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OPINION | TEACHING & LEARNING
America’s Teachers Aren’t Burned Out. We Are Demoralized.
By David Stieber Feb 14, 2022

America’s Teachers Aren’t Burned Out. We Are Demoralized.
Overearth / Shutterstock
TWEETSHAREEMAIL
As a teacher, I felt fortunate. The first job I took in Chicago Public Schools in 2007 was at a school where the administration truly valued student and staff input. I remember sitting with students as we interviewed potential new teachers and the students saying things like, “This teacher doesn’t seem like they will be a good fit for our school family.”

The entire school staff worked incredibly hard to give our students every opportunity possible. The issue was that our school (like many across the country) did not have the resources it needed. We watched our already thin school budget be decimated by more budget cuts. We let go of administrators, counselors, librarians and teachers.

The reduction in school staff immediately impacted the students. They lost supportive adults who had built relationships with them. The inequity in the system was tragic and profound. As educators, we would tell our students they could become anything, while simultaneously teaching them in a school building that had no soap in the bathrooms, broken computers and a nurse for half a day, only on Fridays. We fought for more for our students and watched as our mayoral controlled school district refused to provide more funding, and instead returned with the decision to close the school. All of this was demoralizing.

These last two school years have been even tougher. Tougher for parents, for students and for educators. We’ve experienced a historic presidential election, an uprising to bring about racial justice, an attempted coup and a debate on whether schools are even a safe place to be during a pandemic. Educators were caught smack in the middle of all of this, hoping that our students and their families, as well as our own, were safe and healthy. Trying to help our students make sense of this world while we’re still figuring it out has been exhausting.

Often in education we hear that teachers are burned out, but that isn’t quite accurate. As teacher demoralization expert Doris Santoro says, “burnout tells the wrong story about the kinds of pain educators are experiencing because it suggests that the problem lies within individual teachers themselves.” Those outside education assume that the teacher can’t hack it in the classroom. But in reality, teachers are forced to operate in systems that aren’t functioning properly, which makes teachers feel demoralized, discouraged and overwhelmed. According to Santoro, demoralization occurs because teachers “care deeply about students and the profession, and they realize that school policies and conditions make it impossible for them to do what is good, right and just.”

As a 15-year educator in Chicago Public Schools, let me explain what demoralization looks like:

Losing more students to various forms of gun violence than years I’ve been teaching, and being told educators are greedy for demanding more counselors, social workers, therapists, clinicians and psychologists for our students. Every day, as a 40-year-old, I struggle with these losses and imagine what it’s like for the 14-year-olds I teach.
Watching 7-year-olds on a school night in February plead with school officials to not close their school.
Watching parents and community members go on a 34 day hunger strike just to get a school open.
Having to tape down broken asbestos tiles on our floor so the students and staff don’t breathe in a carcinogen.
Supporting students who want to speak up and out, only to be told we are indoctrinating students who dare to challenge the status quo.
Dealing with all these inequalities while trying to teach through a pandemic.
To survive in systems like Chicago, or anywhere really, educators eventually realize they need to control what we can, which is what happens inside our classrooms. We have kids sit in circles and talk about novels they read. We have debates about current events, we do amazing experiments and solve formulas. Students perform concerts and showcase their art. We form meaningful relationships with our students as we get to know each other over the year we spend together. We laugh with and at our students, and learn to laugh when they make fun of us.

But during all of those amazing days we also try to ignore that it’s only 60 degrees in our classroom in the dead of winter or that it’s over 90 degrees in our rooms in the summer. We try to ignore the mold in the ceiling tiles, the windows that don’t open, the blinds that broke and have not been repaired, ever, and the floors that haven’t been swept because every custodian has quit. Some days it just seems easier to work in a cubicle where at least the air conditioning works.

We try to ignore all of that so we can just teach. But no matter how hard we try we can’t help but see the inequities, the injustice, the hypocrisy in our education system.

