- Tuesday 09 April 2024
April is Stress Awareness Month, and we wanted to take this opportunity to discuss stress in the workplace among teachers.
Between juggling ever-changing curriculum demands, navigating unreasonable parent expectations, trying to stay ahead of lesson planning, and feeling like you’re not making enough of a difference with your pupils, it’s all too common for teachers to experience burnout, stress, and frustration.
The caveat to stress and being in a stress-state long-term is that it can lead to serious health problems such as heart disease, insomnia, digestive issues, and more serious mental health disorders like anxiety and depression.
But, we’re here to tell you things can be different.
No, it’s not as easy as waving a magic wand (we wish!) but we know from partnering with wellness professionals that certain habits and changes can improve your work/life balance, your state of mind, and your overall fulfilment in your job.
(After all, teaching is all about the kids and nothing beats watching a lightbulb go off for pupils when you teach a subject you personally love and have passion for. More of that and less admin work, please!)
So, to honour Stress Awareness Month, here are our top tips for teachers who are currently feeling the effects of stress from their workload:
1. Less is More
A lot of teachers fall into the trap of thinking, ‘if I just work a little harder I’ll get ahead of my workload’ and in turn, end up adding more and more to their plate.
We’re here to tell you that less is always more and you don’t need to spend time creating hundreds of custom teaching resources, re-teaching the same concepts to pupils, or even designing lesson plans from scratch.
Truthfully, if you’re doing all the things, you can’t possibly be doing all of them well because none of those tasks are getting your full time and attention. So we recommend finding just three essential, needle moving goals and focus on those instead.
A great method to help you identify your needle movers and prioritise effectively is to do the Eisenhower Matrix, which looks like drawing four squares on a sheet of paper and labelling them as follows:
- First Quadrant (upper left): urgent and important.
- Second Quadrant (upper right): important, but not urgent.
- Third Quadrant (lower left): not important, but urgent.
- Fourth Quadrant (lower right): neither important nor urgent.
2. Lean on Support
It’s important to utilise support where it’s available. Raising a child takes a village – so we can only imagine what teaching 30+ pupils every day must feel like.
If you’ve done the Eisenhower Matrix exercise, then we would argue that one of your top priorities is going to be teaching concepts – and that’s where our resources that encourage daily skills practice come in to play.
These resources are designed to provide scaffolded learning of taught concepts in manageable doses – meaning, you’re doing less re-teaching and more practise and reinforcement of learned concepts in the classroom.
A great example of this is our staple resource, New Wave Mental Maths – which includes daily practise columns (Monday through Thursday) and a ‘Friday Review’ column to promote regular practise and reinforce ongoing mathematical concepts.
Just like that, you’re saving hours of your time by being able to plan lessons more effectively and identify your opportunities for teaching, consolidating, progress monitoring, and assessment with a single resource.
Another priority that may come up for you is doing the actual lesson planning, and that’s why we created Let’s teach! – our all-in-one digital solution for organising and delivering lesson plans, assignments, and other classroom activities in one place.
Planning lessons digitally saves so much time because everything can be linked in one place – including curriculum-aligned materials and activities – so you don’t have to spend hours searching through binders, folders, or tabs for what you need.
These are just two examples of educational support resources, but if you’re not yet utilising them we highly encourage it (and we have an incredible and wide range of resources available on our website.)
3. Prioritise Downtime
Finally, it’s so important to recognise that overworking will not lead to more productivity, and that your downtime, evenings and weekends need to be restful so that you can re-charge.
We know this is easier said than done when you’ve got stacks of marking to complete and you’re missing materials and activities for next week’s science lesson, but we want to challenge you throughout Stress Awareness Month to put boundaries in place and try to complete any work within school hours.
Let’s teach! will help significantly with this as it allows you to plan lessons within mere minutes instead of hours. Combine that with time-saving teacher resources and you’ll quickly notice an increase in energy and general wellbeing due to:
- Less decision fatigue (as your lessons will be easier to plan)
- Less burnout (as you’ll be achieving more work/life balance)
- More focus (allowing you to ‘switch off’ on weekends and sleep better.)
Did these tips help you? Why not share this article with another teacher or colleague you know who you think would benefit!