. These engaging, science-based exercises will help you to effectively deal with difficult circumstances and give you the tools to improve the resilience of your clients, students, or employees.

The person showing little emotional distress in difficulty is not necessarily displaying resilience. The person who fails and feels intense negative emotions, yet tries again the next day, is displaying resilience.

Put simply, resilience is the ability to adapt and we can all demonstrate resilience. Granted, some people may be more resilient than others, but it is not an immutable trait or characteristic that you either do or don't have. Resilience is a learned ability and one that you can build.

Resilience is not the absence of distress or difficulty. Resilience is the ability to adapt and grow following adversity.

Some of these resilience activities and exercises may help you develop your resilience, while others might make you realize how resilient you already are.

Either way, the outcome is more confidence in your ability to bounce back.

Read on if you're ready to learn more about how to boost your resilience and meet challenges with confidence in yourself and your ability to succeed, even after failure.

4 Resilience Activities for Adults

We'll provide several resources for building resilience, but first, let's take a look at what the American Psychological Association has to say about building resilience.

According to the APA (American Psychological Association, 2009), there are 10 ways to build resilience, many of which will be applied in the training, exercises, and activities listed later:

Making connections and building your social support network;

Avoiding the tendency to view crises as insurmountable challenges;

Accepting that change is a natural and unavoidable part of life;

Moving towards your (realistic) goals;

Taking decisive actions that will help you face your challenges;

Looking for opportunities for self-discovery;

Nurturing a positive view of yourself and your abilities;

Keeping things in perspective and in context;

Maintaining a hopeful outlook on life;

And taking care of yourself.

These ten basic principles of improving resilience can be applied on your own, in a guided therapeutic relationship, or in training and courses on resilience.

PositivePsychology.com Realizing Resilience Coaching Masterclass

If you're a helping professional seeking a comprehensive resource to help your clients build resilience, take a look at our Realizing Resilience Coaching Masterclass.

In this course, you'll gain science-backed tools to show your clients how to navigate life's ups and downs with poise and resilience, enabling them to improve their overall wellbeing.

The course comprises six modules.

1. Positive Psychology 2.0

You'll begin by delving into the darker side of the human experience, often triggered by adverse events. In doing this, you'll gain the skills to teach and apply positive psychology principles in a holistic and balanced way.

2. Resiliences

Next, you will discover the characteristics that make up a resilient person and the four key elements of resilience. The modules that follow explore these four elements in more detail.

3. Attention

In Module 3, you will learn about the first element of resilience-attention. In this module, you'll develop an understanding of how resilient people direct their attention to positive and negative life events.

4. Thoughts

The second element of resilience you'll learn about regards thoughts. In this module, you'll gain a range of practical tools and exercises to help your clients direct their thoughts in constructive ways based on the best scientific practice and theory.

5. Action

Resilient people are quick to adopt adaptive coping strategies in the face of negative events. Module 5 will teach you to arm your clients with these strategies.

6. Motivation

What drives resilient people to persist and engage in positive coping in the face of adversity? This final module will answer this question and teach you about the last key element of resilience-motivation.

The Realizing Resilience Coaching Masterclass© includes a range of useful materials, including live recordings, a workbook for your clients, PowerPoint presentations, and extended usage rights to save you time developing your own materials.

Adult Resilience Program

This program is intended for teenagers and adults over the age of 16. It is offered online and is especially helpful for older students dealing with stress or pressure from school, family, and upcoming transitions.

This program will help participants:

Identify their feelings and develop empathy;

Control and regulate difficult or intense emotions;

Learn relaxation techniques;

Practice mindfulness;

Prevent bullying, for both bullies and victims;

Resist peer pressure and develop positive relationships;

Compromise in difficult situations and avoid conflict;

Choose appropriate role models;

Set realistic and achievable goals;

Learn organizational and focus skills;

And develop non-internet-based friendships and relationships.

This course is delivered through five sessions of 2 to 2.5 hours and guided by a facilitator. Click here to learn more about this training endorsed by the World Health Organization.

Samaritans Resilience Training

The Samaritan's organization trains for adults in their "Building Resilience and Wellbeing" course.

This course helps participants:

Explore the connection between emotional health and resilience, and understand how resilience can positively impact our lives;

Assess their own resilience skills;

Recognize the indicators of stress and identify sources of support;

Learn the Keys of Resilience;

Identify practical steps they can take to build resilience;

And build a personalized action plan.

The course generally takes place over one day and can be delivered at locations throughout the UK.

Click here to learn more about this course.

