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Upon completion of my principal certificate program, my professional perspective is to become a Curriculum Assistant or English Language Arts Coordinator/Reading Specialist for the district or region. I am currently a 6th grade English Language Arts and Reading teacher. I hold a Bachelors in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Texas-Pan American and a Masters in Curriculum & Instruction with a specialization in Reading from Texas A&M University- College Station.

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I talked with the former Dean of Instruction from a High School in our district, Mrs. Cheryl Kanipe, who is now currently an Assistant Principal for another high school about the current legal and ethical issues that are impacting her role.

#1. The school districts are struggling to manage the issues of the Senate Bill 7 Law that relates to personnel behaviors with students that are unethical. While in the past the superintendents were to only inform the state on employees accused of unethical behaviors, SB 7 requires administrators to inform the state about any issues within a certain amount of days.

#2. A major issue in the school districts is school safety. With the tragic school shootings that have taken place in the past years, it is critical that administrators are on top of the campus safety and are aware of the laws and surroundings of school safety. Students and staff come to school daily thinking they are at a safe haven.

#3. Another issue is managing the behavior policies for Special Education students. A manifestation now has to take place resulting in presentation of facts surrounding the incident and relating it to the disability. If the manifestation does not take place, the child cannot be considered for Alternative Placement.

#4. Within the personnel management in the campus, teacher evaluation and remediation is ongoing. Teachers get themselves into dilemmas throughout the day and unexpectedly, sometimes responses or actions are not proper or proactive. As administrators, they need to be very active in their documentation and aware of the necessity in doing so.

#5. One last major issue that is an impact on her role is bullying. Bullying has been a nationwide issue in school districts. Ensuring that all administrators, teachers, staff, students and parents are properly informed on bullying is a necessity.

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Exploration Option 3 (2/2) Moral Teachers, Moral Students

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Exploration Option 3 (2/2) Moral Teachers, Moral Students

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In reviewing this article, the ethical behavior of a teacher trickles down to the behavior of the student. Have a positive campus and classroom allows the student to behave positively and work to their best potential. The lack of support for the teachers allows for stress to occur which in turn brings down the success rate of the students. This article shares how there needs to be a positive climate with supporting the teacher from student behavior to instruction and curriculum.

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March 2003 | Volume 60 | Number 6
Creating Caring Schools Pages 6-11

Rick Weissbourd

There is value in these solutions. Students surely benefit from performing community service, being reminded of important virtues, and practicing good habits.

But we have been wringing our hands and trying these solutions for decades, in some cases for two centuries, without fundamentally changing students' moral prospects. The moral development of students does not depend primarily on explicit character education efforts but on the maturity and ethical capacities of the adults with whom they interact-especially parents, but also teachers, coaches, and other community adults.

Educators influence students' moral development not simply by being good role models-important as that is-but also by what they bring to their relationships with students day to day: their ability to appreciate students' perspectives and to disentangle them from their own, their ability to admit and learn from moral error, their moral energy and idealism, their generosity, and their ability to help students develop moral thinking without shying away from their own moral authority. That level of influence makes being an adult in a school a profound moral challenge. And it means that we will never greatly improve students' moral development in schools without taking on the complex task of developing adults' maturity and ethical capacities. We need to rethink the nature of moral development itself.

Guiding Students' Moral and Emotional Growth

During the past decade, I have spent much time in schools and talked to many students. I have observed again and again students' exquisite sensitivity to the qualities of their teachers-both their fierce loyalty to the teachers they trust and their keen alertness to hypocrisy, injustice, and indifference. Research shows that even when schools are massively restructured, students often remain strangely oblivious to new structures and practices. When asked about the strengths and weaknesses of their schools after these reforms, students focus on the strengths and weaknesses of individual teachers (Warren Little, 1998).

