Teacher stress and COVID-19: Where do we go from here?

Abstract

Teachers, a population already vulnerable to high stress, experienced increased demands and threats to their coping resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic likely will continue to exact a toll on the mental health of the teaching workforce. A silver lining from COVID-19 could come from teacher stress research conducted during the pandemic, which provides directions for how to improve the occupational lives of teachers. To this end, Christopher McCarthy, Madison Blaydes, Caroline H. Weppner, & Richard G. Lambert briefly review how teacher stress is defined, how it was exacerbated by the pandemic, and what can be done to alleviate it and promote wellness going forward.

Coping is crucial : exploring relations between K-12 educators and staff coping strategies, perceived stress and psychological wellbeing

“…Personal stressors including anxiety over their health and the health of their families, job security, greater home/work imbalance and caring for others also elevated educators' stress experiences (Lilja et al, 2022;Shavers et al, 2022). Consistent with the findings in this study, female educators experienced more perceived stress than their male counterparts throughout the pandemic (Klapproth et al, 2022;McCarthy et al, 2022).…”

“…The findings of this study suggest that educators uniformly experience low levels of wellbeing and high levels of perceived stress relative to the general population, consistent with the findings of another research conducted prior to the global pandemic (McCarthy et al, 2022). Teachers, school-based professionals and support staff demonstrated average scores on the WHO-5 that were indicative of poor levels of wellbeing, consistent with previous findings that educators are at high risk for compromised sense of wellbeing and mental health disorders including depression and anxiety (Kidger et al, 2015;McCarthy et al, 2022;WHO, 1998).…”

“…The COVID-19 global pandemic increased educators' perceived stress and decreased their wellbeing throughout the world (McCarthy et al, 2022). The need to integrate unfamiliar online technologies into their teaching practices with limited notice and training taxed educators' coping resources (Fernandez-Batanero et al, 2021;.…”

Teacher Morale, Job Satisfaction, and Burnout in Schools of Choice Following the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…This was especially true for teachers at schools with high levels of poverty, where several teachers reported needing more support compared to teachers at more affluent schools (Kraft et al, 2021;Slavin & Storey, 2020). Higher levels of stress and burnout became more pervasive as teachers were asked to follow new instructional requirements and approaches, failed to receive adequate support for the continual changes, and saw their workloads increase (Chan et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2022;Marshall et al, in press-a;McCarthy et al, 2022;Sokal et al, 2021).…”

Teacher Morale, Job Satisfaction, and Burnout in Schools of Choice Following the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…This was especially true for teachers at schools with high levels of poverty, where several teachers reported needing more support compared to teachers at more affluent schools (Kraft et al, 2021;Slavin & Storey, 2020). Higher levels of stress and burnout became more pervasive as teachers were asked to follow new instructional requirements and approaches, failed to receive adequate support for the continual changes, and saw their workloads increase (Chan et al, 2021;Ma et al, 2022;Marshall et al, in press-a;McCarthy et al, 2022;Sokal et al, 2021).…”