Reaching In Reaching Out (RIRO)

If you're a parent, coach, therapist, or mental health professional seeking a more structured approach to helping clients or children build resilience, the Reaching In Reaching Out Resiliency Skills Training program can help.

It consists of 12 hours of training divided into two parts:

Part 1 helps adults build their own foundation in resilience and learn resiliency skills they can model and encourage in their children. These skills include:

1. Identifying and strengthening resilience abilities.

2. Using strategies to stay calm and focused when experiencing stress.

3. Recognizing how thoughts can affect the ability to cope.

4. Challenging thinking patterns that hinder resilience.

5. Generating alternative ways to deal with conflict and stress.

Part 2 teaches participants how to apply these skill to children, through:

1. Modeling the skills and fostering resilience in children.

2. Using their own resiliency skills to help them understand their children's or clients' behavior.

3. Incorporating resiliency skills into their work by using child-friendly approaches.

This training can be completed in two full days, four half-days, six after-work sessions, or 10-12 brief sessions.

To access the RIRO skills training, click here.

4 Resilience Worksheets for Youth and Students

There are many resources to help students and youth build resilience, including worksheets they can work through on their own or with the guidance of a trusted adult.

A few of these worksheets are listed below.

1. Coloring in for Emotional Clarity

The goal of this worksheet is to help children and students explore their feelings through color.

At the same time, it's a good way to help them gain some insight into the feelings they experience in different situations.

To guide students through this worksheet, ask students to recall a recent emotional experience. This could be positive, such as an exciting birthday party, or negative - like an argument with a friend.

The instructions are simple: have the students close their eyes and try to reconnect with their feelings during that situation, color in the Mandala in a way that represents how they feel.

They can use a variety of colors or just one color, as well as their own choice of materials - however it should best represent their feelings.

After they have colored each section in, discuss the color(s) with them. Ask them to reflect on why they chose the color or colors they used, and use questions and active listening to open up more dialogue if you feel it will help.

This Coloring in for Emotional Clarity worksheet can help students discover and express their own feelings, as well as help parents or teachers, learn about how the student or child is doing with each area of their life. Before issues can be addressed and learned from, they must first be discussed.

You can access the full worksheet with a subscription to the Positive Psychology Toolkit© and you can also click on the image to print the mandala.

2. My Gifts - Traits and Talents

Completing this exercise can help children and students recognize and appreciate the talents, strengths, and positive traits they have. Encouraging kids to see them as "gifts" adds a fun twist to the whole activity as your child creates a creative "gift box".

To guide you through this exercise, you will need:

1. Gift box template (find this in the worksheet)

2. Scissors

3. Glue

4. Markers

5. Craft items to decorate with (such as stickers, sequins, glitter, etc.)

6. Small pieces of paper with different gifts, traits, and strengths written on them.

Begin by explaining that this exercise will focus on who you are inside.

The first step is identifying the gifts, traits and talents that students feel they have. These include qualities like:

There is also space at the end of this page to write down a few qualities or characteristics not already listed, so encourage students to be creative if they think some of their " gifts" or good qualities are missing.

The second step is for students to share these traits and talents that they chose. Students should describe why they chose each gift or quality and give examples of how these qualities fit them.

Step Three is to give students the gift box cutout provided. Have them cut along the dotted lines and arrange the box, then decorate it with their name, their favorite color(s), or any of the craft items they would like to use.

Click the link to download My Gifts - Traits and Talents.

3. Learning From My Work

This exercise helps students learn from how they did on a particular assignment or task and learn how to improve in the future.

In order to develop resilience, it's important to be realistic about setting and striving towards goals, learning from one's mistakes, and trying again.

This worksheet presents nine dichotomous pairs of statements with a scale in between. The student should be instructed to indicate on the scale how they feel in regards to these two opposite statements.

The statements include:

"I did better than I thought I would" vs. "I didn't do as well as I imagined"

"I pushed myself and worked hard" vs. "I could have tried a bit harder"

"I took a chance by trying out something new" vs. "I stuck to what I knew, because that's what I feel sure of."

"I changed my work as I went along" vs. "I stuck to my approach throughout"

"I listened to others' feedback" vs. "I kept going using my own approach"

"My work and ideas were my own" vs. "I had help from other sources"

"I was clear on the task" vs. "I was unsure what I was supposed to do"

"I'm satisfied with my results" vs. "I'm not content with my results"

"I was working on a deadline" vs. "It was a continuing project"

Use the students' responses on this Learning From My Work exercise to help them discover where they are satisfied with their work and where they could devote more attention. Encourage them to do better next time, and emphasize that their performance is always a work in progress.