In these relationships, moral qualities are shaped. Adults do not simply transmit moral qualities and beliefs to children. These qualities and beliefs emerge and continually evolve in the wide array of relationships that every child has with both adults and peers starting nearly at birth, and in children's felt knowledge of what is harmful, true, or right. In these relationships, children continually sort out, for example, what they owe others, what they should stand for, what traditions are worth keeping, whether to follow rules, how to contribute to their family, classroom, and community-in other words, how to be a decent human being.

Should I tell my teacher when I know another student is lying to her? Do I have to say yes to the girl who invited me over and who doesn't have friends, when I would rather play with another girl I like more? Should I speak my mind about an issue that's important to me, even though I may lose friends?

Fair, generous, caring, and empathetic educators model these qualities and can effectively guide students in sorting out these questions. Often adults are also effective when they express how their own moral questions are related to children's moral questions and when they model how to think through moral issues and dilemmas.

Teacher-student relationships shape students' moral development in another sense-through their influence on students' emotional development. Most of the talk about moral development in school assumes that we can teach students to behave morally by instilling in them virtues and standards, a clear sense of right and wrong. This assumption ignores the fact that emotions are often the horse, values and virtues the rider trying to hang on. Harvard child psychologist Jerome Kagan (1995) observes that violence prevention programs that explain to students the harmful consequences of violence often don't help because "children know violence is wrong-what they can't control is the shame and destructive impulses that fuel violence."

People do not usually lie, cheat, or abuse others because they don't value honesty and respect; more likely, they suffer from feelings of inferiority, cynicism, or egocentrism that blind them to others' feelings. Research suggests that such emotions as shame, anger, and cynicism in particular eat away at caring, a sense of responsibility, and other important moral qualities (Gilligan, 1996; Rozin et al., 1999). When people's moral beliefs conflict with their immoral actions, many will change their beliefs to accommodate their actions, not vice versa. They will justify stealing, for example, because "society is corrupt" or because "all people are basically self-interested."

Complex Interactions

What makes matters more complicated is that the influence of teachers and other adults on students' emotional and moral lives goes both ways, in complex reverberations and interactions that are often positive but sometimes clearly destructive. For example, Randall, a 7th grader who gets under everyone's skin, finds himself in a common kind of escalating war with adults. His constant antagonism makes it hard for teachers to see his perspective-one teacher calls him "a jerk," and the principal refers to him in even harsher terms-which makes him step up his provocations, further angering his teachers and the principal. Randall is spinning out of his school community. When I ask him whom he trusts, he holds up a piece of paper that is totally blank.

Often a chain of complex interactions among home, school, and peers shapes students' moral qualities and behavior. Consider Sally, a 10-year-old with Attention Deficit Disorder. Sally has a highly anxious mother and a father prone to spikes of anger. According to her psychologist, Sally is furious with them and isolates herself at home. At school, she has become increasingly disruptive and rude: She wrote on the chalkboard that her teacher is a bitch. Her teacher has little empathy for her, not only because of these attacks but also because she feels harassed and criticized by Sally's mother. At war with both her parents and her teacher, Sally looks to her peers for support. Other students, however, find her needy and rude. Sally becomes more provocative with her teacher, and the spiral continues downward.

Teachers Who Make a Difference

Many teachers, of course, are effective at identifying and turning around these downward spirals and at promoting key emotional and ethical qualities. Many teachers communicate high moral expectations and provide steady listening and opportunities for accomplishment that reduce students' shame and distrust. Many teachers learn from their own moral errors and continually develop their capacity to see the perspective of every student in their classrooms. I recently talked to a 4th grade teacher who told me that she thinks that a 10-year-old boy in her classroom has a more refined and complex sense of justice than she does-that he is more effective at working out conflicts in the classroom than she is. She said that she tries to learn from him.

