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Who talks about the mental health of teachers?

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Safeguarding the Mental Health of Teachers

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Subscribe to receive weekly updates of MindShift stories every Sunday. You'll also receive a carefully curated list of content from teacher-trusted sources. Thanks for signing up for the newsletter.

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Slide deck from Dec. 20 PD at Ruus Elementary School, Hayward CA

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Healing Centered Design through a trauma informed and equitable approach. The work held in this website and the free downloadable resources are very applicable to teaching and learning communities.

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Designing healing spaces through a trauma-informed, healing centered- and equitable approach with services for nonprofits, corporations, individuals, and communities.

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Elena Aguilar's work featured in a KQED blog: 12 Ways Teachers Can Build Resilience so they can make Systemic Change

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When things are hard in the classroom, it's tempting to blame the kids, their parents, or the communities they come from, but those are not things an individual teacher can control. Building personal resilience is about responding to adversity, to setbacks, to getting knocked down. The resilience comes from learning something in those moments.

"Resilience is about thriving and not just surviving," Aguilar said. "Because I think there are places where people use the term and they're just talking about survival. But resilience is when you experience a challenge or a setback and you come out stronger than you were before, having learned something new."

After decades of teaching and coaching, Aguilar has written a book that joins her years of experience in classrooms around the country with the research about resilience. Called Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators, the book offers practical ways educators can build their resilience mapped to months of the year, and the ebbs and flows of energy that dictate school life.

But this isn't the average self-help book. Aguilar, like many educators, sees real issues in the systems and structures of education. But she also knows teachers are too overwhelmed and tired to pick their eyes up and see the bigger issues. Aguilar believes that building personal resilience leads to action. In Onward she writes:

"Here is my theory of action: If we boost our individual resilience, then we will have more energy to address organizational and systemic conditions -- to elect officials who will fund public education, organize against policies that dehumanize educators, and push back on punitive assessment policies and scripted curriculum that turn teachers into robots and students into depositories to be filled. With more energy and more resilience, we can build and strengthen the kinds of communities in which we can thrive, where we can engage in professional development that allows us to reflect on our own biases, and where we can observe and learn from each other."

As a coach, Aguilar is action oriented. She wanted to give educators things they can do, habits they can form to boost their resilience. The current research isn't framed that way; it describes dispositions, which are more like attitudes or ways of being. Resilient people tend towards optimism, for example, and they're curious and courageous.

Aguilar has taken that research and developed a sequence of reflections and activities that teachers can do throughout the year to build habits that cultivate a resilient disposition. She thinks they will be most powerful if educators do them together.
1. Know Yourself
"You'd need to do this in the summer when you have a bit of a break," Aguilar said. She recommends June, when school has ended and teachers have had a little time to recover. In June many educators are reflecting on the end of the year anyway, so why not go a bit deeper to think through the values, socio-political identity, strengths and personality traits that define each of us?

In Onward, Aguilar writes: "Self-knowledge helps us to be more confident about our actions and clear on our decisions. It's what enables us to show up in a way we want to show up."

This is foundational work. Everything else depends on self-knowledge because so much of how one reacts to a situation is rooted in experience, context, identity and perception.
2. Emotions
There's been an increased focus on social and emotional learning for kids in classrooms, but much less attention is paid to helping teachers manage the array of emotions that come up over the course of a school day. Just because teachers are adults doesn't mean they've had practice recognizing, naming and reckoning with their emotions.

"Embedded within emotional resilience is emotional intelligence," Aguilar said. "And I find so many adults have never had an opportunity to really learn about emotions."

In the workbook that accompanies Onward, Aguilar offers activities that walk educators through a process of thinking through what an emotion is, how to understand their own, and offers language to talk about emotion. This is reflective work, perfect for July when teachers have a little distance from the classroom.
3. Tell Empowering Stories
"It really might be the most important habit, but you can't practice it well without understanding your emotions, so they all connect," Aguilar said.

