In his book, “Triage Your School: A Physician’s Guide to Preventing Burnout,” Dr. Chris Jenson provides specific actions school leaders and coaches can take to address the elements of chronic stress for teachers and themselves. Combining his years as a doctor in an emergency room with his years teaching high school science, Dr. Jenson has a unique understanding. He states, “Like healthcare, triage prioritizes educators actions and provides a healthier perspective toward overflowing work demands…one that removes guilt and emotion from incomplete tasks.”
In a podcast I recorded with Chris, he shared why self-care is an insufficient focus for educators:
“What self-care does is just put a bandage on your day, it doesn’t erase any of the driving forces. If you look at the fact that we have a teacher shortage that really hasn’t improved, and maybe your area right now is okay, that math is going to hit you sooner or later. If you can’t establish a better climate and sense of satisfaction for the educators in your district now, that’s a dangerous gamble to take when that shortage finally comes to your district.”
Here’s a short list of some driving forces of burnout identified in his book. (Pages 19-20) How many of these are present for you and your staff?
- Volume of Work
- Loss of Control
- Feelings of Isolation
- Inability to Escape Work
- Fear of Disappointing Others
If self-care is good but insufficient, then as administrator and teacher leaders we need to explore ways to decrease the driving forces of workplace stress. Some of the strategies that health care providers have found effective can be implemented by educators.
One of the strategies that Jenson explores is leveraging shared workflow. My career long focus on “teaching as a team sport” lead me to explore this chapter of his book with special interest. From my days as a classroom teacher, I had always believed that given the choice of 20 students on my own or 45 students with a teammate, I’d always pick the larger group with a teammate. As I read Jensen’s chapter on leveraging shared workflow, my thinking was reinforced.
In my podcast with Chris, he shared this example from doctors rotating responsibilities in an outpatient clink.
“Physician A will be the late physician taking care of the unexpected sick patients. That’s a hard week for them. They’re going to be there late. But then next week, they rotate to administrative meetings and lab reports. That’s easy. There aren’t that many meetings and lab reports, they can fly through them quickly. They’re out typically 2-3 hours before they usually would be. They rotate through the responsibilities and share the responsibilities equitably across their group. They know they have some late weeks, some short weeks, some middle weeks. And suddenly, instead of never-ending monotony and not knowing what you can do after work, you have a very predictable pattern of workflow that gives you stability, that gives you confidence, that gives you happiness on your quick weeks when you know you’re out the door and you can go to your kid’s soccer game and so forth. On the longer weeks, you’re not bitter because you know something good is coming.”
Jensen illustrates how a high school math department developed a schedule for an afterschool math support lab. Teachers rotated the assignment of being available in the lab (which was in a fixed room) providing consistent student support with teachers’-controlled schedule of their time.
In school we tend to do parallel work which is often inefficient. While there tends not to be a requirement on teachers to work this way many educators stay with “this is how we’ve always done it” structures. Because I entered teaching and spent my early career teaching both with a classroom partner and broader multi -grade and even cross -school teams, I automatically think how a problem might be addressed as a team. I find that many teachers have not had real team experiences to build upon. Some teachers think that teaming would increase the demands on them rather than alleviate stressors.
As I chatted with Chris on the podcast, two words came to my mind autonomy and teaming. Some educators may need coaching support to recognize the potential of using teaming to increase their autonomy. How do you see teaming and shared workflow addressing some of the stressors listed above? Here is my thinking:
- I always found a sense of autonomy when teaming with colleagues to design a plan for tackling a task or student need rather than assuming I was on my own. As an example, when students needed individual assessments, some teammates would take the task to of instructing larger groups of students as other teachers conducted individual assessments. This was less stressful than trying to accomplish it on our own.
- I never understood principals assigning teachers to extra duties with no teacher input. Give a team a list of coverages needed to be fulfilled and let them plan the best way for them. I was always more comfortable on before school duties than after school while colleagues had a reverse preference.
- Isolation is greatly reduced, and students are better served when a team tackles students’ needs.
- Celebration of success and shared commitment to perseverance decreases the stress of struggles we face as caretakers of student success.
Consider how you build staff openness to teaming and shared workflow.