I know teachers who work hard to enter the particular moral worlds of students. A high school teacher recently told me about his efforts not to condone but to understand why a student he admired had brought a gun to school. It turned out that this student went straight from school to work and returned home late at night. On his way home from the bus, he had to walk past a gang that had threatened him several times. Bringing the gun was not an act of provocation but an act of self-defense. This same teacher told me about his struggles to understand the religious orientations that underlie some students' moral thinking. He recalled how vexed a girl in his class became when he related that he did not believe in God. How can I respect your judgment and guidance, the student asked openly, if it is not rooted in a belief in God? The teacher realized the depth of his student's religious feelings. I have observed that other teachers consciously try to take the perspective of the children whom they find most frustrating.

Many teachers and administrators, however, clearly don't possess these qualities-or don't express them in their interactions with students day to day. These teachers and administrators don't reach out to struggling students, don't attempt to see students' perspectives, and have lost their idealism. What gets in the way of adults developing or expressing these qualities? And what can we do about it?

Depression and Disillusionment

Exact data are difficult to obtain, but I think that disillusionment and depression undermine large numbers of teachers in urban schools. I refer here less to the serious, acute depression that afflicts about 20 percent of U.S. adults (Beardslee, 2002) than to the steady drizzle of helplessness and hopelessness that can wear teachers down.

The litany of stresses that these teachers bear has become well known. They can't get textbooks and other materials; they feel stranded, marooned in their classrooms; they don't get adequate support from administrators; they don't believe that they have the skills to deal with problems that they confront every day. Even those teachers who develop the skills and knowledge to work effectively with individual students often become overwhelmed when they realize what it would take to work effectively with every struggling student in their classroom. "As a human, I may never be up to this," one told me.

A colleague who recently directed an institute for new teachers in Boston believes that new teachers suffer a kind of learned helplessness -a term coined by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania-a gradual sense of losing control (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). You can hardly set foot in an urban school these days without also hearing about the burden of managing students with behavior troubles. Some teachers feel physically at risk. One of my former graduate students was hurt while physically restraining a 2nd grade student; another 7-year-old told her that he was going to kill her. She came into my office in a kind of moral shock, a disbelief that this state of affairs existed. Most teachers have brought to this work their hearts and souls, and many have lost the belief that they can make a real difference in students' lives.

Research documenting what happens to adults when they get depressed may shed light on what happens to teachers who feel this chronic sense of helplessness and become burned out. Depressed adults often become unilateral and commanding in their interactions with other people. Their behavior tends to be governed by their own moods and needs rather than by an awareness of others. They tend to take the path of least resistance and do what requires the least effort. Often they become withdrawn, irritable, critical, or sometimes outright hostile (McLoyd, 1990). What's hard for them are exactly the qualities-empathy, patience, persistence, consistency, idealism-that are crucial for teachers to shepherd students' moral growth.

Misconceptions About Adults' Moral Development

Yet there may be a bigger obstacle to adults developing important moral qualities, and that obstacle is a fundamental cultural misconception about the nature of adults' moral lives. Most adults, including most teachers, don't view themselves as engaged in their own moral growth. We have the peculiar notion that our moral natures are established by late childhood-and that as adults, we simply live out the die that is cast.

Yet new models of adult development suggest that adults' ethical qualities do not remain static at all-they zigzag depending on many factors (Noam, 1995). Some adults become more generous and compassionate over time; others become more selfish. Some adults become wiser, more able to distill important moral truths; others' notions of fairness become more formulaic or coarse. Many people lose their moral enthusiasms. Every stage of adulthood brings both new moral weaknesses and new moral strengths.

This capacity for change means that the typical adult has not reached his or her moral potential. King Lear does not develop compassion or a mature sense of justice until he nears death. Schools face the challenge of creating cultures in which teachers come to view appreciating and being generous to others, acting with fairness and integrity, and formulating mature and resilient ideals as evolving and subtle capacities. "There is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else," civil rights leader Whitney Young says. "The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self."

Much of what passes for character education in schools simply has no influence on adults' emotional or moral qualities. The constant exhortations that teachers receive to become better role models generate by themselves neither the internal commitments nor the external guidance and support that teachers need to develop these qualities. Minimally, an effective moral education effort would include specific strategies for helping adults deal with disillusionment and helplessness and would focus on creating a culture that supports teachers in their emotional and moral growth.