The stories educators tell dictate the experience they'll have, she said. The story could be about kids and parents that don't value education. Or, it could be that teaching in a particular context is hard because the political and economic systems aren't set up to support this community. "You can tell really different stories about the same thing," Aguilar said.

She has found that educators often get excited about this habit: "When they realize they have the power to reframe a situation, it's actually very empowering. It can be a big relief to people."

It can also open up avenues of creativity. Sometimes teachers can feel so overwhelmed that it's difficult to see a situation in any other way than the one they're already locked into. Aguilar has seen this time and again when coaching. She often asks teachers and leaders probing questions to shift the way they see the constraints and structures within which they are working.

"I think it's really critical because so many educators almost can't imagine how things could be better," she said.
4. Build Community
Aguilar imagines this habit tied to September when school is back in session and people have energy and hope for the year ahead. "One of the visions I had when I wrote this book was that teachers would read this book together," she said. "They'd talk about it together, and they'd do the workbook activities together."

And in doing so, they'd deepen relationships with one another. Those relationships can be a crucial source of resilience when setbacks occur.
5. Be Here Now
This section draws from mindfulness practices and their power to ground educators in the present moment. Mindfulness in schools has exploded over the past few years, especially on the West Coast where Aguilar lives. So she was surprised when readers from elsewhere in the country had never heard of it.

"The ability to be present in the moment allows you to be clear on what story you're telling," Aguilar said. "It's really hard to tell powerful stories if you're not able to recognize when you're telling a story."

She equates this set of strategies with October because towards the end of this month things can start to get hard for educators. It's a time for deep breaths, creating some metacognitive space before reacting to students, and taking care of oneself.
6. Take Care of Yourself
November is often a hard month for teachers. The excitement from the beginning of the year has worn off, the days are getting shorter and darker, and exhaustion becomes a factor. Most educators have probably heard they should take care of themselves and yet many still don't. Aguilar uses this section to help educators interrogate why this might be.

"Teaching is so dominated by women and there's so much messaging to women about self care, but they also get messages about giving to everyone else," Aguilar said. Sometimes deep values come up about who deserves rest and what it means to prove one's worth.

"It's intended to help people untangle what's going on," Aguilar said.

7. Focus on the Bright Spots

"This is an opportunity to focus on strengths and assets and skills and shine a light on what's working," Aguilar said. Again, in the heart of winter it can be easy to let a natural negativity bias take over. It requires active work to push back against those thoughts and create structures to notice the progress students have made and the many beautiful things happening in schools and classrooms.

"Resilience has a lot to do with how often we experience what is thought about as positive emotions. That is in part how we get to the thriving part of the definition, and not just the surviving," Aguilar said.

It's easy to dwell on the negative, the lesson plan gone awry, the one kid who won't engage. But Aguilar says that unless educators actively work to refill the reserves of satisfaction, meaning and connection it's hard to keep going.
8. Cultivate Compassion
In January it might seem like teachers would return from a vacation and feel rested, ready to jump back into the classroom with energy. That's partly true, but Aguilar has also found that the time off can decrease people's tolerance for stuff they have to deal with in the classroom. They've felt like a normal human for a few weeks and they don't want to go back. That's why she suggests cultivating compassion for oneself, colleagues and students during this time.

"Recognize that if you're cultivating compassion you can have greater understanding with a student who lost their temper and did whatever they did, and you can respond differently in that moment."
9. Be A Learner
Learning is something resilient people do. They take away a lesson from hardships they experience.

"One of the most useful prompts for someone when they're in a challenging situation is to ask, is there any possibility I could learn something from this experience?" They don't even have to know what they're learning yet, but just asking if there's something that will reveal itself later can make it feel possible to get through.

Aguilar used the example of her mother's battle with cancer and ultimate death. In the moment, she felt horrible and couldn't see her way out of the pain and grief she was experiencing.

