Is everything as urgent as your stress would imply?
~Carrie Latet

• What is stress?  What is burnout?
• How stressed am I?
• What can I do about my stress/burnout?
• Studies/Articles on stress/burnout?

Welcome to teacherburnoutandstress.com. This web page is designed as a resource and guide for teachers and administrators to deal with the problem of teacher stress and burnout. I created this web page, in part, to fulfill the requirements needed to earn my MA in Educational Leadership at Sonoma Sate University in California.

Though I began my career as an optimistic teacher with a “skies the limit” approach to teaching, I encountered certain obstacles along the way which eventually started me down the precarious path of burnout. I have collected a wealth of web-based information on teacher stress and burnout which I organized as individual web pages. The site contains self-tests and questionnaires, guides and intervention strategies as well as research articles and studies. There is a great deal of valuable material here that a principal can use as professional development, discussion topics at staff meetings or as way to improve the overall health and well-being of the teaching staff.

The intention of the web site itself is to shed some light on the phenomenon of teacher burnout and stress, which is all too common an occurrence in education. There are many things that can be done at both the individual and site level to combat teacher burnout and reduce stress. Good luck.

In the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, burnout is defined as "exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration," while the term stress is defined as "a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.”

top

What is stress?  What is burnout?

Streaming Doctoral Research Presentations
Correlates of Burnout: An Overview of the Literature and Methodological Critique.
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate competence in research fundamentals by providing an overview and critique of the scholarly literature on occupational burnout. This paper fulfills in part the requirement to earn the Doctor of Philosophy degree in counseling at Oregon State University . Burnout, a construct developed in the 1970's, refers to negative responses to occupational stress. It is most commonly defined in the literature as the prolonged and pervasive manifestation of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (i.e. cynicism) and reduced personal accomplishment. Development of the construct, as well as trends in the literature are briefly discussed. Finally, four articles representing various methodological approaches and research paradigms are critiqued for scholarship and merit.
http://oregonstate.edu/education/research/docResearch.html

Burnout: Signs, Symptoms, and Prevention - Identifying the causes of your stress, recognizing your limited control of any given situation, and taking care of yourself emotionally and physically can help you to avoid burnout.
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/burnout_signs_symptoms.htm

Wickipedia Teacher Burnout
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Teacher_Burnout

Symptoms of Burnout - The symptoms of burnout are neither unusual nor mysterious. In fact, it's difficult to find someone consistently free of symptoms. Burnout is a loss of interest in work and, in extreme forms, the burnout victim can literally become unable to work. The work skills remain intact, but burnout leaves its victim unable to become involved in the work: It extinguishes motivation.
http://www.docpotter.com/boclass-2bosymptoms.html

top

A Page of Links on Burnout - Mark Gorkin, "The Stress Doc"
Five Keys for Managing Change and Reducing Burnout, Practicing Safe Stress During Organizational Change, Four Stages of Burnout, Organizational Burnout Smoke Signals, Rebuilding the Fire: From Burnout to Break Out, Black Hole Burnout: I, Black Hole Burnout: II
http://www.stressdoc.com/organizational_change_strategies.htm

Teacher Stress REMINISCENCES OF HANS SELYE, AND THE BIRTH OF "STRESS" - Stress has become such an ingrained part of our vocabulary and daily existence, that it is difficult to believe that our current use of the term originated only a little more than 50 years ago, when it was essentially "coined" by Hans Selye.
http://www.stress.org/hans.htm?AIS=e3e0baa181f49a29783a1722b3de846c

Oklahoma State University - Online Safety Library: Stress Management Links
Short Stress Fact Sheet
http://www.middlebury.edu/academics/tools/olr/time_management/stress_fact_sheet.htm

American Institute of Stress - AMERICA 'S NO. 1 HEALTH PROBLEM - Why is there more stress today?
http://www.stress.org/americas.htm

Job Stress
http://www.stress.org/job.ht

How stressed am I?

top

Instructors and Burnout - Signs, Symptoms and Stages of Burnout along with a self-test, prevention and treatment suggestions
http://www.equestrianeducation.org/burnout.htm

Are You Burning Out? Self Test
http://quiz.ivillage.com/health/tests/burnoutinv.htm

Are You Experiencing Burnout?
Symptoms and coping strategies for Extension professionals.
http://www.joe.org/joe/1986spring/a1.html

Evaluating Stress - The Maslach Burnout Inventory
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~sjacksox/PDF/EvaluatingStress.pdf

What can I do about my stress/burnout?

top

Burnout Inventory - Practicing Resiliency
A short questionnaire designed to determine to whether or not you are a candidate for burnout.
http://www.lessons4living.com/burnout_inventory2.htm

Burnout - Ideas for Employers and Employees
http://www.employer-employee.com/Burnout.html

Burnout Prevention and Recovery - 12 ideas
http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/w/c/wchuang/News/college/MIT-views.html

Effective Teaching by Harry and Rosemary Wong  A Stress Free Teacher http://teachers.net/gazette/FEB02/wong.html

The Medical Basis of Stress, Depression, Anxiety, Sleep Problems, and Drug Use - Explained in Fun, Easy to Read, Format - How to Survive Unbearable Stress
http://www.teachhealth.com/

Stress Management
Proactive Study Guides and strategies to identify and monitor your stress
http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/psapublishing/Pages/FYD/stress.htm

Tips on Handling Stress
http://vitamvas.tripod.com/stress.html

top

Studies/Articles on stress/burnout?