We went from being heroes and essential workers during the spring of 2020 to being viewed as babysitters by politicians around the country. We fight for student safety and we are told to get back in the building, ironically by people working remotely. We challenge our students to question and are told we are indoctrinating them with “critical race theory.” We are plied with guilt and encouraged to normalize choosing our students over our own families and our own lives. Our love of students is regularly abused. We are pitted against each other by administrators or district heads who use terms like “super teachers” for some and “hell raisers” for others. We grow so demoralized and dispirited that some educators lose hope and motivation; they become so empty that they start to think teachers should go back to only worrying about our pay and benefits. That fighting for the common good of our students is too difficult to even think about.

All of this is intentional on the part of our school systems and those controlling them. All of this is demoralizing. We love teaching, we love students. All we want is a true say in how our schools are run.

Right now the educators may be in one of the greatest exoduses in history. Educators are and will continue to leave in record numbers. Teachers will either leave silently or will leave fighting. We will be thanked for our service and left to rebuild our professional lives.

Some think tanks will try to replace us with some fast tracked program like Teach For America, only to watch them leave in faster time than educators who’ve been called to this profession, who are committed to honing our craft and improving year after year.

Educators know that bargaining for the common good, working with other organizations and advocacy groups who think about all parts of our students' lives is what gives us hope. The late Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis taught us to bargain for the common good and to realize we are the experts.

We want community run schools, where the voices of parents, students, educators and administrators all matter. We want elected school boards and an end to mayoral controlled school districts. We want time to plan and to collaborate. We want equitable funding for our schools. We want to stop wasting our own time creating DonorsChoose projects to compensate for the ridiculous lack of funding our schools receive.

We want policy that actually shows that our students matter. But here’s the thing: We want to be a part of all of this work. We have the expertise, the experience, the degrees, the certifications upon certifications. We know how schools work. This is how we can attract teachers and re-energize the experts that we do have.

America’s educators aren’t burned out. We are demoralized.

The solution lies in understanding the difference.

Dave Stieber () teaches high school social studies and poetry for Chicago Public Schools.

×
OPINION | TEACHING & LEARNING
America’s Teachers Aren’t Burned Out. We Are Demoralized.
By David Stieber Feb 14, 2022

America’s Teachers Aren’t Burned Out. We Are Demoralized.
Overearth / Shutterstock
TWEETSHAREEMAIL
As a teacher, I felt fortunate. The first job I took in Chicago Public Schools in 2007 was at a school where the administration truly valued student and staff input. I remember sitting with students as we interviewed potential new teachers and the students saying things like, “This teacher doesn’t seem like they will be a good fit for our school family.”

The entire school staff worked incredibly hard to give our students every opportunity possible. The issue was that our school (like many across the country) did not have the resources it needed. We watched our already thin school budget be decimated by more budget cuts. We let go of administrators, counselors, librarians and teachers.

The reduction in school staff immediately impacted the students. They lost supportive adults who had built relationships with them. The inequity in the system was tragic and profound. As educators, we would tell our students they could become anything, while simultaneously teaching them in a school building that had no soap in the bathrooms, broken computers and a nurse for half a day, only on Fridays. We fought for more for our students and watched as our mayoral controlled school district refused to provide more funding, and instead returned with the decision to close the school. All of this was demoralizing.

These last two school years have been even tougher. Tougher for parents, for students and for educators. We’ve experienced a historic presidential election, an uprising to bring about racial justice, an attempted coup and a debate on whether schools are even a safe place to be during a pandemic. Educators were caught smack in the middle of all of this, hoping that our students and their families, as well as our own, were safe and healthy. Trying to help our students make sense of this world while we’re still figuring it out has been exhausting.

Often in education we hear that teachers are burned out, but that isn’t quite accurate. As teacher demoralization expert Doris Santoro says, “burnout tells the wrong story about the kinds of pain educators are experiencing because it suggests that the problem lies within individual teachers themselves.” Those outside education assume that the teacher can’t hack it in the classroom. But in reality, teachers are forced to operate in systems that aren’t functioning properly, which makes teachers feel demoralized, discouraged and overwhelmed. According to Santoro, demoralization occurs because teachers “care deeply about students and the profession, and they realize that school policies and conditions make it impossible for them to do what is good, right and just.”