Toward Effective Moral Education

Schools clearly can't respond to all the troubles that lead to helplessness and hopelessness in teachers. But they can focus on two prime causes: the strain of dealing with students with behavior troubles; and isolation.

Many schools now put a priority on helping teachers work with students with behavior problems, not only because these problems are so fraying to teachers but also because the problems undercut the learning of all students in the classroom. Happily, programs exist to help teachers deal effectively with these students. The best give teachers specific strategies and break down teachers' isolation, creating stronger, more caring school communities. An example is the Child Development Project, an elementary school program designed, implemented, and evaluated by the Developmental Studies Center in Oakland, California (Battistich et al., 1991). Among the many supports provided, teachers learn effective discipline strategies and receive help in developing students' intrinsic motives to act constructively and cooperatively, including engaging students in rule setting, decision making, and problem solving. Over the past four years, I have worked in two Boston elementary schools with Robert Selman, Bethany Montgomery, and Alison Auderieth on a similar project, which trains a diverse cadre of graduate students to work with schools on these goals.

Schools might also assist in getting the small number of teachers suffering from serious depression into treatment. Such treatment has dramatically improved in the past 25 years (Beardslee, 2002). I am certainly not suggesting that school administrators identify depressed teachers and pressure them into getting therapy. But schools could play a much bigger role by participating in the National Institute of Mental Health's ongoing public education campaign on depression awareness and screening, including using posters and other materials to inform both parents and teachers about the symptoms of depression and about treatment resources.

Although a mountainous literature exists on depression, psychologists have remarkably little understanding of dis-illusionment. They don't even have a vocabulary for talking about it. But disillusionment-especially the loss of a belief that they can make a difference in students' lives-is one of the biggest reasons that nearly one-half of teachers in the United States leave the profession within their first five years ( Education Week, 2001). Disillusionment is not necessarily bad. Strictly speaking, disillusionment is freedom from illusion. It is the ability to face and absorb a greater portion of reality-a foundation for wisdom and maturity. But disillusionment turns pernicious when it slides into helplessness and passivity-when teachers don't have the confidence, support, or opportunities for the creativity needed to master these realities.

There is a great deal of talk these days about stronger, more coherent mentoring programs for new teachers, and these new programs are vital for helping teachers work through disillusionment. Mentors can assist teachers in developing their competence and talents, but they can also be responsive to teachers at precisely those moments when new teachers' images and expectations about teaching collide with difficult realities. Mentors can help new teachers be realistic and take pride in seemingly small accomplishments.

Mentors can also help new teachers think about creative, diverse career paths within the teaching profession that might enable them to use their talents and have a larger impact on students' lives. Research suggests that using their talents and growing professionally are significantly more important than status or salary in boosting teachers' morale (Heath, 1994). A growing chorus of educators and researchers now call for revamping teachers' career opportunities to allow teachers to become innovative and entrepreneurial-for example, enabling them to start their own programs, conduct research, take sabbaticals in the private sector, or assume leadership roles.

Such changes as these should be one piece of a broad effort to support both teachers' ethical growth and their ability to guide students' ethical growth. New modes of professional development focused on improving instruction can teach us much in this regard. District 2 in New York, for example, has attracted attention for revamping professional development so that teachers regularly observe and reflect on one another's practice. Veteran professionals with expertise in such important content areas as literacy also coach teachers.

School districts need to do much more to promote professional cultures that focus on both academic instruction and developing adults' ethical awareness and skills. Teachers, guided by coaches, could provide feedback to one another on such topics as earning respect and trust, creating a caring community, dealing with challenging students, and identifying and reversing the downward spirals in which students and adults get caught.

Teachers need opportunities to reflect on why they have difficulty empathizing with particular students, on their successes and failures in cultivating students' moral thinking, and on the state of their own ideals. Teachers need emotional support from their colleagues in dealing with chronic stress. And administrators need to learn the art of creating opportunities for this emotional support without turning schools into the kinds of therapeutic cultures that would estrange many teachers.

