Making Teaching Less Stressful

An article on CNNMoney.com this week listed being a high school teacher as one of the highest-stress, lowest paying jobs.  This comes at absolutely no surprise to anyone who has stood up in front of a crowd of 20-30 teenagers every day at work.  This too may be believed by a section of the rest of the working world.  Teachers, when asked what they do, often are met with responses along the lines of "Oh, good for you.  I could never do that!"  (And here's a little secret: many teachers would never want to do what you do either.)  People don't say this sort of thing because of a teacher's salary; they say this sort of thing because of a teacher's job description. 

There is no doubt about it, a teacher's job is high on stress and low on salary.  So much so that about 50% of all teachers leave the professon after five years.  A popular belief held by many is that the best way to retain teachers is to pay them more.  Paying a teacher as one might pay an accountant or lawyer might be a good way to recruit high caliber potential teachers to the profession, but higher pay does nothing effective for the job stresses that come with teaching. 

Teachers know that we are in a profession that will not make us rich.  Money, by and large, is not as motivating as notions of seeing one's students grow up to be intelligent contributing members of society.  And as such, money can only motivate a teacher so far.  Even if a teacher were to be paid twice or three times more than they ever thought they were going to make, it still would not diminish their stress level.  The trick to retaining teachers, then, is to make the day-to-day of the job less stressful.   Here are some recommendations whose price is small when compared to its payoff:

1. Reduce the number of students a teacher has to teach at any one time.  Teachers in large comprehensive high schools can't effectively keep track of the number of students they currently have.  A high cost solution is to reduce class sizes.  This isn't always a feasible option, though, but there are still other ways of cutting down a teacher's caseload.  Using block or semesterized schedules can reduce a teacher's caseload.


2. Make a usable curriculum and requisite resources available to all teachers in all schools.  Teachers that work in schools that are just starting often are forced to create their curriculum on the fly, and it's only after they've taught a class all the way through do they have a curriculum to use.  In these cases, teachers often reinvent the wheel, designing a curriculum around content that already has a solid curriculum developed.  In the age of the Internet, there should be no reason why every teacher does not have access to a well-designed curriculum.  this does not mean that teachers should be forced to use a curriculum, but rather that they have access to lesson plans and pedagogical and content resources.  Teachers will often (almost always) adapt such curricula to their own classrooms, and I have never heard of a teacher complain about having too many resources.


3. Provide training in classroom management, and ensure that schools are consistent and firm when it comes to setting and enforcing limits on behavior.  No teacher likes to put time into behavior management, but no teacher can deny that behavior management is important and necessary.  Anything that can be done by administrators to alleviate the burden of behavior management can give teachers more time and energy for the things that they are there to do in the first place. 

Having quality teachers makes all the difference.  Offering money to teachers, while welcomed, will ultimately not make the job itself less stressful.  It's vitally important that we figure out what will, and work towards it.