As a 15-year educator in Chicago Public Schools, let me explain what demoralization looks like:

Losing more students to various forms of gun violence than years I’ve been teaching, and being told educators are greedy for demanding more counselors, social workers, therapists, clinicians and psychologists for our students. Every day, as a 40-year-old, I struggle with these losses and imagine what it’s like for the 14-year-olds I teach.
Watching 7-year-olds on a school night in February plead with school officials to not close their school.
Watching parents and community members go on a 34 day hunger strike just to get a school open.
Having to tape down broken asbestos tiles on our floor so the students and staff don’t breathe in a carcinogen.
Supporting students who want to speak up and out, only to be told we are indoctrinating students who dare to challenge the status quo.
Dealing with all these inequalities while trying to teach through a pandemic.
To survive in systems like Chicago, or anywhere really, educators eventually realize they need to control what we can, which is what happens inside our classrooms. We have kids sit in circles and talk about novels they read. We have debates about current events, we do amazing experiments and solve formulas. Students perform concerts and showcase their art. We form meaningful relationships with our students as we get to know each other over the year we spend together. We laugh with and at our students, and learn to laugh when they make fun of us.

But during all of those amazing days we also try to ignore that it’s only 60 degrees in our classroom in the dead of winter or that it’s over 90 degrees in our rooms in the summer. We try to ignore the mold in the ceiling tiles, the windows that don’t open, the blinds that broke and have not been repaired, ever, and the floors that haven’t been swept because every custodian has quit. Some days it just seems easier to work in a cubicle where at least the air conditioning works.

We try to ignore all of that so we can just teach. But no matter how hard we try we can’t help but see the inequities, the injustice, the hypocrisy in our education system.

We went from being heroes and essential workers during the spring of 2020 to being viewed as babysitters by politicians around the country. We fight for student safety and we are told to get back in the building, ironically by people working remotely. We challenge our students to question and are told we are indoctrinating them with “critical race theory.” We are plied with guilt and encouraged to normalize choosing our students over our own families and our own lives. Our love of students is regularly abused. We are pitted against each other by administrators or district heads who use terms like “super teachers” for some and “hell raisers” for others. We grow so demoralized and dispirited that some educators lose hope and motivation; they become so empty that they start to think teachers should go back to only worrying about our pay and benefits. That fighting for the common good of our students is too difficult to even think about.

All of this is intentional on the part of our school systems and those controlling them. All of this is demoralizing. We love teaching, we love students. All we want is a true say in how our schools are run.

Right now the educators may be in one of the greatest exoduses in history. Educators are and will continue to leave in record numbers. Teachers will either leave silently or will leave fighting. We will be thanked for our service and left to rebuild our professional lives.

Some think tanks will try to replace us with some fast tracked program like Teach For America, only to watch them leave in faster time than educators who’ve been called to this profession, who are committed to honing our craft and improving year after year.

Educators know that bargaining for the common good, working with other organizations and advocacy groups who think about all parts of our students' lives is what gives us hope. The late Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis taught us to bargain for the common good and to realize we are the experts.

We want community run schools, where the voices of parents, students, educators and administrators all matter. We want elected school boards and an end to mayoral controlled school districts. We want time to plan and to collaborate. We want equitable funding for our schools. We want to stop wasting our own time creating DonorsChoose projects to compensate for the ridiculous lack of funding our schools receive.

We want policy that actually shows that our students matter. But here’s the thing: We want to be a part of all of this work. We have the expertise, the experience, the degrees, the certifications upon certifications. We know how schools work. This is how we can attract teachers and re-energize the experts that we do have.

America’s educators aren’t burned out. We are demoralized.

The solution lies in understanding the difference.

Dave Stieber () teaches high school social studies and poetry for Chicago Public Schools.