If they feel they have failed themselves or their teacher, help them to see that failure is a crucial part of life and not the end of the world when we learn from it.

4. What Is Hope?

This simple worksheet can help students learn to develop hope and build resiliency.

It will guide students through a thought exercise in what hope is, how they tend to think about and experience hope, and how to facilitate greater hope in their lives.

This worksheet includes a series of questions to help students explore this topic, including:

Aristotle once said: "Hope is a waking dream." What do you feel this means to you, personally?

Have your own hopes changed throughout your life? How?

What are three of your biggest aspirations right now?

How has being hopeful, or feeling hopeless, influenced choices you've made?

Has anything happened to you that caused you to lose hope?

What kind of things, people, or activities give you hope? Where do you feel your hope, or your hopelessness, comes from in life?

In what ways do your surroundings give you more or less hope? How have they given you more or less hope in the past?

What kinds of things need to occur for you to feel more hopeful about your life?

You can find this worksheet here.

4 Resilience Building Games for Kids in Primary School

Primary or elementary school is an excellent time to begin building resilience.

Children are so adaptable already, that introducing the idea of resilience is much easier than teaching resilience to adults.

Games are certainly one of the best ways to build resilience. Listed below are some of the best games for teaching resilience in primary or elementary school.

1. I Love My Classmate

This is a great game for helping foster kindness in children. Kindness is important on its own, but learning kindness for others in addition to the self is also vital as a piece of resilience.

This game is played with a number of chairs formed into a circle. Make sure there is one less chair than the number of players.

The game is played in the following steps:

1. The person standing in the center of the circle begins by saying "I love my classmate, particularly my classmate who...", completing the sentence with a piece of information that is true for him- or herself. For example, the player could say something like "... particularly my classmate who has a cat" or "... especially my classmate who plays hockey."

2. As soon as s/he is finished, everyone who this applies to (including the person in the center) moves from their chair to an empty one that is not right next to them.

3. The person who remains in the middle begins a second round of the game.

This game will help children get to know each other if they don't already know each other well, learn about what they have in common with others, and practice kindness towards one another by repeating the phrase "I love my classmate."

Download the instructions for I Love My Classmate.

2. It's Not a Secret...

This game can be played with only several pairs of children and some space. If there is an odd number of children, you can play with them to make an even number.

To play, separate students into pairs of two and designate one of them as student A and the other student B.

Instruct student A to listen to student B for a specified amount of time, perhaps 15 seconds for very young children or a minute for older children.

Instruct student B to finish the sentence " It's not a secret that..." They can finish this sentence with any information about themselves, whether it's their family structure, the classes they like best in school, their hobbies, their pets, their favorite or least favorite things or anything else they'd like to share.

Student B repeats this sentence several times, completing it with a new piece of information each time.

When the time is up, have students A and B switch roles, so A speaks while B listens.

This game is another good way for students to get to know each other and to practice active listening. It may even help strike up a few friendships! Having meaningful relationships and practicing kindness is a great way to build resilience.

Download the worksheet to read more about It's Not a Secret.

3. Shuffle

Shuffle is played with a four-square court or four markers forming a square with an additional cone in the middle. Review rock-paper-scissors with the children before you begin.

The steps of the game are:

1. Five players can play at a time, with each player occupying either a corner or the middle. All other children should be in a line, ready to play when their turn comes.

2. The game begins when the person in the middle says "Shuffle."

3. At this point, all players must find a new corner or cone to occupy, but no one can go to the center cone.

4. If two players arrive at a corner at the same time, they must play rock-paper-scissors for the corner. The winner stays in the corner, and the loser is "out."

5. The next person in line becomes the person in the middle and begins the next round.

This game helps children learn how to deal with conflict. Meaningful connections are vital to developing resilience, but conflict arises in all relationships at some point. While most conflicts cannot be solved with only "rock-paper-scissors," this teaches children that conflict can be solved. Although they may be disappointed by being "out" of the game, they will quickly learn that, in life as in the game, their turn will come again.

You can read about this game and its other variations at this link: Shuffle.

4. Do The Hula

Do The Hula is played in a circle, with all children holding hands.

First, demonstrate how to get your body through a hula hoop without using your hands. Make sure that each child has a space in the circle.

Then, play the game as follows:

1. Place the hula hoop over two people's interlocked hands so it cannot escape the circle.

2. Tell the children that the goal of the game is to get the hula hoop all the way around the circle without anyone letting go of their neighbors' hands.

