Term 4: Teacher Self-Care isn’t selfish.
If you are an Australian teacher then today is the return to the final term of teaching for 2019 or if you are in VIC you will already be one week down. In my opinion as an educator of almost 20 years, Term 4 is the most important term for teacher self-care and today I want to discuss prioritising Teacher self-care in Term 4 and get to the heart of why it just isn’t happening for our teachers.
Start of Term reminder for Teacher Self-Care
On the weekend I posted the above image on my Monday Morning Resources to receive a lot of likes and direct messages. It seems many teachers appreciated the reminder to prioritise self-care in Term 4.
What prompted me to post the image were the comments and posts I was seeing on social media about teachers dreading the arrival of Term 4. Let’s be clear that teachers were not dreading returning to the classrooms in and of itself. Many teachers were sharing how sad they will be to end the year with the wonderful classes of students they have been working with all year.
Summarised, teachers were dreading the extra demands that are put upon teachers in Term 4. Discussions about assessment, report writing and the toll it takes on family lives. Teachers who were trying to get ahead and already organising end of year gifts for students. In my experience these demands were felt the most when I worked as an Upper Primary and Year 6 teacher. Before you even settle back in to the classroom routine for the Term 4 – the jobs are waiting for you. These are the jobs that many teachers spend their holidays tackling rather than recharging.
When I was in the classroom teaching Year 6 Term 4 looked like
- report writing – then proofreading, re-writing, proof-reading your team reports.
- preparation of student portfolios – either hard copy or digital
- Year 6 presentation day
- Organising end of year fun day
- End of year Art Display
- Choosing new school captains/prefects
- liasing with highschools around transition – writing transition reports and supervising school visits
- Managing student anxiety around commencing Year 7
- Managing parental anxiety around children commencing Year 7
- booking the school camp for next years Year 6 students
- Having school camp meetings with Year 5 parents
- Ensuring all summative data was up to date
- Many round table discussions about class lists for the new year
- Indicating teaching preferences for the following year
- Packing up and moving classrooms
- Managing end of year school concert performances and rehearsals
While not comprehensive, and each school is different, the list shows that there can be at least one extra demand per week placed on top of the hectic schedule, engaging lesson preparation and programming and demanding workload that Terms 1-3 already give teachers. Before we factor in any element of our home/personal lives.
We all know what Teacher self-care looks like.
I am confident that the large majority (if not all) teachers know what self-care looks like. Type teacher self-care into Pinterest and there are plenty of articles with titles like “Top 5 tips for Teacher Self-Care”, “5 Self-Care Quotes” or “50 ideas for stressed out teachers”.
Teachers are educated professionals who nurture students. We know about nurturing, we preach about kindness in our classrooms all year long. Believing that teachers simply need to be told what self-care is to start acting out self-care is missing the mark. If it was that simple we would have a country full of self-care experts.
So why hasn’t self-care been embraced like in other professions?
Teachers deserve self-care.
If you are a teacher then you deserve self-care. Let me say that again. You.deserve.self-care. Self-care is not selfish. The entire education system is bolstered afloat on the goodwill and passion of educators.
After working with teachers and mentoring teachers for several years there is a disconnect between the realities of the job and how teachers feel about their role performing the job. I believe this links to the number of teachers getting burnt out and leaving the profession in the first 5 years.
If I spoke to the wider community about the need for front line medical professionals such as ER nurses, doctors and paramedics to utilise effective self-care strategies I am confident that people would show their support for these professionals by recognising the value they bring to our society, the hectic pace, the potential trauma and risks the job brings, the energy levels used to carry out the role. The feelings of the professionals and the demands of the job would be largely validated by the wider community.
What does the community say about Teacher self-care?
However it only takes a news media outlet to post a story about teacher holidays, industrial wage concerns or the hours of a teaching work week to have these comments come out of the woodwork. Each of the comments below were anonymously posted in response to newspaper articles this year alone.