Parenting • Perspective�How parents can help kids redefine what it means to be smart���(iStock)�By Ulcca Joshi Hansen�February 11 at 8:00 AM CT�My sons learned the concept of being smart when they were young. To them, “smart” meant to be good at the things most schools tell us are important: reading and writing well, understanding math, finishing tests quickly.�Both of my sons, now 15 and 13, measured themselves against this standard, and not surprisingly, found themselves to be lacking.�One is a reluctant reader who was flagged for years in school because he was “below grade level.” The other is a strong student but a bit scattered; he thinks about five things at once, often when he is expected to pay attention. He constantly heard that he was off-task.�During the pandemic, I had a front-row seat to how they each thrived beyond the limitations of traditional school. My reluctant reader can hold variables in his head visually in a way that lets him beat everyone in the family at chess and strategy games. He used YouTube to explore topics like asteroid mining, his favorite city of Dubai, and whether sugar really makes kids hyper. His brother binge-watched “Grey’s Anatomy,” decided he wants to be a surgeon and used the Internet to teach himself to dissect a fetal pig and master the basics of surgical suturing.�Like many parents, I struggle with a painful tension: I see the unique brilliance of my children, but I also know that brilliance can’t shine in an education system where “smart” is measured in a very different way. Despite the fact that children learn in different ways, at different paces, we favor certain cognitive functions and place heavy emphasis on compliance, stillness and the ability to pay certain kinds of attention.���The educational disruption of the coronavirus pandemic was a reminder that “smart” has come to represent a flattened, largely dehumanized idea of human capability, and that our children are so much more.�I am a former elementary school teacher who worked in Newark. I eventually left the classroom to become an educational researcher and advocate because I wanted to change how we educate our children to reflect what we now know about human development, the science of learning and the many ways in which human potential emerges.�Over the years, I have counseled parents who struggle to support the child they have under the shadow of what our system expects. Here are some ideas for parents so they can reconsider how their kids are smart, and how to encourage children to learn and thrive, despite a system that is often measuring them differently.�Explore how your kid is smart instead of whether they are smart�This one is hard, but parents need to step back and stop focusing on grades to discover how their children are smart instead of whether they are smart. How? Have a conversation with your child and reflect on the past year of remote learning. What worked for them? What did they like? What felt hard? Discuss how they might use it to approach school differently.�One friend’s daughter discovered she worked better with a more flexible schedule, choosing when and how to complete assignments. She had figured out the best times she felt focused and less distracted. Another child discovered he completed work much more quickly at home, when he didn’t have distractions he has at school. He asked his teachers if he could wear noise-canceling headphones. And another realized he was much better at creating videos for school projects instead of writing the same ideas on paper. He is asking his teachers if he can have some opportunities to demonstrate his knowledge in ways other than essays.���Ask what they’re most curious about learning. If they aren’t sure what they find interesting, have them think about how they chose to spend the extra time that was not filled with their usual activities.�Once you identify a question or issue they show interest in exploring, help create projects they can pursue on their own. Look online for people who work in that field — and reach out with specific questions or requests. People are busy, but many will make time to support a young person interested in learning.�Take stock of what you and your kids have learned during the pandemic�While it is true that there are things your child may not have learned as well because of distance learning, there are other important things they did learn because they were at home, in their communities, paying attention to different things. They probably noticed new things about injustice in their country and communities; observed how the economy works (or doesn’t) when a global pandemic disrupts supply chains; took in something about the science of vaccines.�Conversations about these and other everyday happenings are learning opportunities. It is useful to remind ourselves and our children that learning happens everywhere, all the time, if we can view our experiences through that lens.�It is also important to talk about soft skills as learning, as they are important skills that will help our kids become successful adults.�“Critical thinking, communication, time management, executive functioning, metacognition — if a child has mastered these they will not only do better in their classes, they will take these tools into whatever context they go,” says Kelsey Komorowski, owner of KOMO, a tutoring organization. She believes we focus too much on how well kids are doing in individual subjects and on boosting grades. Instead, she said, we should, focus on those “soft” skills that transfer across classes and contexts. These skills can be for kids of all ages: Even very young children have a desire to understand and plan their days, create and maintain order, and ask questions about the world.