3. Start the game, and have everyone cheer on the children that are currently trying to move the hula hoop.

4. Once the game has been played for one round, discuss the group's successes and challenges and try it again.

This game is a great way to show children that when conflict or challenges arise, there are ways to deal with them. Even if they face seemingly insurmountable challenges, together they can find a way to overcome them.

Variations on this game include challenging the group to beat a chosen time, playing with eyes shut, or dividing the circle into two circles and having them compete against each other.

To see more about this game, click Do The Hula.

4 Exercises for Developing Resilience

There are many resources for developing resilience in adults aside from courses. For example, there are several exercises that can help build resiliency skills. A few of these exercises are listed below.

1. The Brief Resilience Scale

The Brief Resilience Scale is an assessment for understanding your current resilience. While this may not build your resilience directly, it can give you a general overview of your current resiliency skills and abilities. In order to increase your resilience, it's important to know where you stand.

Designed to be compact, the scale itself includes only six questions. Each self-report item is answered on a five-point Likert scale, where 5 indicates "Strongly Agree," and 1 represents "Strongly Disagree."

Example items include:

It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event; and

It is hard for me to snap back when something bad happens.

Doing this exercise will help you to recognize where you are in terms of resilience and begin to identify where you can improve from your current state of resilience.

You can access the Brief Resilience Scale with a subscription to the Positive Psychology Toolkit©.

2. Exploring Past Resilience

This exercise focuses on your past experiences with resilience.

Start by thinking about a time in your life that was particularly challenging or demanding, especially one that was emotionally draining or difficult emotionally. Think about how you handled that situation and eventually came through on the other side.

Next, answer some questions to consider the different resilience skills and strategies you applied. For example:

What was your objective at the time?

What challenges did you need to overcome?

What difficult thoughts and emotions do you recall experiencing at the time?

What skills were helpful to you in dealing with the situation? What perspectives or mindsets in particular?

Going through Exploring Past Resilience and answering these questions will help you to realize the resilience skills you already possess, which can aid you in further building on those skills.

Use this exercise to remind yourself that you have already practiced resilience many times before and that you are fully capable of handling whatever comes your way.

3. The Resilience Plan (The 4 S's)

This exercise can help you set goals on improving your resiliency and making sure you keep your resilience-building on track.

First, identify a recent experience in which demonstrating resilience helped you overcome adversity. Working through the sheet, you'll then learn about the 4 S's of resilience and how they helped you cope at the time:

Supportive people - People who gave you advice, or perhaps helped you develop a new, more helpful perspective

Strategies - Methods and approaches you implemented to deal with difficult thoughts and feelings

Sagacity - Wisdom and insights that may have been helpful

Solution-seeking behaviors - Planning, for instance, or searching for useful information.

Next, identify a current challenge you'd like to deal with by applying your resilience plan. The exercise will guide you through the steps of crafting a plan, and the worksheet includes examples and templates to get you started.

Finally, you're invited to apply and evaluate your 4-S Plan so that you can continue developing resilience for the future.

Resilience is like many other skills or abilities, in that you cannot put forth effort once and consider your learning done. To truly build meaningful resilience, it must be a practice rather than a crash course. Use this goal-setting exercise to facilitate your goal striving.

You can access the exercise in full detail with a subscription to the Positive Psychology Toolkit©.

4. It Could Be Worse...

This is an exercise that you can use for yourself or guide your clients through when they are feeling down or excessively worried.

"It Could Be Worse" refers to thinking about three ways that their situation could be worse, specifically for yourself or your client).

For example, if a friend flaked on your plans, you might feel upset or disappointed, which could lead to feeling abandoned or even to feelings of worthlessness. Instead of focusing on what happened in this situation, think about three ways that it could be worse.

For instance, you could think " I could have no friends at all," "I could have no family members to talk to," or " I could have nowhere to sleep tonight."

Spend a few minutes truly imagining each scenario. Think about what you would see, hear, and physically feel in each scenario.

It may seem counterintuitive to imagine things being worse, but thinking through these three ways can actually remind you of what you already have and instill gratitude for the good things in your life.

You can read more about this exercise here: It Could Be Worse.

Integrating the Science of Resilience in Schools: 5 Lesson Plans

As mentioned earlier, school is an excellent place to begin building resilience.

While parents can and should help their children develop resilience, a classroom setting with their peers and a qualified teacher guiding the way can be an excellent place to learn.

A few resources for resilience lesson planning are below.