None of this, of course, will be easy. But it doesn't have to be yet another task for schools already burdened with the hard work of improving instruction. Much of the work can be done in the context of what schools should be doing anyway to support new teachers and to promote good instruction, and much of it-creating strong communities, helping teachers manage students with behavior problems, increasing adults' capacity for reflection-will certainly serve academic goals. Best of all, this approach, unlike so many current character education efforts, stands a real chance of nurturing in children the qualities that they need to become caring and responsible adults.

References

Battistich, V., Watson, M., Solomon, D., Schaps, E., & Solomon, J. (1991). The Child Development Project: A comprehensive program for the development of prosocial character. In J. L. Gewirtz & W. M. Kurtines (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development (Vol. 3). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Beardslee, B. (2002). Out of the darkened room. Boston: Little Brown.

Bennett, W. (2000). What really ails America? In G. Muller (Ed.), The McGraw-Hill reader (7th ed., pp. 342-346). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Damon, W. (2001). To not fade away: Restoring civil identity in the young. In D. Ravitch & J. Viteritti (Eds.), Making good citizens (pp. 122-141). New Haven, CT: Yale Press.

Education Week. (2000, January). Quality counts 2000: Who should teach? Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education.

Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Our deadly epidemic and its causes. New York: Putnam.

Heath, D. (1994). Schools of hope: Developing mind and character in today's youth. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kagan, J. (1995). Personal communication.

McLoyd, V. (1990). The impact of economic hardship on black families and children: Psychological distress, parenting, and socioemotional development. Child Development, 61, 311-346.

Noam, G. (1995). Reconceptualizing maturity: The search for deeper meaning. In G. Noam & K. Fischer (Eds.), Development and vulnerability in close relationships. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Peterson, C., Maier, S., & Seligman, M. (1993). Learned helplessness: A theory for the age of personal control. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rozin, P., et al. (1999). The mapping between three moral emotions (contempt, anger, and disgust) and three moral codes (community, autonomy, divinity). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(4), 574-586.

Schaps, E., Schaeffer, E., & McDonnell, S. (2001, September 12). What's right and wrong in character education today. Education Week, pp. 40-41.

Warren Little, J. (1998). California's School Restructuring Demonstration Program: Lessons about comprehensive school reform and its effects on students, educators, and schools. Excerpt of paper presented at University of California, Berkeley.

Rick Weissbourd is a lecturer on education at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government; weissbri@gse.harvard.edu. He is the author of The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America's Children and What We Can Do About It (Addison-Wesley, 1996).

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March 2003 | Volume 60 | Number 6 Creating Caring Schools Pages 6-11 Rick Weissbourd There is value in these solutions. Students surely benefit from performing community service, being reminded of important virtues, and practicing good habits. But we have been wringing our hands and trying these solutions for decades, in some cases for two centuries, without fundamentally changing students' moral prospects.

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Exploration Option 3 (1/2) The Achievement Gap

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Exploration Option 3 (1/2) The Achievement Gap

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In reviewing the NASSP webpage, I stumbled upon an issue with the achievement gap in schools today. NASSP believes that it is the schools/district responsibility to address the factors. According to NCES, since the 1900's there have been little measurable change in the achievement gaps with reading and math between the different populations. Some people believe that it is impossible to close the gap due to social class characteristics.

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Click image to download printable PDF

Issue

Since the days of Horace Mann, who first captured the concept of Education as the Great Equalizer, public schools have been regarded as the institutions where the effects of social, economic and racial inequalities are eliminated. Until the later part of the 20th century, the history of segregation made this charge a challenge of immense proportions. Since then, however, the expectation that public schools level the playing field for all students has been reaffirmed and was, in fact, presented as a major objective of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Never have the stakes been higher for educators to fulfill this mission. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, one out of every three Americans is now a member of a racial and/or ethnic minority\[i\]\[ii\]. Yet, achievement data disaggregated by income level, race and disability status show a persistent gap between white, affluent, English speaking students and their low income, African American, and Latino peers.