Teacher Burnout in Black and White - Review of Studies showing that classroom management and discipline along with teachers' perceptions of administrative support are majors factors in stress and burnout of teachers
http://www.ednews.org/articles/584/1/Teacher-Burnout-in-Black-and-White/Page1.html

Predicting Teacher Burnout over Time: Effects of Work Stress, Social Suppport, and Self Doubt on Burnout and its Consequences - The present paper gives an overview of personal and social coping resources that help to combat stressful encounters and daily stress. The theoretical perspective is mainly inspired by the work of Bandura (1986, 1992), Hobfoll (1988, 1989) and Lazarus (1966, 1991). As an introduction, the cognitive-relational theory of stress, coping, and emotions will be briefly characterized. http://web.fuberlin.de/gesund/publicat/ehps_cd/health/burke9.htm

Quantitative Study: Are beginning teachers with a second degree at a higher risk of early career
burnout?
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:H_k3tTcJ294J:www.aare.edu.au/03pap/god03015.pdf+Freudenberger+and+Richelson+(1980)+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Quantitative Study: Testing a Model for Teacher Burnout
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/group/ajedp/Archive/Volume_3/v3-dorman.pdf

Quantitative Study - Teacher Burnout and Teacher Efficacy: Trends over time
http://www.aare.edu.au/95pap/laboe95201.txt

A study on teacher burnout in Osaka
http://www.fed.cuhk.edu.hk/fllee/AppOfComp/WebResourceRep/burnout.htm

top

Research was conducted on the predictors of burnout in a sample of teachers in Queensland private schools. A total of 246 teachers responded to scales that assessed burnout, school and classroom environments, work pressure, role overload, role ambiguity, role conflict, teaching efficacy, external locus of control, and self-esteem.
www.psicopolis.com/burnout/budoc1.htm

How to conduct research on burnout: advantages and disadvantages of a unidimensional approach in burnout research.
When conducting research on burnout, it may be difficult to decide whether one should report results separately for each burnout dimension or whether one should combine the dimensions. Although the multidimensionality of the burnout concept is widely acknowledged, for research purposes it is sometimes convenient to regard burnout as a unidimensional construct. This article deals with the question of whether and when it may be appropriate to treat burnout as a unidimensional variable, and presents a decision rule to distinguish between people high and low in burnout.
http://oem.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/60/suppl_1/i16#BIBL

Burnout among New Zealand primary school teachers
This study examined factors relating to levels of job burnout in a sample of 386 New Zealand teachers and principals at 47 Auckland North Shore primary schools. The results confirmed the construct validity of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach & Jackson, 1993) and showed that these teachers recorded significantly higher scores on the MBI emotional exhaustion subscale than a normative sample of United States teachers. The nature of these differences and implications of the findings for reducing work stress among teachers are discussed.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3848/is_200012/ai_n8909905

Staff Matters - The Professional - Job burnout
Burnout has prompted many interventions, but relatively little research on effectiveness. In particular, they point to a paradox: that interventions tend to focus on the individual (removal, behaviour change, coping skills, relaxation), whereas the research has found that situational factors play a bigger role (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001, p. 418).
http://cms.curriculum.edu.au/mindmatters/staff/professional/job_burnout.htm

Occupational Stress Among Canadian College Educator: A Review of the Literature
http://www.senecac.on.ca/quarterly/1995-vol03-num02-winter/grant_ali_thorsen_dei_dickie.html

Patterns of Stress and Coping Mechanisms for Novice School Administrators
The author of this study examined patterns of stress and coping mechanisms for
practicing school administrators.
http://www.usca.edu/essays/vol142005/Fields.pdf

Teacher Burnout in Black and White

top

http://www.altcert.org/research/Teacher%20Burnout%20in%20Black%20and%20White.pdf

Feeling the Strain - An Overview of the literature on teacher's stress
The main aim is to review the published literature on stress in teaching, its
impact and comparison with other professions.
http://www.scre.ac.uk/resreport/pdf/109.pdf

Teacher stress is a much talked of phenomenon, however there is little consensus between different professional groups regarding its aetiology, or how to tackle it. Based on a review of international research, it is concluded that teacher stress is a real phenomenon and that high levels are reliably associated with a range of causal factors, including those intrinsic to teaching, individual vulnerability and systemic influences.
http://www.isma.org.uk/stressnw/teachstress1.htm

Teaching: Stress and satisfaction
Quantitative Study: Responses by 574 full-time classroom secondary teachers to a survey conducted in Western Australia during 1984 indicate that male and female teachers differ in the importance that they attach to the rewards of teaching, such as salary, promotion.
http://www.iier.org.au/iier1/tuettemann.html

Work-related stress and depressive disorders - A range of adverse health outcomes have been identified but psychological disorders are significant because they occur frequently, are often unrecognised and can be accom- panied by significant social morbidity; there are important implications for the lifestyle and health of employees and their families and there are medico-legal issues.
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:va_6nmPyh5YJ:www.uic.edu/sph/glakes/occupational/reading_lists/73102/pdfs/tennant.pdf+Necowitz+%26+Roznowski,+1994+personal+characteristics&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Teacher Burnout: Towards Preventative Strategies

top

During the last decade problems with teacher morale in North America , gave rise to a significant body of research into teacher burnout.  Similar problems in the teaching profession in Australia , particularly in New South Wales , became salient late in the last decade. Research into the problem of teacher burnout has focused largely on organizational factors and static individual traits associated with burnout.

http://www.aare.edu.au/94pap/laboe94129.txt

Study: Sources of stress and professional burnout of teachers of special educational needs in Greece
http://www.isec2000.org.uk/abstracts/papers_p/polychroni_1.htm 

Stress and strain in teaching: A structural equation approach

A large number of studies show that teachers are exposed to workloads which result particularly in stress and strain. At least one third of the teachers can be seen as suffering under extreme stress and/or burnout

http://teach.newport.ac.uk/sen/SEN_0506/BD_common/StressinSchool.pdf

top