A vision for teachers’ emotional well-being

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced education stakeholders to grapple with fundamental questions about the role of schools in our society. As a result, many educators have found creative new ways to provide not just academic instruction but also emotional care, ensuring that their students are safe and well in a tumultuous time. But these efforts have not come without a cost. For many teachers, adjusting to virtual and hybrid education was highly stressful, and that stress was only compounded by the worldwide pandemic-related confusion across all areas of society. And so an already stressful job was made even more difficult. For many teachers, the return to in-person schooling hasn’t improved matters, as they’ve had to support students who are having difficulty adjusting to being back in the classroom , even as they face intense political scrutiny regarding the nature and content of their curriculum.

In this season of reimagining the purpose and meaning of schools, many educational stakeholders are crafting new visions of how schools can support all children (Nasir, Bang, & Yoshikawa, 2021). We encourage them to go a step further to ask, What is our vision for teachers’ emotional well-being? We challenge educational stakeholders to imagine what it would look like for teachers not just to survive, but to thrive in their jobs — and to consider what needs to change at the organizational level to make this possible.

For some, engaging in a conversation about teachers’ emotional well-being may feel superfluous to the critical conversations that are happening about the future of our schools. But the way teachers feel at and about their work has deep implications for both their own success and that of their students. We know that how students feel in school affects both their willingness to engage in the academic process (Côté-Lussier & Fitzpatrick, 2016; Li & Lerner, 2013) and their academic outcomes (Pekrun et al., 2017). And because teachers shape the culture and climate of their classrooms, their own emotions influence those of their students (Keller & Becker, 2020).