No One Talks About Teacher Trauma
Denise recently shared a Tik Tok with me from one of our faves @gibsonwashere. In the brief video, she informs the viewer that there really isn’t much out there in regards to information about teacher trauma. And dammit, if she isn’t right. If you google search anything about trauma and education, inevitably you will receive pages and pages about how to treat student trauma and how to provide support for the students experiencing trauma, but what about the teachers? Who is supporting us?
Teachers are people, and guess what…many of us have experienced trauma in our lives as well. Supporting students through their trauma while you yourself have trauma…that is freaking hard! I recently started reading Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education by Alex Shevrin Venet. If you have not purchased this book yet, please do so. She has a chapter all about supporting teacher wellness. Alex Shevrin Venet posits that teacher wellness is an equity issue. When teachers do not feel supported by their administrators, their school, or their district, they leave. This teacher turnover leads to lower student achievement. We hear so much about how we want our schools to support high achievement. However, if we want to have high achieving schools, we need to start with supporting our teachers.
If your district is like our district, teacher wellness is usually almost 100% the responsibility of the teacher. We are told, “take time for you,” “make sure you find time to rest this weekend,” or my favorites: “try exercise, meditation, reading a book”…you get the idea. Sure, our district may even support teacher “self-care” by directing us to programs like Calm. They may even provide some great reading resources for us, or even pay for a program for mindfulness. The problem here is that the responsibility of self-care and treating our trauma is solely our own. Alex Shevrin Venet states that instead our school should create a culture of caring. She says that there is a big distinction between caring about us teachers and caring for us teachers. Our leaders need to start caring for us, like we care for our students. Prioritizing the teachers’ and students’ well-being above achievement and test scores is a step in the right direction.
How Do We Help the Helpers?
Alex Shevrin Venet says that a culture of care is a proactive way to support staff. She also goes on to say that having responsive leaders is tantamount to this ideology. Teachers are stressed, burnt out and suffering from secondary trauma. Some of us are suffering through trauma of our own. We can not be expected to self-care our way out of our stress. One solution is to create a culture of caring where schools and leadership provide opportunities for teachers and support staff to “build in reflection and sense-making time.” This can be time built into staff meetings or department meetings so we are not required to spend even more time on site after contract hours.
We Need to Go Beyond “Cutesy Wellness”
A community of care should be authentic and make a real impact on the working conditions of teachers. While buying us donuts, providing lunches every once in a while, and having us do mindfulness during our staff meetings is nice, we need to support teachers so that they feel “seen, valued, and supported as full people.” Alex Shevrin Venet states that what we really need for our wellness is time, money, support, and autonomy.
Time: Leaders should look at our calendar. Think about when we are most stressed and cancel all nonessential meetings in the weeks leading up to paperwork deadlines or semester changes so it reduces the amount of work we must do outside of contract hours. She also notes if it can be sent in an email…cancel the staff meeting and send the email.
Money: Teachers need a livable wage and full health care. Leadership should always be on the front lines advocating for their teachers, working with the unions and fighting to protect their teachers’ pay and benefits.
Support: Leadership should be asking: what does my staff need from me? Frequent check-ins are always a good idea. Our leadership team often sends out reflection questionaries asking for feedback and ways in which they can support us. It is a great way for them to connect with us and it shows that they care. If admin frequently checked in to make sure that their teachers’ needs were being met and helping to facilitate that, teachers will be receptive to that.
Autonomy: Teachers know the feeling of constantly being micromanaged by their district leaders or school site. “Leaders can foster an environment of autonomy and agency among teachers by providing them with freedom to exercise their professional judgement along with resources to continually grow as educators.” Leadership needs to trust their teachers.
Bottom line:
Self-care should not be the only way in which districts and school sites can support their teachers. A community of caring is a great first step in showing teachers that districts and school sites are there to support their teachers. This is not an easy and quick fix. This community of caring takes time. Teachers are frustrated and burnt-out. We are not quick to trust anything that we may feel is creating more work for us. So leadership, take on the work and please do not make it just one more “to-do” for us.
