Teacher Stress and Job Effectiveness - Literature review Example

Teacher Stress and Job Effectiveness

Introduction

Recent studies have attempted to examine the extent to which stressful events in conjunction with other motivational job features impact the teachers’ effectiveness, productivity, and wellbeing. It is not only the teaching profession that faces the challenges that stressful work environments pose on the staff, but also other sectors such as the nursing and business fields. A combination of job demands and job resources’ availability and knowledge of their use is just one of the aspects that may cause some of the stress at work that may lower the level of effectiveness of the teachers, thereby adversely affecting the students’ learning. Studies have indicated that stress at work may lead to physical effects like headaches, emotional impacts like depression and intellectual consequences like reduced motivation. Besides, it may result in behavioral difficulties like isolation and therefore cause high rates of absenteeism, turnover, illness and staff complaints. Therefore, the following section is a problem statement of why it matters to study the teacher stress and its impacts on their job effectiveness, its history and the reasons for the problem.

Significance of the Study

The Need for Practicing Primary Prevention

The topic on how teachers’ stress levels impact on their effectiveness matters a lot in ensuring that the school environment comes up with appropriate ways that can prevent the occurrence of such stressors. It may include ensuring that the job designs and the workflows are correctly set to ensure that the levels of satisfaction of the teachers in their routine chores do not cause any stressful events (Antoniou, Polychroni & Vlachakis, 2006). Besides, this topic comes up with appropriate solutions such as reduction of teaching workloads, unrealistic deadlines and a work environment that is conducive for effective teacher operations.

The Need to Implement On-Going Intervention Techniques

Among the contributions of job stress for teachers that reduce their effectiveness include the fact that there is a failed system in implementing the methods put in place to reduce workplace stress for the instructors (Dessler, 2009). Therefore, studying the levels of teachers’ stress and their effectiveness is significant in examining whether the surveys that determine stress sources and the assessments by school heads are operational and how effective they are.

Provision of Management Training

The study is significant in training the teachers on some of the sources of stress and its impacts and how to know if they are in stressful conditions. Besides, studying this topic is useful in making school heads understand what they may do to reduce their teachers’ stress levels while improving their effectiveness (Dessler, 2009). Moreover, it may be useful for the school management to understand how the leadership styles they choose influence the effectiveness of their teaching staff.

Why Studying Teacher Stress and Job Effectiveness Matters

Teacher Stress Causes Student Stress

The stress of teachers may have an effect on the stress levels of the students. From the study of the University of British Columbia that tested saliva samples from more than 400 students of instructors who accepted to have been feeling much stressed and exhausted, the investigation discovered a high level of cortisol. Cortisol refers to a hormone that the body releases when stressed. The result of the survey was that there is much likelihood that most of the teachers who experience stressful events go into their classrooms and make little attempts to provide for the needs of the learners. Besides, they face difficulties in managing the students in their academic works. It is often the case when they are in class, and the classroom climate becomes tensed and chaotic, which is equally a transmission of the teachers’ stress to the students. To worsen this further, when the teacher’s stress extend to the learners, the students’ case becomes even worse . Therefore, this study revealed that teachers’ stress influences their effectiveness through the transmission to the learners who feel the effect the most.

Stressed Teachers Lead To Lower Quality Classrooms

The instructors who are unable to use their stress-reducing strategies are incapable of coping with their career requirements and are inept at making their students learn. However, a research by the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education revealed, those instructors who take part in one professional development program called Cultivating Awareness and Resilience are capable of enlightening their wellbeing. Subsequently, this group of teachers can create the best learning environment in their classrooms . Currently, the number of teachers who have got the right preparation for the social and emotional requirements in classes has depreciated. However, it is important that apart from guiding the students in their lesson contents, the instructors need to have a continuous classroom management plan to assist the students in accommodating one another. Therefore, this important since it shows that one of the hindrances of teachers’ effectiveness is stress.

