The Sustained Teacher: How I Protect the Joy of Teaching (Part One)
What is teacher sustainability?
One of the more significant and memorable class sessions during my masters and credential program was during the last week before graduation, when our program director prompted us to identify our primary reason for becoming educators. She introduced us to this story about a fictional character losing their way through a forest or something and using a rope with a knot tied at the end to find their way back home. To be honest I don’t quite remember those details about the activity, but we had a few minutes of arts and crafts time where each teacher candidate wrote on a small card with a knot of yarn tied through it. Mine was a thick red piece of yarn and a light beige notecard. I wrote “I want to empower young people to think critically about the world around them”. It was a simple but powerful statement that accurately described what I wanted to accomplish as a teacher. Our instructor advised us to keep this notebard with us, ever reminding ourselves our purpose whenever we feel lost.
I can’t speak fully to whether or not I have fulfilled my purpose or whether I have achieved “empowerment” for every student I have worked with during my 7 years teaching physics, AP Physics, AP Computer Science Principles, and College and Career Readiness to high school students. However I can speak to how important that purpose still is for me today.
While there have been many days, weeks, months when I have felt worn down by the job, most of the time I have pulled through. “The job” for me is defined by the actions I take as a public school teacher to fulfill this purpose. The actions that range from preparing lessons, writing curriculum, mentoring new teachers, leading department meetings, grading assessments, calling guardians, writing referrals, stocking snacks for students, taking attendance, and making sure I return from the copy room early enough to give all a proper greeting at the door. And now the “job” involves learning how to deliver quality instruction and support high levels of learning through a completely new platform. A task I was unsure of my willingness to do mid-summer.
But when I thought back to my purpose, the small notecard that now lives stored inside a notebook rather than in the top drawer of my pre-COVID classroom, it has sustained me. Even in the face of a global pandemic, socio-political uprising, and environmental crises, I can still find my way back to where I started: trying to empower young people to think critically about the world around them.
While reminding myself of my purpose for teaching has helped me to endure the system of education, with its injustices towards students and teachers, I cannot say it has been enough. I have seen enough of a “teacher self-care” wave to know that although tiny tweaks can lead to big changes, the white supremacy and martyrdom that is normalized within the system of education will prevail in ejecting competent, caring, and charismatic teachers as long as there are those willing to preserve the status-quo, no matter how many face masks, meditations, or Starbucks gift cards are distributed. That said, I think teacher self-care should be a quest in emboldening the spirit, consisting of mindful actions that serve to protect what we find so joyous and fulfilling about the job and about carrying out our purpose.
Schools and Staffing Surveys from 2012-13 collected by the Learning Policy Institute found that the most significant factors in teacher turnover were related to lack of support for doing the job in high-need, high-poverty, POC-serving areas, and the increased financial burden of student loans and self-funded teaching materials. Their data also shows that the rate of teachers leaving has been increasing, even before the COVID-19 pandemic (when it’s still too early to tell the impacts to teacher turnover). Here are the main points from their executive summary:
Total turnover rates are highest in the South (16.7%) and lowest in the Northeast (10.3%), where states tend to offer higher pay, support smaller class sizes, and make greater investments in education.
Teachers of mathematics, science, special education, English language development, and foreign languages are more likely to leave their school or the profession than those in other fields. These are teaching fields that experience shortages in most states across the country.
Turnover rates are 50% higher for teachers in Title I schools, which serve more low-income students. Mathematics and science teacher turnover rates are nearly 70% greater in Title I schools than in non-Title I schools, and turnover rates for alternatively certified teachers are more than 80% higher.
Turnover rates are 70% higher for teachers in schools serving the largest concentrations of students of color. These schools are staffed by teachers who have fewer years of experience and, often, significantly less training to teach. Teacher turnover rates are 90% higher in the top quartile of schools serving students of color than in the bottom quartile for mathematics and science teachers, 80% higher for special education teachers, and 150% higher for alternatively certified teachers.
Teachers of color—who disproportionately teach in high-minority, low-income schools and who are also significantly more likely to enter teaching without having completed their training—have higher turnover rates than White teachers overall (about 19% versus about 15%). While they leave at higher rates than White teachers generally, their turnover rates are about the same as those of all other teachers in high-poverty and high-minority schools.
In this series, I offer you and every educator a principled method for teacher self-care, what I prefer to call teacher sustainability, because for me it’s about sustaining ourselves in a system that is very efficient at overwhelming and wearing down educators who are passionate about public service, therefore resulting in high teacher turnover especially in high-need areas. For me, it’s about protecting, not recovering. We must act to preserve our joy, not wear out.
In upcoming posts, I will share the approach that has kept me sustained as a science teacher of color, working in a high-need area, serving mostly students of color, with a mostly-white staff.
Part One: What is Teacher Sustainability?
Part Three: Three and Three, Finding Your North Star(s)
Part Four: Mindfulness and Mood Tracking for Sustainability