���Help your child’s formal education work better for them�Schools are set up in ways that can work well for some and not so well for others. Many schools expect kids to work at a pace and in an order defined by adults, even though that may not work for your child’s development.�Consider what you and your child have learned about how their school is and is not a good fit in how it approaches learning. The pandemic may have provided insights into how to address common struggles at school, or how to advocate for different supports.�Many people remember schools as places that told us all the ways we didn’t measure up, rather than being a place where we focus on our strengths and build from those. Philippe Ernewein, director of education at Denver Academy, a program designed for learners who have not thrived in conventional settings, told me: “We ask students: what do you take joy in doing or find easy to do? How do you prefer to learn? Then we build around those skills,” he says. “If a student has a hard time reading, we teach them that there are different ways to ‘read’: with your eyes through words on a page; your fingers if you read Braille; your ears if you prefer books on tape; your eyes and ears if you prefer to watch videos.”�In a world where technology enables us to access, capture, engage with and distribute knowledge in so many ways, it feels most important to help kids learn what they need to succeed and help them build those skills.�It is perfectly normal for kids’ foundational reading skills to develop as late as age 8, and for them to grow into higher order literacy skills well into their middle school years. It’s why systems like Finland’s — in which children generally outperform American students both academically and in terms of overall wellness — don’t begin formal reading instruction until ages 6 or 7, and often have more flexible learning progressions and multi-age classrooms.���If your child struggles with reading, remind them that what matters most is that they gain new information and ideas. Explore tools that can support them. For example, have them listen to audio while looking at text to make connections between sounds and written words, use video to introduce new material before moving onto to written materials, or introduce visual organizers, which are ways to gather and organize information graphically.�For the vast majority of children, reading eventually clicks. If there is a history in your family of diagnosed dyslexia or struggles with reading, it may be worth considering an evaluation, but understand that children’s naturally jagged development is normal.�It’s important to consider your child’s working memory and attention abilities, too. A child with lower working memory skills can have difficulty following directions, recalling information, tracking lengthy discussions or remembering information long enough to work it through to understanding. For a child like this, the goal is to reduce the number of things they need to do at one time.�Working on computer-based programs can increase working memory challenges. It requires a child to focus on learning new content even as they figure out the logistics of a platform, struggle to type or juggle windows.�Instead, ask their teacher for lesson notes so your child can focus on a lesson without struggling to simultaneously take notes. Write down as much as possible using colors and visual clues, which can be especially helpful. Notice whether they focus better when using headphones to reduce background noise.���While it wasn’t easy, one benefit of the pandemic was an opportunity to better understand both our education system and our children. Now we have the chance to advocate for our kids’ education to change in meaningful ways, to rethink “smart,” and to meet our children’s needs as learners and as whole people.�Ulcca Joshi Hansen is the author of “The Future of Smart” and chief program officer at Grantmakers for Education. She is a mother of two and a former elementary teacher who has worked in education for two decades. Her experiences as an English-language learner and first-generation college student inform her perspective on what it means to provide an “equitable” education for every child and engage communities in that effort.

Teacher Tom
Teaching and learning from preschoolers
Monday, February 07, 2022
We Must Demand Play-Based Education Because That's What The Evidence Tells Us

201


According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is no, as in zero, research that finds longterm gains from teaching to read in kindergarten. In fact, the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces literacy in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is not my feeling. This is not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

******

The science tells us that young children learn everything they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a brand new 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

Teacher Tom
Teaching and learning from preschoolers
Monday, February 07, 2022
We Must Demand Play-Based Education Because That's What The Evidence Tells Us

201


According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is no, as in zero, research that finds longterm gains from teaching to read in kindergarten. In fact, the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces literacy in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is not my feeling. This is not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

******

The science tells us that young children learn everything they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning is a brand new 6-week foundational course on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

IISSE IISSE was founded in 2012 with the purpose of supporting and facilitating diverse types of research in the social sciences and education. Its founders wish to promote alternative types of qualitative research.