Lesson Plans for Primary/Elementary and Middle School

Elementary or primary school is an excellent time to begin teaching resilience to children. The earlier children begin building resilience, the more likely it is to "stick." However, resilience is not something that can only be built in young children; children in middle school can also benefit greatly from resilience building.

The PDF from Lynne Namka and Talk, Trust, and Feel Therapeutics in Tucson, Arizona is an excellent source for lesson plans for young students. To access the PDF click here. It covers teaching a growth mindset, stress inoculation, giving effective praise, helping children deal with emotional trauma, and "bouncing back" after a setback.

There are tons of exercises, tools, and lesson plans in this PDF that teachers can use to help young students develop resilience.

Another great resource for lesson plans and suggestions for resilience building in young children comes from Professor Helen McGrath's Bounce Back! program.

"Bounce Back!" is an acronym for some of the foundational principles of resilience, specifically:

B - Bad times don't last, and things get better.

O - Other people can only help if you share with them.

U - Unhelpful thinking only makes you feel worse.

N - Nobody is perfect - not you, not your friends, not your family, not anybody!

C - Concentrate on the good things in life, no matter how small.

E - Everybody suffers, everybody feels pain and experiences setbacks; they are a normal part of life.

B - Blame fairly - negative events are often a combination of things you did, things others did, and plain bad luck.

A - Accept what you can't change and try to change what you can.

C - Catastrophizing makes things worse - don't fall prey to believing in the worst interpretation.

K - Keep things in perspective. Even the worst moment is but one moment in life.

McGrath applies these principles to building these components of resilience:

1. Courage

2. Managing feelings

3. Humor

4. Relationship skills

5. Self-knowledge

6. Goal setting skills

7. Optimistic thinking

8. Helpful thinking skills (avoiding cognitive distortions)

You can access a slideshow on the Bounce Back! program here to learn how to apply McGrath's resilience building principles and activities to each of these areas.

Additionally, the PDF from Connect with Kids provides a lesson plan for children in grades 3 to 5 called "Resilient Voices." It can be found on page 6 and guides students through listing problems they face in their lives, defining resilience, and building a foundation for resilience. To access the PDF click here.

Another lesson plan that can help students develop resilience can be found in the previous PDF on page 8 or in the PDF from Connect With Kids and the Drug Abuse Prevention Program in New York. To access the PDF click here. There is great information throughout this PDF, or skip to page 4 to see the Resilient Heroes lesson plan.

Lesson Plans for High School

While it's best to begin early, high school is still a time that is ripe for building foundational skills like resilience.

High school teachers should not be discouraged from incorporating resilience exercises and activities into their lesson plans, as high school students may be one of the groups that need resilience the most!

The website reachout.com provides excellent tools and lesson plans for teaching resilience to adolescents. These plans can be incorporated into classes to help high school students deal with difficult situations, including:

Illness;

Changing schools;

Transitioning from primary/elementary to middle school/junior high, middle school to high school, and high school to life beyond;

Difficult family situations like divorce;

Changes in friendship groups;

Conflict with peers;

Conflict with family members;

And a heavy student workload.

The lesson plans you can find here will help students to explore and build seven elements of resilience:

1. Emotional awareness and self-regulation

2. Impulse control

3. Optimism

4. Flexible and accurate thinking

5. Empathy

6. Self-efficacy

7. Connecting and reaching out

Exercises and activities are provided for each element, with tips for implementing resilience building and encouraging students along the way.

This lesson plan will help students learn about the Seven Resiliencies (insight, independence, relationships, initiative, creativity, humor, and morality) and explore the life of a historical hero, as well as apply the Seven Resiliencies to their own life.

If you are a school counselor, therapist or teacher, you would appreciate this excellent resource which will teach you how to teach resilience to others. Aptly named the ' Realizing Resilience Masterclass© ', the course consists of six modules that cover positive psychology, resilience, attention, thoughts, action, and finally motivation.

Highly recommended, this online course will enable you to empower others and make an impactful difference in their lives.

Bonus: 4 Shame Resilience Theory (SRT) Exercises

Aside from the benefits and advantages we know resilience can bring, there is another type of resilience that can greatly enhance the quality of life.

The Shame Resilience Theory was developed by author and researcher Brené Brown. Brown noticed that the fear of being vulnerable hindered meaningful connection with others, and one of the many reasons we fear vulnerability is the feeling of shame.

Shame is an intense and negative feeling of being hopelessly flawed and unworthy of love and acceptance, and it affects all of us at one point or another, but it can be especially gripping for some people.