According to the National Assessment of Education Progress, while 8th grade NAEP reading and math scores have improved over the years, the achievement gap persists for African American, Latino, and low-income students.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, since the early 1990s, the achievement gaps in reading and mathematics between White and Black and White and Hispanic 4th- and 8th-graders have shown little measurable change\[iii\].

The high school dropout rate for African American and Latino students continues to be unacceptably high. According to the 2007 National Center for Education Statistics, 10.4 percent of African American students and 22.4 percent of Hispanic students dropped out of high school in 2005\[iv\]. Other studies report that urban districts with predominantly minority student populations have dropout rates near 50 percent\[v\].

Two schools of thought have dominated the conversation around the achievement gap. One, promoted by a number of education reformers, advocates, and the business community, contend that schools do have the capacity to close the achievement gap, but don't have the will to do so. Arguing that a number of schools do, against all odds, successfully narrow the achievement gap for their students, these groups suggest replicating practices implemented in these outstanding schools. The achievement gap, according to this thesis, is simply an expectation gap. Solutions proposed include holding schools accountable for narrowing or closing the achievement gap, higher expectations, academic rigor for all, and highly qualified educators.

On the other end of the spectrum, some argue that schools simply don't have the capacity to close the gap because they only reflect inequities in the larger society. They argue that although schools receive much of the blame, the gap is more the result of social class characteristics that are beyond the control of even the best schools and teachers. This thesis dramatically diminishes the impact schools can have in closing the achievement gap. Solutions proposed include social interventions aimed at combating the effect of poverty, such as better housing and healthcare, that impact children's capacity to succeed in schools.

Although factors external to schools are paramount in creating the achievement gap, NASSP believes that schools have a responsibility to address this challenge. It should be unmistakably clear that only a truly collective effort (educators, parents, community leaders and policymakers) will ensure that children of poverty and other disadvantaged backgrounds have an equal opportunity to succeed in school.

NASSP believes that the various government entities and societal institutions have a responsibility to address the myriad and complex conditions impacting students' capacity to learn, such as poverty, housing, health care, unemployment and nutrition.

NASSP and other groups have identified schools and districts that have successfully narrowed the gap.\[vi\] These schools hold a piece of the solution and provide examples of best practices that other schools can emulate.

NASSP believes, and recent research has confirmed, that school leadership affects student achievement (second only to instruction, particularly for at-risk students). Principals and assistant principals play a critical role in leading schools' efforts to narrow the achievement gap.

NASSP offers Breaking Ranks II™ and Breaking Ranks in the Middle™ as tools that provide school leaders with a framework for raising awareness of the achievement gap and strategies to address it.

The achievement gap is the product of a multitude of factors all working together. Consequently, the solution to this problem must be no less multifaceted, no less complex and comprehensive.
NASSP calls on school leaders to:

Align all programs and structures in their schools so that all social, economic, and racial/ethnic groups have open and equal access to challenging activities and learning\[vii\]

Construct teams with a range of expertise levels to encourage peer mentoring and ensure that a particular group of students does not get the uncertified, unqualified or unprepared teachers

Review the composition of the student body. Document that minorities are proportionately represented in challenging classes and not disproportionately represented in less challenging classes or special education classes

Implement academic and social support mechanisms to help low performing students

Place their most qualified teachers to teach those in greatest need, so that these students do not fall farther and farther behind

Ensure that each student has a personal plan for progress that the student, family, and adviser/teacher/counselor review regularly

Encourage transitions and alignment from grade to grade and across disciplines

Develop students' ability to participate in and lead conversations focused on making diversity a valued part of the learning experience

Engage teachers in ongoing professional development that addresses assumptions and stereotypes and becomes part of the school improvement plan

Partner with community organizations to provide vulnerable students academic and social support services

Provide at risk students with awareness and opportunities for post-secondary education.