"When I think back to that time, now I can see there were things that I learned," Aguilar said. "But it's definitely not a situation in which I would say that was a great gift because I learned this or that. Without question I would rather have my mother back."

In those difficult moments, it helps to acknowledge and value the emotions someone is feeling. Without that acknowledgement people don't feel heard and they can get stuck in the negative emotions.
10. Play and Create
There's a lot of research showing that play is fundamental to learning and to human nature. Yet it's often stripped from schools. Play also helps people to be creative, deal with stress and solve problems, all qualities connected to a common disposition of resilient people -- courage.

11. Ride the Wave of Change

"Springtime is when things start changing in schools," Aguilar said. "Spring time can be really unsettling and difficult." New initiatives are launched, hiring happens, teaching assignments change, it can be hard for teachers and deplete their energy.

Aguilar recommends that teachers engage with change, but think carefully about whether the change is within their sphere of influence. Making that distinction can help an educator decide where to spend their energy.

"We all have a finite amount of energy and we can make decisions about how and where we use it. Change gives us an opportunity to reflect on that."
12 Celebrate and Appreciate
"We need to end the year on a note of celebration," Aguilar said. Taking time to recognize growth and show gratitude offers a different perspective on what can be a tiring time of year. Many schools have end of year rituals to celebrate the achievements of the year, but personal rituals, as well as class rituals can also be powerful.

Aguilar has no illusions that teachers will pick up this book, do a few exercises, and magically become more resilient. She knows these qualities require cultivation and time, but from personal experience she also knows they work. She now has a daily gratitude practice, and she finds herself repeating over and over again the activities that help her deconstruct her thoughts and beliefs to gain a deeper understanding of her values.

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12 Ways Teachers Can Build Resilience So They Can Make Systemic Change | KQED

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When things are hard in the classroom, it's tempting to blame the kids, their parents, or the communities they come from, but those are not things an individual teacher can control. Building personal resilience is about responding to adversity, to setbacks, to getting knocked down. The resilience comes from learning something in those moments.

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How to Reconnect with your Purpose for Teaching

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I didn't start feeling the effects of burnout until my third year as a school counselor. I had spent the last 10 years as a counselor working with low-income first-generation high school students, but I had recently transitioned to working in a school. I came into the role with the best of intentions-I wanted to work as closely as possible with the students who needed it the most. I was energized by building meaningful relationships, asking young people big, important questions, and helping them make the biggest decision of their young lives, whether that was in high school or beyond. I loved everything about the work yet the spectre of burnout seemed to hover over me. It didn't matter how much impact I was having, how much growth and change I saw in my students; I could feel the wheels coming off.

Sadly, I'm not alone. There is a growing body of research showing that more and more teachers are leaving the profession, citing stress and burnout as a key reason. A recent report found that teachers experience more daily stress than an emergency room doctor. Combined with chronic underfunding, it shouldn't come as a surprise that an estimated 41 percent of teachers leave the profession within five years.

Rising stress, burnout, and mental health problems among teachers is also coinciding with the rise of student mental health issues. Interestingly, these two issues are never discussed in tandem; they're seen as separate issues. Based on my work all across the country, I've realized that teachers are actually struggling with the same issue that afflicts our students: a lack of meaning.

Teachers don't enter the profession lacking meaning. Teachers start their academic careers with dreams of changing young people's lives: the Gates Foundation found that 85 percent of teachers enter the classroom to make a positive impact on young people's lives. But under the constant pressure of meeting national education standards, classroom management, lesson planning, and adapting to constantly changing standards, those dreams eventually fade away. Under the overwhelming daily pressure to just keep their heads above water, teachers become disconnected from their original purpose as an educator. It's this meaninglessness in the role, combined with intense external pressure, that is the recipe for the burnout afflicting both teachers and students.

Luckily, there are some simple, research-backed ways to help teachers reconnect with their purpose and combat burnout. Below are some adapted resources we use at Project Wayfinder, an organization devoted to helping students and teachers develop and live their purpose.

