In a webinar, Dr Chris Jenson, a former emergency room physician turned educator, discusses the healthcare issues that he sees in education and how teachers and educators might go about addressing them. Chris argues that while there are many other improvements that are needed in school systems around the world, mental wellness should be prioritised as it is impossible to learn or teach without it. For teachers, this means that they should have an achievable work-life balance, be reasonably rested, and have a good state of mind. Research suggests that this is currently not the case, with teachers citing a high level of stress on the job and 58% of teachers in New Zealand indicating that they might leave within the next five years. If this were to come to pass it would be dire for schools around the country, which are already struggling with staff shortages.

Preventing teacher burnout

Chris believes that workflow is the primary cause of teacher stress and burnout, and so looked to healthcare to see if there were lessons that could be useful in education. He found that in some leading healthcare institutions in the USA, there were effective strategies for managing workflow; even during periods of extreme pressure, such as the global pandemic of the early 2020s, these institutions retained the majority of their staff. Chris uncovered twelve strategies that prevented staff burnout, five of which could be scaled into education settings. He discussed three of them in the webinar, but full details for all of them, plus helpful templates, can be found in his book.

Triaging your workflow

Teachers often stay late at school, feeling unable to go home until they have done everything. This is not the case in healthcare, where work is triaged, with the most urgent being done instantly and the others needing to wait until later. Chris suggests that teachers take a similar approach by doing what has to be done that day (based on a set of agreed principles), and then going home. An example of what has to be done might be talking to a student with depressive thoughts, or following up on a request from the principal. However, he argues that setting up an activity for the next day, for example, while it might be nice to do before going home, could actually be left until the morning, even if that means rearranging the next workday a little.

Teachers need to be given permission to leave certain things undone and to not be perfect. Schools would rather have a teacher who commits 85% of themselves for 20 years than a teacher who gives 100% all the time, but burns out after two years.  Experienced teachers instinctively know what needs to be dealt with and what could be put down, but it is helpful for schools to make a template to guide newer teachers and to give everyone permission to put some jobs down at the end of the day. 

Shared workflow

Certain jobs, like seeing your patients in healthcare and teaching your class in education, cannot be shared. However, there are other parts that are more connected to paperwork and follow-ups that can be rotated. Instead of each doctor staying at the end of the day to do all their busy work, health practices share workflow for things like following up on tests and seeing out-of-hours patients. A similar idea can be used in education, where instead of each teacher staying after school to answer extra questions, mark exams, or follow up on absences, for example, these kinds of jobs can be allocated to one person each week and rotated.

The rotation of these jobs creates a pattern of workflow with peak times and off-seasons. During the peak times, when you are allocated a more time-heavy job, you know that you will need to stay late all week. However, you will also know that for the week or two weeks after that, your job will be light and you will be able to leave earlier, allowing for a better work-life balance. Chris believes that it is these downtimes that really help alleviate burnout.

Allocating your energy

Teachers have a tendency to try to be all things to their students and to help them as much as they can. While this is an admirable trait, it can lead to burnout. Instead, Chris suggests asking the following questions from healthcare:

• Do you understand the problem?
• Do you understand the causes that are driving the problem?
• Do you have the authority and ability to mitigate the problem?

Often the answer to the first two questions is yes, but if the answer to the third is no, then this is not something to which teachers should allocate their energy. Instead, teachers should focus on one or two things that they have the capacity, skills, and authority to change, rather than engage in twenty cases with little success.

An example of this is the difference between mental wellbeing and mental healthcare. There are things that teachers can do in their classroom to help students with mental wellbeing, and these will be discussed below. However, teachers are not trained in mental healthcare and should not act as clinical psychologists. Instead, they need to take that off their plate and send a student to get more specialised help.

Providing effective mental health and wellbeing support for students

Just as teachers cannot teach when they are stressed out, neither can students learn. Research tells us that learning occurs when a child feels comfortable and has a sense of efficacy and self-worth. Healthcare research demonstrates that self-efficacy results in better self-esteem. Chris hypothesised that skills could build self-efficacy and therefore students should be taught key skills to deal with the pressures of school and life. Studies show that it is ineffective to teach these kinds of life skills in separate classes once a week or once a year, and so Chris proposed instead that they should be embedded into academic learning.

Chris’s research looked at the results on doing just that, by asking teachers to create time in their day to teach students certain skills. For example, if they were teaching in a small group, instead of just setting up the exercise and asking the students to get on with the content, he asked teachers to put aside time to actively teach the class about group work – how to communicate, compromise, listen to everyone but choose one path forward. Likewise, if teachers were handing back a test, they could spend some time explicitly talking to the students about resilience, how to recover from a bad grade, or build upon a good one. Chris stressed that teaching these skills was not intended to replace knowledge, but rather that teachers could see when content might be shrunk a little to include time for skills, and when it needed to be the sole focus of a lesson. Therefore, skills were integrated as it made sense over a week, rather than in a prescriptive manner, allowing teachers to still follow their curriculum while including skills in about 20% of their teaching time.

This intervention was found to have improved self-esteem across the board, but markedly so in the students who started off with low self-esteem. It also had secondary gains such as the relationship between teachers and students growing, and gratitude towards teachers increasing. All teachers could take this approach in their classroom, by customising this idea to their context, subject and students. To learn more about this research, this article provides a summary.