NASSP calls on policymakers to:

Expand health coverage to children and families living in poverty

Establish policies that eliminate children's health disparities

Increase earned income tax credits for low wages to help offset the unequal distribution of incomes

Fund in-school academic and social support mechanisms that help low performing students

Fund after school and summer activities for children in low income families

Support school principals in their efforts to place the most qualified teachers with the most vulnerable students

Provide incentives for the most effective teachers to teach in the hardest to staff schools

Provide funding for Headstart programs

Provide pre-K education for the most at-risk students

Provide opportunities for post-secondary education

Increase access of low income families to stable (permanent) housing.

U.S. Census Bureau, May 17, 2007. https://www.census.gov/library/publications.html/

National Center for Education Statistics: Trends in the Achievement Gaps in Reading and Mathematics, 2006. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2009455.aspx

IES National Center for Education Statistics, 2007. Indicator 23.

Balfanz, R. &Letgers, N., 2004. Locating the Dropout Crisis. http://web.jhu.edu/CSOS/graduation-gap/power/report70.pdf
http://www.nassp.org/

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Click image to download printable PDF Issue Since the days of Horace Mann, who first captured the concept of Education as the Great Equalizer, public schools have been regarded as the institutions where the effects of social, economic and racial inequalities are eliminated.

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After my search of legal and ethical issues in the field of school administrators, I am most interested in how school administrators will help promoting better support with teacher stress. As a current teacher, the lack of support when it comes to student behavior shows in the student achievement. If there is better support in instruction, communication, and especially student behavior, I feel that the stresses of a teacher will trickle away tremendously.

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Researching Support of Teachers to alleviate stress

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Researching Support of Teachers to alleviate stress

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When performing an internet search for teacher stressors, I stumbled upon a website that deals with academic rigor in a journalistic flair called The Conversation. The article is called "The Hidden Threat of Teacher Stress." This article shares that many factors that teachers have to deal with on a daily basis that can lead to stress and ways to help alleviate such stress.

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When a traumatic event such as the Florida school shooting takes place, often the focus afterward is on finding ways to make sure students and teachers are safe from violence and physical harm.

But there's another danger that threatens teacher well-being that is often overlooked. The threat is stress - and it is something that nearly half of all teachers say they experience at a high level every day.

Teachers are actually tied with nurses, with 46 percent of both groups reporting high daily stress. Such reports are comparable with other notoriously demanding occupations, such as physicians and business managers. It's not hard to understand the reasons why.

Teachers do much more than teach academic lessons. They must also manage classroom behavior and keep an eye on helping students grow and develop socially in a healthy way. On top of that, they must coordinate with other adults and keep records of just about everything they do.

Teachers are expected to perform these tasks effectively, even when their students face difficulties outside the classroom, from unmet needs to mental health issues. The more needs students have, the more teachers are expected to do.

If teachers already face high levels of occupational stress, it's not hard to see how the recent spate of deadly school shootings - coupled with the idea that teachers should arm themselves to protect themselves and their students - can elevate their stress levels even higher.

We make these observations as researchers affiliated with the Center for Research on School Safety, School Climate, and Classroom Management at Georgia State University. Among other things, our research focuses on fostering better school and workplace relationships and cultivating safe learning environments.

The consequences of teacher stress are far-reaching and adversely impact not just the teacher, but everyone around them, most notably their students.

Threats to teacher wellness

For starters, chronic stress triggers a range of physical and mental health symptoms. Physically, stress weakens the immune system and increases susceptibility to illness. Stress also exacerbates pain and reduces physical stamina.

Prolonged stress may increase risk of chronic fatigue, heart disease and other ailments. Stress also depletes mental stamina. Common symptoms include irritability, mood swings and exhaustion, which may escalate into depression, anxiety and lower quality of life. These symptoms have been identified by teachers reporting high stress. The consequences, however, do not stop with teachers.

