- Narrator: The rapid change education has taken
throughout 2020 and into 2021
has left many educators overtaxed.
The stress that comes with distance education:
worrying if their students are safe and healthy,
worrying if their students are feeling connected
and keeping up with their learning,
all compounded by a global pandemic,
has left some teachers with little energy
to take care of themselves.
- Matt Hirschberg: Educational research has, for quite a while,
noted that rates of stress and burnout in teachers is high.
In some cases, like extremely high.
This is all even pre-pandemic.
And in the last 10, 20 years, there's been a lot of concern
about teacher turnover and teacher attrition,
and some very good research,
essentially showing that on the high end, up to 50% of teachers,
it's probably more like a third,
will leave the profession in the first five years.
[clicking sound]
This is Matt Hirschberg, a postdoctoral research associate
at the Center for Healthy Minds, a UW-Madison research institute
focused on the science behind emotions,
contemplative practices,
and the qualities of mind they suspect affect well-being.
One study Matt is currently working on
is about understanding educator well-being
during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He says, not surprisingly, that the pandemic is adding
to the already stress-laden teachers.
- Very few of these teachers
have any actual preparation for virtual instruction, right.
And it's entirely new.
Like, most kids have never experienced it.
And on top of that, all of the stresses of just,
we're living through something unprecedented.
And if you think about the way human beings
are highly social creatures who have evolved in social context,
and a lot of that is physical,
and the idea that we have no physical interaction
like in physical proximity, but it's all mediated
through a screen is, I mean, it's brand new, right.
It's never, it's never happened before in human history.
- Relating to students only through a screen
has its fair share of challenges,
and that can add on substantially
to the stress that many teachers already are feeling.
But Matt's study suggests that mindfulness practices
may support educator mental well-being.
- This study is built again
on a sort of foundation of earlier studies,
looking at training, stress, resilience,
and well-being in teachers.
And most of that research
has utilized mindfulness-based interventions.
Like the ability to notice what's going on,
both inside our own minds and emotions,
and also becoming more attuned
and attentive to what's happening out there,
like with other people.
Those practices can be super simple, just, you know,
the simplest form is really just to, just to notice breathing,
just to rest the mind on the movement of the breath,
the felt sense of breathing in the body.
And you can do that for 30 seconds,
or you can do that for 30 minutes.
And it's, you know, what happens over time
when you practice that kind of naturally,
you just feel more at rest and also more centered,
your attention becomes more focused and yeah,
more sort of like a sense of equanimity,
so you don't get thrown off as much.
- Matt shares that another way to practice
is to proactively focus your attention on your motivation.
- I was a teacher.
I was a middle school teacher before coming here
to do my PhD in ed psych, educational psychology.
Before engaging with students, I would close my eyes
and I would just spend a few minutes remembering
why I'm doing what I'm doing.
And for me, the motivation was really clear.
You're really trying to generate
or strengthen the feelings of care for kids,
for yourself, for your coworkers,
empathy, understanding, et cetera,
and a practice like that could be sort of,
very classic practice like that
is just to bring somebody to mind that you really love
and care about and notice what it feels like
to kind of imagine you're in their presence
and then just wish them safety and happiness and health.
So that style of practice
is sometimes called connection style of practice.
And all of it, I think has the,
what it can do is take us out of the stress.
"This is so hard, I'm too stressed out, I can't do this."
And take us more into the feeling of connection
with others or the feeling of resting with just our own self
in this moment.
And I think all of that ultimately
makes us more available.
- Besides creating connections to ourselves and our students,
these practices can help mitigate the stress you feel
on a daily basis.
- So much of our stress and anxiety
is not actually about what's happening.
It's about our concern about what might happen,
and so what these practices seem to help people do
is sort of just remove that extra layer,
which is why before I said,
we should be realistic that this is a super difficult experience
and, you know, meditating or anything else
isn't gonna make that go away.
But what we probably can do is sort of peel off
everything added, unnecessarily added.
And I think when you do that, you start to realize like,
"Yeah, this is stressful, but I can totally manage it,"
versus "This is stressful and I don't know what to do
"and it's horrible," and getting completely overwhelmed,
which is when, you know, we start to get burnt out
and anxious and depressed and you know,
things can really get hard.
But the evidence is quite strong that teachers who are involved
in a mindfulness space intervention
benefit in various ways.
So you see decreased stress, decreased anxiety,
decreased depressive symptoms, and you see often increases
in more positive sort of qualities associated.
[gentle music]