Teacher Stress: A Psychobiological Approach to Stressful Interactions in the Classroom

Abstract

Teachers report elevated levels of stress and psychosomatic illnesses compared to other professions. Teacher stress has far-reaching consequences on their health outcomes, the student's motivation, and the economy. However, research on teacher stress relies mainly on self-reports, hence, assesses stress on purely subjective perception. Personal or subjective aspects can strongly influence these measures, and biological stress may even be unnoticed. It is, therefore, necessary to include both subjective and objective measures to investigate stress, preferably in real-life situations. This review aims to demonstrate the importance of a psychobiological ambulatory assessment (AA) approach to investigate teacher stress, in contrast to purely subjective measures. We discuss classroom disruptions as the primary stress factor within the classroom and how a multimethod AA approach using psychological measures while simultaneously recording classroom disruptions and biological stress reactions of teachers would enable a much deeper understanding of stressful transactional processes taking place in the classroom that has not been achieved before.

Teachers' physiological and self‐reported stress, teaching practices and students' learning outcomes in Grade 1

“…We investigated teachers' physiological and self‐reported stress linked to the observed teaching practices in primary school classrooms and to students' learning outcomes in math. The novelty of our study is in combining the effects of both objective and subjective stress indicators on teaching practices and students' learning (see Wettstein et al, 2021). Our results revealed that self‐reported stress is related to teachers' using fewer child‐centred teaching practices compared with teacher‐directed ones, but physiological stress is not associated with teaching practices.…”

“…Teachers' stress and general well‐being are crucial determinants of the classroom environment, as these are reflected in instructional and classroom management decisions teachers make and, therefore, affect students' learning experiences in the classroom (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Roeser et al, 2013; Travers, 2017; Wettstein et al, 2021). We already know that teachers' well‐being is related to their students' math achievement (Klusmann et al, 2016) and that their teaching practices are related to the students' gain in math skills in Grade 1 (Lerkkanen et al, 2016).…”

“…Physiological stress as an objective measure refers to the evaluations of the potentially stressful situations, while self‐reported stress as a subjective measure refers to the considerations about one's coping ability (Weckesser et al, 2019). Furthermore, measuring teachers' objective stress during the working day allows for avoiding the retrospective bias of evaluations (Wettstein et al, 2021). In the school context, teachers' physiological stress during working days has gained increasing interest in recent years (Katz et al, 2016; Wettstein et al, 2020).…”

Examining biomarkers of stress over the process of teaching among teachers of English as a foreign language

“…For example, they have been criticized for being very subjective and sensitive to mood fluctuations. Some researchers have criticized these scales for lack of ability to capture the complexity of stress as they may ignore essential data on real time of physiological stress reactions (Wettstein et al, 2021). Moreover, when responding to these scales, teachers may not report their level of stress accurately, as their self‐evaluation may be affected by their moods.…”

チュニジアの初等・中等・高等学校教師における新型コロナウィルス恐怖および心理的ストレスの有所見率と予測因子

“…A systematic review of 19 studies reported that school teachers represented an especially high-risk population for mental health disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic [3]. In fact, teachers presented high levels of stress and mental illness compared to other professions [4], since they have to educate many students every day in a closed environment. Indeed, several studies in the literature have shown that more than one third of teachers accumulated high levels of fear of COVID-19 and of serious mental distress during the COVID-19 pandemic [5][6][7][8].…”