Teacher Burnout or Compassion Satisfaction
What innate factors and characteristics make for long lasting and sustainable empathy?
My brother is an emergency room and flight nurse trained in transporting patients. These patients are of course in the worst stages of trauma and often in life-sustaining mode when he meets them. Sometimes he’s successful in the transport. The measure is not always qualitative. This job requires much patience and on-your-feet thinking under very serious stress and time constraints. Some patients don’t survive. That is something he must deal with on a regular basis. It takes a special kind of person to withstand this kind of pressure and fatigue. I am not trying to compare my job to his in all respects. I admire his work even while hoping to never encounter the need for his care.
Nursing, like teaching, is synonymous with caring and compassion. Steven and I are the middle children, nurse and teacher, respectively. (Birth order matters.) Recently, in talking about our caring professions, we agreed that the frustrations and stress are real factors in a work-life balance. Nurses and teachers experience burnout and “compassion fatigue” at higher rates than other professions. He shared an article that said more than 40% of registered nurses experience burnout contributing to lower patient outcomes and hospital acquired infections. Yuk. Emotional exhaustion, disengagement, and lack of personal accomplishment are considered symptoms of “burning out” for both nurses and teachers.
Unchecked, this kind of subtle (and not so subtle) insistent dissatisfaction can lead to real harm. Real harm to self and system comes in a variety of flavors. We have all seen how stress works against a healthy work-life balance. Self-medicating starts seemingly small and simple but works at cross purpose to health. Depression and anxiety lead to a compulsion to feel overwhelmed requiring more medication. To the system, this kind of fatigue has long lasting effects and costs–real money; contributing to turnover, attrition, and understaffed facilities–not to mention the dreaded infections. Although that outcome is seen primarily in the healthcare setting, kids are walking petri dishes. Many negative outcomes for healthcare workers parallel that of educators. Front-line staff.
I recently saw an article about low or stagnant pay contributing to turn-over. That is part of it. Oversight and accountability are also things in which teachers balk. I wonder if nurses bristle at having their performance measured through patient outcomes. Too many teachers experience bullying or perceive bullying due to this oversight. I haven’t experienced bullying, but the pressure to perform is real and part of school change. In many ways, in all areas, our kids and school achievement depend on exemplary performance. Our work is not, nor should it be, private. Teachers should be valued and evaluated.
My brother introduced a new term, compassion satisfaction. We have all heard about compassion fatigue, the side-dish of stress and burnout. Compassion satisfaction is maybe what leaves the building with outgoing staff. Compassion satisfaction is the positive aspects of caring that balances out the negative feelings of working in caring fields with individuals that are chronically ill, traumatized, or underserved. In many respects teachers understand the challenges. Many enter these fields to make a difference. Our customer base is not a surprise, although being well-suited to some educational environments may contribute to more satisfaction. Those who find themselves ill-suited to these environments become overwhelmed quickly and dissatisfied regardless of their nature to care. Teachers are also prepared to handle the effects of trauma; it is part of our field’s continuing social and emotional education. Other factors, like safety continue to weigh heavy. Main-stream media discusses the prospects of teachers carrying guns. Use of fire-arms was not part of my pre-service work. Precautions related to safety are a known additional stressor.
If burnout and compassion fatigue represent the “cost of caring” then compassion satisfaction represents the “positive payment” that comes from caring.
Hooper C, et al., Compassion Satisfaction, Burnout and Compassion Fatigue Among Emergency Room Nurses. www.jenonline.org (2010)
Compassion satisfaction indicates that persons choosing to be in the care-giving professions may have some innate protective mechanisms that promote sustained empathy. The argument: because we are self-selected care givers, the sense of satisfaction and achievement is maintained without becoming emotionally overwhelmed. This is true but like anything, there is a tipping point. Some may have reached it.
As I talk with educators, those that have stayed and those that have left as well, there is a strong connection to being “in service.” Living your educator life as a social justice warrior is no joke. In graduate school, professors advocating for social justice (as we should) and anti-racist practice exclaimed, “If you can’t take it, you won’t make it!” Indicating you should be able to put up with the other bullshit because this role can make a difference for people; people that may need it the most. Identifying the b.s. is not only helpful to overcoming it, but may move the onus from teachers who are shouldered with demands of becoming well (for kids, of course). This includes showing more grit or increasing resilience. Again questioning or making the story about whether teachers are doing enough.
“Burnout happens when exhaustion replaces feeling energized, cynicism replaces being hopeful and ineffectiveness replaces feeling efficacious.”
Chang, M. (2009). Teacher Emotion Management in the Classroom: Appraisal, Regulation, and Coping. (Electronic Thesis or Dissertation). Retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/
Doris Santoro proposes in her book Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love And How They Can Stay (2018) and in her talk with NEAToday (January, 2018) that burnout may not be the whole story. Her work questions if the “moral rewards” of teaching, the very factors that contribute to being satisfied, are eroded by the direction of schools and public education in general. The high-stakes testing, standardization, and stripping of teacher autonomy surely play a part in the disengagement of teachers. I’ve also witnessed the frustration teachers experience in identifying for themselves the right measure to understand instructional successes, aka assessing learning, and avoiding required busy work that benefits no one. This administrative record keeping (if it’s for no purpose) keeps teachers from doing what is really important: engaging students in learning.
This is the loss of hopeful contribution to our society. It’s demoralizing to feel implicit in changes that you don’t agree with and evaluations that do not give attention to the actual reason you became a teacher and how you could get better at it. And it isn’t in just high-poverty urban settings that teachers are feeling challenged with the work and demoralized. Although my experience for the past 20 years has been in a large diverse district, I know many teachers in the state that say they have a sense of drowning too. I’m interested to see what teachers around the state are feeling.
I still believe that the element that keeps our heads above water and doing the important job we love, may be more within our control than we think. Working together to create environments that support our work and each other is imperative. Working with administration to make systems that support teachers based on strengths is necessary to re-balance the scales of compassion satisfaction. Care-givers need care and to feel valued for the work they do. There is no one answer. The problem and the solution continue to rapidly change right along with everything else in our society.
Are you a teacher (or nurse) who is not being restored and questioning your ability to give more? Take action. If you have a leader that is open to this conversation, start talking about what can be done to re-moralize our profession. Join innovators and/or groups like unions that are interested in having conversations that promote the change necessary—staying the same is not an option now. Make the difference in your community that brought you to the field in the first place. Create a work-life balance that prioritizes your health and well-being. And ask for that thing that would keep you balanced and working in the role you love. If you don’t love it, well, then that’s another problem entirely.
