A year ago I started this newsletter as a home for full-size rants and raves I’d been posting in fun-size on pre-Elon Twitter. I began publishing every week or so as inspiration or irritation hit. Then in August, I returned to the high school classroom to cover for a friend on leave. It’s been hard going since for Nobody Wants This—because my Teacher Brain is back.
Symptoms of Teacher Brain vary. Some of mine have flared up: the inability to read a book or watch a show without considering how it might fit into a lesson, anxiety dreams in which a series of obstacles keep me from being on time, a thirst for hearty reds. Teacher Brain prevents me from focusing on any one thing for very long. Ideas come and go. Few get captured that don’t have immediate use.
A big cause of Teacher Brain is decision fatigue caused by the sheer number of decisions made in the course of a day. These are rarely the life-and-death decisions made by air traffic controllers or first responders, though sadly they sometimes are. Educators face student, staff, and parent aggression, the threat of student self-harm, school shootings, and swatting hoaxes.
Daily, teachers make a multitude of lower-stakes but meaningful decisions—many on the fly—while planning and executing lessons, conducting class discussions and fielding questions, developing and giving assessments, evaluating learning and adjusting instruction, providing feedback on student work, responding to emotion and redirecting misbehavior, all while trying to keep in mind students’ confidence, motivation, engagement, productivity, knowledge acquisition, and skills growth. That’s a long sentence; that’s a lot of decisions.
In the current political climate, more of these decisions are fraught. How to approach a long-taught unit or text that is suddenly controversial? How to handle a student sharing misinformation? What can no longer be posted on a classroom wall, shelved in a bookcase, or worn on a lapel?
The worsening crisis in child mental health brings a heavier weight to interactions with students who are off task, misusing technology, missing deadlines, producing subpar work, frequently absent, or who just don’t seem themselves. With greater frequency, as Boston University’s Dr. Jennifer Greif Green put it, “We ask ourselves questions like: When should we be concerned? When should we seek help? And if we want help, where can we go?”
Little research on teachers’ decision fatigue is readily available. When I started writing about education a decade ago, I came across the same statistic that gets bandied about today: teachers make more than 1,500 decisions in a day. Educational neuroscience has focused primarily on the brains of learners, with researchers only recently starting to look at the teacher brain.
Gobs of data, however, support that teachers are stressed and burned out, exacerbating the so-called teacher shortage. I’ve written elsewhere about the bad ideas that have been put forth to deal with the shortage, noting that improving pay and working conditions is essential to retention. Returning to the classroom after a two-year hiatus has reminded me of the importance of working conditions.
Yes, due to the nature of the work, I have Teacher Brain, but because it’s mild, I’m feeling successful. As a part-time fill-in, I have fewer drains on my time and energy than I had as a full-time, tenured teacher. Fewer classes and students is a critical factor. I’m able to plan better and have more mental energy during class. Too many teachers have more students than they can reach and teach well, no matter how devoted or skilled they are. That’s why unions are increasingly demanding smaller class sizes as part of contract negotiations.
But many of the aggravators of Teacher Brain have nothing to do with student numbers. They have to do with administrative and other burdens that suck up teacher time and mental energy. To battle decision fatigue and other causes of stress and burnout, schools must relieve some of this load.
Keep teachers where they are. My courses this semester are ones I’ve taught before. That means I’m innovating and improving instead of scrambling to learn a new curriculum. Each year, about a quarter of US teachers are moved to teach new grade levels, negatively affecting student learning.
Cut down on extra duties. When teachers are monitoring halls, recess, or the cafeteria or are on bus and car duty, they aren’t teaching or preparing to teach. When they have to cover classes because substitutes can’t be found (read: aren’t paid enough), they aren’t giving extra help to their own students or reflecting on their instruction.
Relieve the pressure to take on more. Districts and schools seem to have more committees than the US Congress, and teachers can feel pressured to participate if they don’t yet have tenure or they hope to become administrators so they can better provide for their families. For these same reasons, some take on extracurriculars.
Reduce bureaucratic burdens. Some districts provide effective professional development. Some use data meetings to improve learning. Some run efficient and essential faculty meetings. But lots of teachers spend too many hours in meetings of questionable necessity and training of questionable quality.
Improve evaluation systems. Elaborate teacher evaluation systems rolled out a dozen years ago have been proven to have little effect on learning, and despite some scaling back, they continue to eat up administrator and teacher time. It took 63 pages just to explain this one.
Slow the initiative roll. I could not count the exciting! big! new! initiatives and programs rolled out and quietly abandoned in the schools I’ve worked in since 2001. Countless hours were spent learning about them and trying to deliver on them, though how well and in lieu of what? Teachers can’t focus when admin can’t focus.
In the faculty lunchroom this week I asked a few colleagues what they thought of when they heard the term Teacher Brain. They spoke about hypervigilance and the second guessing that comes with all the decision-making. They spoke about guilt, of knowing what needs to be done but not always being able to do it.
“There’s always something I’m neglecting,” said one. When teachers are overburdened with non-teaching work, what can end up neglected are the most important things. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt able to fully focus on what matters most when I’m in a school building. It’s not the lighter class load that’s done it; it’s the lighter administrative load. Because I can breathe, I can think. I can see and hear my students. I can teach.