Threats to teacher job performance

Chronic stress can also impact teachers' job performance. Unwell teachers have a reduced ability to teach and therefore call in sick. The more absences teachers rack up, the less time they spend with their students. Excessive teacher absences disrupt the flow of instruction, behavior management and connection with students. Research has confirmed that excessive teacher absences are linked to student underachievement.

Stress is also associated with high teacher turnover. Nearly half of all new teachers leave the field within the first five years. Among those who stay, nearly two-thirds were found in a 2015 poll to be "not engaged," or mentally and emotionally disconnected from their teaching role and their students' needs.

If nearly half of teachers leave the field within five years, and most who remain are disengaged, there is an epidemic of teachers who are stressed out, burned out and merely going through the motions.

Research suggests that active teacher engagement and positive teacher-student relationships result in high student achievement. Similarly, without active engagement, teachers cannot connect with their students and teach them effectively.

What can be done to reduce teacher stress?

There are ways to lessen teacher stress and boost their capacity to perform their best.

School leaders can help reduce teacher stress by cultivating working conditions that support teachers. Teachers experience less stress and commit to jobs more often under satisfactory working conditions. The working conditions that lead to the most job satisfaction involve administrative and collegial support. In other words, teachers need their leaders to provide constructive feedback that helps improve their performance.

Schools can also help reduce teacher stress by promoting effective teacher-student interactions. One way to accomplish this is by using strategies that reward positive student behaviors. Teachers in schools with that utilize positive strategies on a schoolwide basis to support student behavior experience significantly lower levels of burnout. To promote positive teacher-student relationships, experts recommend a ratio of five positive supports for each punitive action. In other words, teachers should be commending students for doing the right thing five times as often as they take away privileges or scold them for doing the wrong thing.

Teachers also need to make sure they take care of themselves so that they can take care of others. Without actively caring for themselves, teachers lose the capacity to care for others.

Given the demands of teaching, it may be easy for teachers to put their own needs last. A comprehensive self-care plan may help teachers identify signs of stress and improve their stress management skills. Examples of stress-reducing strategies with the most scientific support include yoga, exercise and mindfulness meditation. Yoga and exercise require physical exertion and have benefits beyond physical fitness. Both also trigger hormones that relieve stress and are associated with better mental focus and mood. No specific skills are required for mindfulness meditation, and with even a few minutes of practice most days, benefits include improvements to self-awareness, mental concentration and emotion regulation.

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When a traumatic event such as the Florida school shooting takes place, often the focus afterward is on finding ways to make sure students and teachers are safe from violence and physical harm. But there's another danger that threatens teacher well-being that is often overlooked.

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After reviewing various articles in the Angelo State University Library, I found an interesting article that shares a qualitative study on special education teachers by investigating the unique teacher stressors they deal with. The teachers mentioned that there was a lack of support with the administrators and due to that it creates stress for the them within in the classroom.

Reference:

Haydon, T. T. haydon@uc. ed., Leko, M. M. 2. L. ed., & Stevens, D. S. ed. (2018). Teacher Stress: Sources, Effects, and Protective Factors. Journal of Special Education Leadership, 31(2), 99–107. Retrieved from https://easydb.angelo.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=131644615&site=eds-live

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What I learned about the Stress of Teacher

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What I learned about the Stress of Teacher

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Teachers play a critical role in the students development, they shape the children to become who they need to be. Where teachers don't just play a role of teaching children, they also play a vital role in the emotional and social development of their lives.

One of the main reasons that the teaching profession has a huge turnover rate within 5 years is due to stress.  There is a lack of support from administration. Student behavior can cause a class to have a negative classroom environment. It is not the teachers job to babysit kids, they are there to teach them to their best potential. Some administration lacks the discipline and then asks for far more than what the teacher can handle in a limited amount of time.

There is a critical role in helping the teacher stress. They are very valuable to the children and teachers should be happy with their job.