Step One: Reconnect with Your Why

If you're a teacher, imagine that you could only teach one lesson to all your classes. Which lesson would you choose? Now, ask yourself, after teaching that lesson, what impact would you want that lesson to have on your students? If you achieved this impact, what would the impact of THAT impact be? For example, I'm writing this article to teach educators about the power of purpose. I hope that by reading this article, teachers can bring the principles of purpose to their classroom. If they do that, they then can help young people find their own purpose. With that, I hope they become empowered to pursue meaningful and fulfilling lives. By continuing to ask ourselves "why" a goal is important, we can begin to unearth the deeper intentions we have that drive our daily actions and behaviors. By reconnecting to the impact we as teachers want to have on students, it can remind us why we got into the profession in the first place.

Step Two: Craft Your How

Once you have reconnected to the impact you want to have as a teacher, it's time to begin exploring how you could go about making good on that impact in the classroom. Innovative research by Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale University can help. Wrzesniewski's research found that professionals who had found purpose in their work had done so by "crafting" their role to align with what they cared about. Called " job crafting," it's an effective tool that can help teachers reconnect to their purpose. Although teachers face enormous pressures to make sure their students score well on standardized tests and master knowledge in a variety of subjects, how teachers go about reaching those targets is up to each teacher.

To better craft your role in the classroom, it's helpful to remind yourself of the character strengths that make you your best self. Take the VIA Character Strength Survey or simply review the list of character strengths and choose the three or four you use the most in your classroom. Now consider: How could you use your strengths to make the impact you identified in the activity you did above in Step One. For example, two of my strengths are "zest" and "creativity"-one thing I love to do in the classroom is design interactive and experiential team-building activities that teach students about the research on youth purpose. What could you do to use your strengths in the classroom? How might you design a class project, assignment, or classroom discussion that utilizes your unique skills as a teacher? The more we can craft our roles in the classroom, the more meaningful the work becomes.

Step Three: Communicate Your "Why" to Students

Teachers work incredibly hard with students, pushing them to become their best selves. However, too often we don't explicitly explain to students how we're trying to help them grow, or why we feel that growth is important. It can be incredibly powerful not only for students, but for teachers as well, to explicitly state why we're teaching them. Social psychologist Susan T. Fiske has found that to build meaningful relationships with people, we need to communicate two things: our intention and our competency. That is, when a young person walks into our classroom, they ask themselves, "What is this teacher's intention for me?" and "Do they have the skills to follow through on that?" When young people know our positive intentions and believe we can make good on them, they're much more willing to trust us. Every teacher I know got into the profession to build relationships with young people; explicitly sharing the intentions with them that you identified in Step One is the best place to start.

It's equally as powerful to ask students directly: "How can I help you succeed? How can I be most helpful?" Often times, students' answers can be surprising. As a school counselor, it often felt like it was my role to dole out sage wisdom to young people. However, most students found it most helpful when I just listened. Ask your students what they want and need; not only does it show that you care about them, but it also validates their needs and desires. And it can make your role in their lives all the more purposeful. Taking them seriously will make them take you-and school-more seriously.

Often when talking about teacher burnout, we point to systemic issues as the culprit. But don't overlook the small changes that can make a big impact. Each of the three steps could be done in one class. While systemic challenges absolutely need to be addressed, we should spend an equal amount of time thinking of the psychological and mindset changes we can make as well. Doing so can make education more purposeful for everyone.

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Teachers: How to Reconnect with Your Purpose for Teaching | NGLC

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I didn't start feeling the effects of burnout until my third year as a school counselor. I had spent the last 10 years as a counselor working with low-income first-generation high school students, but I had recently transitioned to working in a school.