Shame resilience is a specific kind of resilience to this intensely negative feeling, and building it can do wonderful things for our self-confidence, empathy, and human connection.

According to Dr. Brown, there are four elements of shame resilience:

1. Recognizing shame and understanding our shame triggers (physical sensations like elevated heart rate or shaking).

2. Practicing critical awareness, of ourselves and of our environment and the way things work.

3. Reaching out to others and sharing ourselves and our stories (building a social support network).

4. Speaking shame to keep it from flying under the radar (Graham & Graham, 2015).

When we recognize shame and understand our triggers, practice critical awareness, share with others, and keep shame out in the open, we lay the groundwork for a type of resilience that will greatly improve our connections with others, our self-esteem, and our overall wellbeing.

There are a few exercises that can be especially helpful for building shame resilience. A few of these are listed below, but many more are out there if you're interested in learning more.

Self-Compassion Exercises

Developing self-compassion can be an excellent way to combat shame and build resilience to its effects.

Dr. Kristin Neff is the pioneer of self-compassion research, and her website offers several guided meditations and exercises to increase compassion for the self.

1. How Would You Treat a Friend?

For example, a simple exercise that can set you on the right path is "How would you treat a friend?" This is a quick and easy exercise that anyone can do. All you need is a piece of paper, a pen, and a willingness to answer honestly.

To give this exercise a try, use your paper and pen to answer these questions:

First, think about the times when a close friend feels really bad about him or herself or is really struggling in some way. How would you respond to your friend in this situation (especially when you're at your best)? Please write down what you typically do, what you say, and note the tone in which you typically talk to your friends.

Now think about the times when you feel bad about yourself or are struggling. How do you typically respond to yourself in these situations? Please write down what you typically do, what you say, and note the tone in which you talk to yourself. Did you notice a difference? If so, ask yourself why. What factors or fears come into play that leads you to treat yourself and others so differently?

Finally, respond to this prompt: Please write down how you think things might change if you responded to yourself in the same way you typically respond to a close friend when you're suffering.

To see this exercise on Dr. Neff's self-compassion website, click here.

2. A Letter of Self-Compassion

Writing a self-directed letter can help you express your emotions and recognize that you are your own most important source of support. It gives you a chance to exercise self-kindness and keep in touch with yourself in a more understanding, forgiving way.

All you need to start journaling is paper, a writing instrument, and a willingness to write honestly.

Here is the Letter of Self-Compassion exercise.

3. Taking Care of the Caregiver

This exercise is intended specifically for those in a healthcare profession or those who take care of a family member.

People who spend so much time providing care for others often have a greater need for self-compassion and self-care.

The beautiful thing about this exercise is that you can practice it, however works best for you - the only requirement is that you do something for yourself that will meet your needs and help you recharge. This could be getting a massage, taking a long and leisurely walk, going to a yoga class, or spending time relaxing and doing nothing at all.

If you just can't find the time to do any of these in a specific moment of need, practice "on the job" self-care. When you're feeling overly stressed or overwhelmed in your caregiving, use soothing words or touch, or take a quick self-compassion break. Only you know what will work for you in the moment, but above all, give yourself permission to be human-with all of the flaws and pain that come with being human.

To read more about taking care of the caregiver, click here.

4. The Daring Way

This isn't so much an exercise as it is a program, one that requires committing time and energy in order to engage and reap the benefits. The Daring Way is an experiential methodology, facilitated by certified professionals and appropriate for individuals, couples, families, teams, and organizational leaders.

The focus of this training is on helping people build shame resiliency skills and become braver, more vulnerable individuals who accept their worthiness and live a fuller, more authentic life.

To learn more about The Daring Way, visit thedaringway.com.

A Take-Home Message

This article covered several ways to help build resilience in adults, young adults, adolescents, and young children. There are many more ways to build resilience, so don't feel constrained to these resilience activities.

I hope you find these exercises useful. How do you think resilience can shape the mind and strength of yourself and those around you? Did you try any of the exercises? Please leave us a comment below and let us know how it went. We love hearing from you.

Thanks for reading, and happy resilience building!

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our three Resilience Exercises for free.

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27 Resilience Activities for Students and Adults (+PDF)

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Here are resilience activities, PDF worksheets, games, and exercises for youth, students, & adults who want to develop resilience. Enjoy!

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The Habits of Resilient EducatorsA Self-Assessment

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The Habits of Resilient EducatorsA Self-Assessment

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The Habits of Resilient Educators: A Self-Assessment