Teacher Stress Is One of the Causes of Poor Student Performance

Recent studies suggest that schools have done much to reduce the stress levels of their students. Among the techniques that they have instituted include late commencing of lessons, lessening the number of classes and even the inclusion of school clubs where the learners can meet and share their experiences (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). However, the schools’ failure to supervise what happens in the classrooms has been one of the causes of poor performance among the learners. When teachers get stressed up, they sort of become repellent to the students’ needs, may often become unfriendly to the extent that the learners develop some fear in approaching them with some academic issues. It is at this point that the effectiveness of the teachers become in question since they are unable to conduct one of their key chores in the learning environment. When the efficiency of the teachers goes down, the problem that arises is that the students are most likely to perform poorly. Although the students may participate in stress-reducing events such as non-curriculum activities, they spend most of their time in the classrooms (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Therefore, from this, it is important to study the stress levels of the teachers so as to avoid poor performance of the learners.

Ill Health Due To Stress Causes Teacher Ineffectiveness

Today, it is almost entirely impossible to find a teacher without stress (Bartholomew et al., 2014). One of the recent surveys discovered that 100% of instructors had some form of stressful issues that influenced their living outside and within the classroom environment. In the Teachers Assurance survey, the 83% of the teachers indicated that they always have worries that make them feel so tired to carry out their classroom duties . 42% also reported that from their concerns, they are completely unable to do their work. Nevertheless, 84% acknowledged that if it were not for the stress they experienced, they would be handling their duties appropriately. Additionally, the survey revealed that the teacher’s stress had some detrimental effect on their health. Subsequently, the sick leave rates were approximately 13.3 days. An overwhelming 76% of the instructors also agreed that their stress affected their health and lifestyles . From this, the problem is evident that due to the high rate of illnesses that teachers undergo due to stress, they are incapable of properly implementing their chores as required. There are more sick leave days that impact on the learning process, which if were absent, the teachers would efficiently carry out their tasks.

Reasons for the Problem

Administrative Insensitivity

It is a question that has often revived around the violence that students create in the school environment as well as their discipline. Previous studies have indicated that majority of the teachers perceive the school heads as not always supporting the teachers enough in their bid to impose discipline in schools and enforce the school regulations (Collie, Shapka & Perry, 2012). It has categorically been the case in private schools where the school administrators often want to side with their students even if they make mistakes since these schools are in business and would not like to see the students leave (Collie, Shapka & Perry, 2012). Besides, the instructors also have a feeling that the administrators are much held up with their office duties, avoiding paying much attention to factors that may prevent the occurrence of stress between teachers and students.

Large Class Sizes

Studies have indicated that the most effective classrooms are those where the teachers are capable of individualizing the lessons and getting the attention of each and every learner so as to meet their needs (Klassen & Chiu, 2010). However, the teaching role becomes more complicated when the student population in a class expands. It is because of the more the number of the learners, the fewer the opportunity that the teacher will attend to all their needs. It is, therefore, becoming a problem to the teaching fraternity globally because the world population of students is on the rise, and it means that the stress levels will increase and the effectiveness of the teachers will go down (Klassen & Chiu, 2010).

Inadequate Salaries

When teachers begin making comparisons of their wages with other professionals, while some who teach in secondary compared to colleagues in colleges, they find themselves in stressful situations (Buchanan, 2010). Subsequently, they find themselves in search of other ways to raise their living standards. Among these alternative methods include conducting private tuitions, which makes them work overtime, therefore increasing their stress levels. The overtime work then reduces the teachers’ capability to provide effort to their regular teaching chores, which is an impact on their effectiveness. However, it is critical of this in that as they require a pay rise, the world economic situation is often tremendously falling. It is to mean that the possibility of enforcing their pay rise is little. Nevertheless, a failure to increase the teachers’ wages at in situations like inflations will further elevate their stress levels while lowering their effectiveness (Buchanan, 2010).

Role Ambiguity and Overload

The lack of clarity on responsibilities, targets, and procedures of teaching are some of the causes of stress in their day to day teaching profession (Buchanan, 2010). Even though there are areas that their roles are often clear like in ensuring they teach the learners as the syllabus requires, there are some areas that their responsibilities are unclear like instilling discipline among the students. Role overload, on the other hand, occurs when the tasks are so many for a single instructor to manage. Due to having to complete all the work, stress levels go high, which impedes their efforts to deliver their regular duties. It is, however, a problem because with the rising number of learners in schools, the workload will increase for the teachers, and since the world economy might not support the employment of more teachers, their stress levels will likely go higher than today, jeopardizing their effectiveness to deliver (Buchanan, 2010).