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Gratitude and care are connected

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More tips and language for self care

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It's okay to say no when you need to say no

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Simple moments for every day

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How to practice self care when you have no time

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See if any of this sounds like you:

1. You're a teacher who puts everyone else's needs before your own

2. You never have enough time and energy for everything, and only what's left over belongs to you (And I'm guessing on many days, there ISN'T time and energy left over for you)

3. You know you need to prioritize self-care but just haven't been able to create habits that you can stick with long-term

I think that a lack of time and energy is one of the biggest problems teachers are facing, and I've spent the last 3.5 years supporting teachers with work/life balance through the 40 Hour Teacher Workweek Club.

And to be really honest with you, sometimes, it makes me really fired up, because I see first hand, day in and day out, just how much teachers are having to do with so few resources and so little support. We're always hearing about "do it for the kids, it's all about the kids" and it feels like, well, what about taking care of teachers?

It's not hard to make the assumption that the only way to be successful as a teacher is to put your students' achievement before everything else in your life. If the kids - that is, other people's kids - aren't your #1 priority, if you're not working 24/7 for them, then you're letting everyone down and your students won't be successful.

This is the message that is passionately on my heart:

There is no direct correlation between the number of hours you work and your effectiveness as a teacher. We all know truly outstanding teachers who prioritize time with their own families and refuse to work nonstop, and we all know teachers who work 12 hour days but are teaching like it's 1984.

Effective teaching is NOT about constantly working, it's about making sure you're working on the right things. Once you start examining your habits and making sure you're focused on things that are the BEST and HIGHEST use of your time, you WILL be able to make yourself a priority, too.

I wanted to say that right up front because if you don't see your own needs as being important, you never make time for self-care. Because when something is a priority, we'll find the time. When it's not, we'll find an excuse.

Click play to listen, or subscribe in your podcast app!

As you'll discover through this episode, self-care can be as simple as 5-minute habits embedded into your day. It does not have to be this big complicated, expensive, time-consuming thing. I'm advocating for simple habits peppered throughout your day - some of them just 1-2 minutes.

Instead of scrolling mindlessly through social media while you're making dinner, you can be listening to an uplifting podcast or music that you love.

Instead of grading two and a half papers while waiting for a doctor's appointment, you can spend a couple minutes reading a book by your favorite novelist.

Instead of worrying about work while you're driving and re-hashing that negative interaction with a parent, you can be doing mindfulness practice or breathing exercises.

This kind of self-care is not wasteful, and it's not selfish. Taking care of yourself means that you have more to give to your students. Staying up until 3 AM looking for the perfect lesson on Pinterest does not help you be energetic and in a good mood and present with your kids the next day when you actually implement the lesson. Kids benefit from a healthy, happy, balanced teacher. I mean, they're stuck in a classroom with us six hours a day, who would YOU rather be with, someone who is well-rested and has hobbies and enjoys her life, or someone who hasn't had three minutes to herself in a month and a half and is completely exhausted and cranky?

We all know this intuitively, right? And we've all heard the saying "you can't pour from an empty cup." The tricky part is to turn that from a truism into a life principle. To stop just agreeing with it, and actually live it.

And the way to do that is through creating HABITS of self-care.

Why self-care needs to be a habit rather than an occasional treat

The quality of your habits will determine the quality of your life. You will always be the LAST priority unless you have habits of self-care that are woven into your daily routines, unless self-care is just a part of what you DO.

That's why most of our attempts at self-care fail: We try to do one big nice thing for ourselves every now and then and expect that to tide us over for weeks afterward. You get that one breakfast in bed and a pedicure on Mother's Day, or one girl's night out every six months, and hope that it somehow is enough.

It doesn't work that way. Because what you do on a regular basis is far more important than what you do occasionally. Consistency is far more important than intensity.

Habits are what create your lifestyle. There's no such thing as creating work-life balance once and for all. Your habits of self-care will determine your level of self-care. It's about daily choices.

And that's actually good news, because creating better habits is pretty simple, once you understand what works for YOU. You can start today and see results immediately.