- So tough, wish I got all those holidays
- It’s teaching not brain surgery – how hard can it be
- Must be wonderful to get to leave work at 3.30pm.
- If teachers want more pay then maybe they should do some work and improve national literacy levels.
What these comments reinforce to teachers is that it is not the role of teaching that is difficult but that in fact there is something within them, as the teacher, that makes the job hard. The challenges of the teaching profession often go unseen and thus unsupported. The hidden message here is “what on earth would you need self-care for?”.
Teachers tend to be people who are problem solvers and connectors. The teaching community on Instagram is massive because we love to come together and rally around each other because most of us teach all day alone. There is also a lot of down playing just how intense the workload and emotional toll can be. Any teacher who has had a student make a horrific disclosure to them can tell you just how heartwrenching the job can be.
Teachers spend the large portion of the day meeting the needs of all the individual students in their classroom. Talk about high school teachers or specialist teachers and the number of students you need to have a rapport with multiplies rapidly. We are the people others come to for help. Our days are filled with action and tasks so much so that in the busyness of the day we can forget to check in with our own emotions. Seen the social media videos of the teacher at the door doing a morning check-in and high fiving or fist bumping her students? Student check in is important 100% but, I always wonder if before this, before the day started they took 5 mins to simply check in with themselves?
New graduate teacher self-care
Teaching is hard work. It is a level of difficulty that new-graduate enthusiasm alone cannot protect you from. Many new graduates have shared that they felt unprepared when they left university for the intensity of the role.
When a new graduate teacher talks about being overwhelmed there are usual responses (which I come across frequently on social media) such as “you should feel lucky you got a job” which makes the teacher feel ashamed or ungrateful and they keep their thoughts to themselves. Then there is a comment such as “oh it gets easier” which doesn’t encourage the new-graduate to develop self-care strategies from the get go but rather reinforces the notion that if they persist and try harder then it will all magically sort itself out. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t.
Experienced Teacher Self-Care
Then we have teachers who have survived the early days of teaching but who are struggling with that illusion of the perfect life-work balance. Spoiler alert – you can never perfectly balance the playground see-saw.
These teachers purposefully seek out resources and strategies or classroom management or classroom organisation tips and tricks that will make things easier. They understand that the system has flaws but feel unable to bring about permanent change. Thoughts such as perhaps a new teacher diary will help me stay on top of this workload or perhaps I could try a new assessment folder or system. These are all things I have done in the past and each of these things on their own is beneficial. However it is a band-aid solution. In teaching resilience to our students and fostering student mental health, teacher mental health can take a beating.
It can be really confronting to sit face to face with the challenges of a job. It can be upsetting to admit how much you love your job but hate the role. A lot of teachers choose to just ‘keep trucking’ because facing reality is confronting.
Once teachers admit how hard their job is, how draining, how stressful, how different to what they imagined it would be – then they are faced with the challenge of how do I change this or even more so where do I find the energy to change things?
Teachers survival = self care
Teachers find the energy to bring about change and to thrive not survive when they implement self-care. Teachers commonly begin to implement self-care in two situations . When they are unwell and life falls apart and they have no other option or when they begin to believe deeply that they are worthy of self-care. Just like we take medicine when we know we are sick and will benefit from it, we need to believe in the power that self-care can make for teachers.
If you are a teacher reading this than I want you to know in your heart that you are worthy of self-care because the teaching role of being in the classroom or supporting kids is challenging. Acknowledging that teaching is challenging, demanding, stressful does not mean we don’t love our jobs. Needing self-care does not mean you are bad at your job. To set boundaries and prioritise your self-care does not make you less committed.
Surviving in Term 4 means using personal self-care strategies. It means we need to prioritise ourselves first. Deeply hold in your heart the knowledge that we give the most to our students when we give to ourselves.
We know what Teacher self-care is. We know how to start practising teacher self-care. Now is the time to simply believe we deserve it.