Forms of Teacher Stress

Life Events

Research has found some life events that may cause stress among the teachers. For instance, Albrecht & Adelman (1984) identified the presence of social pressures, psychological issues, physical conditions, relations and other connections as the chief causes of stress to teachers. Besides, Holmes and Rahe (1967)’s Social Readjustment Rating Gauge has been in continuous use in the assessment of teachers’ and other employees in the social works’ stress. The scale has often indicated that there is a connection between the day to day stresses and low teacher effectiveness in their teaching role. However, it has also shown that there is a difference in the magnitude of the stress that teachers experience in their everyday operations and those they undergo at work (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). The difference only means that apart from the stress that the teachers suffer at work, their effectiveness is also under strains from issues that do not relate to their jobs, making stress more of the problem.

Work Events

Albrecht & Adelman (1984) model to explain what stress means provided some priori set of activities that have a close association with the work environment of a teacher. Among them include the workload, job status, mental and physical challenges, physical variables, human contact and accountability. Although most literature works have attempted to explain these variables, there still lacks an appropriate operational definition for them regarding their psychometric hypotheses . Therefore, the problem of understanding the effects of work stress on their effectiveness is likely to get misunderstood until there is a formation of an active teachers’ service inventory that indicates the psychometric construct of these variables.

Burnout

One commonly used scale in assessing the burnout and stress levels among the teachers is the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Diestel & Schmidt, 2010). However, it is still a problem that the users of this scale have probably overlooked its importance since it is only appropriate for measuring burnout levels and not stress. Though the two have some resemblance in their correlations and concepts, they are different. The factors of burnout like exhaustion limited individual endeavors and depersonalisation all combine to form the impacts of stress. Regarding this, it is clear that teachers cannot get burned out if they do not undergo a full duration of stress . Being that most of the school managers do not understand the difference between burnout and stress, they often end up providing the wrong treatments for each. It has therefore become a problem in finding ways for improving the efficiency of teachers since wrong measures get implied for these two.

Role Stress

Most researchers have tried to provide a definition for occupational stress considering the extent of ambiguity and conflict that the teachers undergo at work. Subsequently, other investigators have utilized these factors to make predictions for the levels of burnouts among regular and special education instructors. However, being that there are more variables other than the teaching role causing stress among teachers, there is still need to develop teacher-specific instruments for assessing the role ambiguity and conflict among educators .

Teachers’ Stress Management Strategies and Problems of Implementation

Identification of the Cause

First, it is important to understand the reason behind the stress. Teachers often list some aspects of their daily aspects of busy schedules, their work, students, managers and families (Gold et al., 2010). When doing this, it may be appropriate to separate those within their control from those they have no control. After that, it becomes easy to find solutions to the stressors that the teachers have control. However, the problem comes when the stressors are out of their control such as the income level, tight teaching schedules and strict regulations from the educational governing body (Gold et al., 2010).

Being Realistic With Goals

Setting goals that teachers are capable of meeting within the fixed period and with the available resources is one way that they use in relieving their stress levels while improving their efficiency. Among the ways that they accomplish this is through setting their teaching plans and balancing their schemes of work. However, the problem arises when there are interruptions such as industrial strikes that destabilize the schedules. Upon resuming work after such instabilities, the teachers have to do more work within a limited period of available time, which increases their stresses (Klassen, 2010).

Taking Leaves

At times it is necessary that the teachers take some time off to regain their strength and be more effective in their duties. Besides, through reducing the amount of work they carry home, it ensures that the teachers have some time to regain their energy and become more productive (Klassen, 2010). However, this often becomes a problem as it often creates some conflicts between the teachers and the school managers expect more work from the teachers without considering the impact on their effectiveness.

Conclusion

The primary prevention methods of stress for the teachers in schools have been on the decline. Besides, the set interventions for preventing stressful events have also been neglected. Studying how the stress levels of the teachers affect their effectiveness matters because research has indicated that teachers’ stress transmit to the learners, which lowers the classroom quality and performance of the students. Moreover, as a result of pressure, teachers are often in a bad health, which impedes their effectiveness. Some of the reasons for stress among teachers include salary issues, administrative insensitivity, large classrooms and role ambiguity. The types of stress that teachers undergo include burnouts, life events, work events and role stress. Therefore, studying teacher stress is important in finding ways of improving their effectiveness.