When you finish this episode, I want you to have chosen a very specific and actionable self-care habit for yourself. It's good to think about all the possibilities now, so go ahead and think through more than one thing you'd like to do eventually. But to make this sustainable and not just one more thing you can't find time for, I encourage you to focus on only one or two habits at a time. If you write down a lot of ideas, make sure it's with the intention to implement them later when you're ready, and choose just ONE for now.

Types of self-care habits

Here are some different categories of self-care that might be useful for you to think about.

If you always feel rushed in the morning, like people are making demands of you before you've even woken up, you might like to think about a morning ritual that allows you to have 10 minutes to yourself so you can mentally prepare for the day. I never used to be a morning person, but I started getting up 15 minutes earlier in 2008 and it changed my entire life. I sit outside if the weather permits and have a cup of coffee and just breathe, or read, mentally prepare for the day, and get my head right.
Midday breaks
Or, you might want to think about midday breaks, something that you do for yourself so you don't feel like your going, going, going nonstop from sunup to sundown. It could be a three-minute dance break after lunch with the kids, or one minute of deep breathing or relaxation exercises when students are dismissed. Maybe you want to listen to praise music or spa music in the car on the way home, or sit for five minutes to have a cup of cappuccino when you get home in the afternoons. None of these midday breaks take longer than a couple of minutes, and they can reenergize you for hours afterward if you pick something that works for your personality and needs.
Nighttime rituals
Maybe your habit will be a nighttime ritual - this is good for people who feel like they don't get any time for themselves until the whole family is in bed, and by that point, they're too exhausted to do anything. Maybe you want to shift around your tasks so you can head to bed earlier and have 30 minutes to lay there and read or watch your shows without cutting into bedtime. Or maybe just creating a habit or taking a hot bath or shower right before bed would help you wind down.
Rest and sleep habits
You might want to create a rest and sleep habit. If you are always physically tired and just falling into bed at night, make it your goal to create a habit of seven hours of sleep each night - start with five or six, and work up slowly. Or, instead of forcing yourself to stay in motion for 18 hours straight, schedule in 15 minutes in the late afternoon to lie down and rest or nap.
Mental decompression
Your self-care habit could be centered instead on mental/emotional decompressing. Having a habit of this nature is crucial if you feel like you can never turn off your teacher brain and your mind is always going like a hamster on a treadmill. Set aside a specific time of day for meditation/prayer/mindfulness practice, or create a curfew for social media and checking email (none before noon, or none after 8 PM, for example). Or, you can create a self-care habit of no school work on the weekends. You might even want to give yourself permission to relax by scheduling in time for doing "nothing" - put NOTHING on your to-do list for a certain block of time, and practice NOT being productive until it feels natural and not like a waste of time.
Physical self-care
Maybe your new habit will be related to physical self-care. This is the way to go if your body is manifesting physical symptoms of stress and you need to get healthy in a way that feels good to you. Maybe your new habit will be learning to prepare healthy, delicious meals instead of always grabbing takeout. Or, getting fresh air and sunshine 10 minutes a day. Maybe it's doing something physical you enjoy (yoga, dance, tennis).
Creative outlets & hobbies
A few more ideas for your self-care habit: It might center on creative outlets and hobbies. This is important if you just don't feel like yourself unless you get to spend regular time on a specific activity you love. Maybe you'll carve out two hours a week for your favorite hobby, or get up 30 minutes early to write or paint each morning, or spend time exploring nature for one hour a week.
Indulgences & luxuries
And finally, maybe your self-care habit needs to be something that feels like an indulgence or luxury. If you love the finer things in life but feel like you spend all your time and money on other people, pick one thing you will gift to yourself on a regular basis, like mani-pedis, that will lessen that feeling you have about always sacrificing your own wants.

Which type of self-care habit should YOU choose?

Now, I'm guessing you'd really like to choose one habit from each category, and you can do that eventually, but starting today, we're going to focus on just ONE habit (or a pair of complementary habits). You can't try to do too much at once, or you'll be right back where you started a couple weeks from now, and I'll explain why in a moment.

You can always add more later, but your first habit needs to fit two important criteria:

1-Your habit should be something you want to maintain for the long-term. Remember, we're not going for quick fixes here: Although you can tweak the habit for your needs over time, this needs to be something you can stick with and make a regular part of your life. Otherwise, it will never happen.

2-Your habit also needs to be something that has a meaningful impact on your well being. Choose something that will make you feel happier or more rested or more productive. Don't just pick whatever sounds easiest or fun - you want this self-care habit to be something that will really take a weight off of your shoulders and give you a real sense of satisfaction. It doesn't have to be big - it just has to be meaningful to you.

If you want help planning this, I have a free guide which I created that I can give you. It lists all the categories of self-care and provides space for you to brainstorm and reflect on what you'd like your habit to be.

Remember, self-care isn't selfish. It is integral to your ability to continue caring for others. If you want to be the best version of yourself, you have to prioritize your own needs, and you can do that through simple habits throughout your day.
This post is based on the latest episode of my weekly podcast, Angela Watson's Truth for Teachers. A podcast is like a free talk radio show you can listen to online, or download and take with you wherever you go. I release a new short episode each Sunday and feature it here on the blog to help you get energized and motivated for the week ahead. I'd love to hear your thoughts below in the comment section! This episode is brought to you in part by, Peergrade, a platform that makes it easy to facilitate peer review in your classroom. Students review each other's work, while Peergrade takes care of anonymously assigning reviewers and delivering all the relevant insights to teachers. With Peergrade, students learn to think critically and take ownership of their learning. They also learn to write kind and useful feedback for their peers. The best part? Peergrade is free to use for teachers and students. To learn more, visit thecornerstoneforteachers.com/peergrade. See blog posts/transcripts for all episodes Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Subscribe to the podcast in Google Play

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How to practice habits of self-care when you have no time

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This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: A guide for self-care habits for teachers. See if any of this sounds like you: You're a teacher who puts everyone else's needs before your own You never have enough time and energy for everything, and only what's left over belongs to you (And I'm guessing on ...

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12 Ways Teachers Can Build their Own Resilience, Elena Aguilar interview on Cult of Pedagogy

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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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A Bay Area nonprofit that supports teacher wellness

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The Teaching Well is a Bay Area-based nonprofit founded by teachers, for teachers, that takes an organizational health approach to education and works to interrupt the chronic teacher turnover cycle.

We enter into multi-year partnerships with school communities, and provide a variety of teacher- and systems-level interventions, including:

Professional development around areas like stress resilience, managing vicarious trauma exposure, healthy communication, and financial wellness

Mindful mentoring sessions with teachers to turn these concepts into habits

School site research to provide school communities a landscape analysis around campus sustainability

Executive-level leadership coaching to help administrators build healthy school systems informed by teacher voice

We know that children learn most effectively in nurturing, supportive environments, which is why we invest in teachers' capacities to strengthen healthy dialogue, emotional regulation, and mindful stress resilience. Our work is the "whole adult" counterpart to the "whole-child" approach.

Our Approach

The Teaching Well takes an organizational health approach to education by interrupting the chronic teacher turnover cycle at both the individual and systemic levels. We work in partnership with schools to more effectively leverage the brilliance of their educators, by providing tools for healthy dialogue, emotional regulation, and mindful stress resilience. Our work touches all educators on campuses we serve and is a catalyst to creating sustainable school systems.

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The Teaching Well is a Bay Area-based nonprofit founded by teachers, for teachers, that takes an organizational health approach to education and works to interrupt the chronic teacher turnover cycle.

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From Cult of Pedagogy: Why It's So Hard for Teachers to Take Care...

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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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The Jellyfish Live feed from the Monterey Bay Aquarium is a great visual meditation anchor