Why We Must Focus on Resilience

Schools are stressful places. Regardless of whether you teach in an established, well-resourced private or suburban school or in an underfunded school in an underserved community, teaching is emotional work and is inherently stressful. In part, this is the nature of being in a helping profession and serving young people in complex organizations. Healthy stress can be okay; it can challenge us and help us develop. However, in many of our schools, healthy stress is frequently displaced by toxic stress. Toxic stress occurs when demands consistently outpace our ability to cope. Toxic stress first manifests as decreased productivity, and escalates to more serious symptoms such as anxiety, dissociation, frustration, and, eventually, burnout. Roughly half a million US teachers leave the profession each year—a turnover rate of over 20% (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2014).

School leaders—both site leaders and central office leaders—must focus on boosting the resilience of staff as a lever for school transformation. Teacher attrition among first-year teachers has increased about 40% in the past two decades (Ingersoll, Merrill, and Stuckey, 2014). A range of factors, such as morale, accountability expectations, and salaries, certainly contribute to the attrition problems, but stress and poor management of stressors are also rated as a top reason why teachers leave the profession (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017).

Burnout is physical and emotional fatigue—and surely we can do something about that. This rate is much higher in urban areas, in secondary classrooms, and in hard-to-staff content areas such special education, math, science, and foreign languages (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017). It is estimated that teacher turnover costs school districts upwards of $2.2 billion per year (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2014) and the cost of replacing a teacher in an urban district exceeds $20,000 per teacher (Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017). For site administrators, turnover rates may be comparable, particularly in urban areas, but the data is not systematically collected as it is for teacher attrition.

Lack of resilience, therefore, has a financial cost and contributes to staff instability, which in turn negatively impacts student learning and experience. High turnover rates at schools make it hard to accumulate professional capital, hinder the implementation of programs, contribute to low levels of trust among stakeholders, and make staff and student culture fragile. It would simply make good sense, from a financial perspective, to focus on increasing staff resilience.

The end goal, of course, is not just to retain warm adult bodies in classrooms but to meet the needs of our students. Kids need passionate, effective, committed educators. In order to retain such people, school leaders need to provide teachers with resources to meet the challenges they'll encounter in their work so that they can learn from those challenges, surmount them, and fulfill their purpose. And our purpose is to ensure that we are working in, teaching in, and leading organizations where every single child thrives—academically, socially, and emotionally. We must cultivate resilience so that all children feel that they belong to a resilient community, so that all children graduate and are eligible for the college or career of their choice, and so that all children have an expansive tool set to contribute to our society.

Over the last decade or two, in many schools across the United States and in other countries, there has been increased attention to the social and emotional learning (SEL) needs of children. Curricula and standards have been developed, resources have been allocated to SEL programs, and staff have been trained. This is a tremendous advancement in acknowledging children as complex, multifaceted beings, and it is our responsibility, as adults committed to guiding children in acquiring the massive set of skills they'll need in order to have productive lives, to attend to children's social and emotional skills.

It's now time to look at teachers and all the adults working in and with schools through this same lens—as people whose learning needs include the social and emotional realm of existence. In the majority of schools, what's needed isn't more professional development on deconstructing standards or academic discourse or using data to drive instruction. What's needed is time, space, and attention to managing stress and cultivating resilience. Whether you're a teacher reading this intent on boosting your capacities in these areas or you're a positional leader concerned about the flood of teachers leaving your schools, this book, and the companion workbook, offer a way to begin this learning. We must focus on cultivating our own resilience because it'll help us manage physical and emotional stressors, enjoy life more, and fulfill our purpose as educators.

The Three Conversations We Must Have

There are three conversations in which we must simultaneously engage to consider how cultivating resilience can transform our schools. These three, depicted in Figure I.1, are

1. Individual resilience. We can do a lot to boost our own individual resilience, improve our well-being, and prevent burnout. Ultimately, this is what we have the most influence and control over: What we think, how we engage with our emotions, and the actions we take every day to cultivate resilience. It is incumbent on each of us to attend to our resilience.
2. Organizational conditions. Focusing on individual well-being and action is not enough. If the conditions and context in which teachers work are suboptimal, it is not enough to tell teachers to sleep more, check their attitude, and be grateful. Conditions in many organizations don't foster well-being. These include the adult culture, the strength of leadership, and basic operational routines and systems. To address burnout and turnover, leaders in organizations must take responsibility for substantially improving the conditions in which people work. Until then, we'll still see teachers leaving in droves—even those with high levels of individual resilience.
3. Systemic conditions. We must address the macro, political, and economic context of our education system. Teachers must be paid more, and they must be treated as people who can think and who can learn. Teacher and administrator preparation must improve. We must address the racism, classism, and sexism that exists in our institutions, including in our schools. We'll need to talk about testing and publishing scores and performance pay. Until we dig down to the structural and systemic roots of the dysfunctions in our education system, we'll still see high levels of teacher turnover. This may open a Pandora's box, because we'll need to talk about capitalism and the legacy of colonialism and property taxes and who votes and for whom we vote. We'll need to talk about patriarchy and the dehumanization of some groups of people. We must have these conversations, however; our resilience and well-being are connected to them. And if our true goal is school transformation, we'll need to have them.

Here's my theory of action: If we boost our individual resilience, then we will have more energy to address organizational and systemic conditions—to elect officials who will fund public education, organize against policies that dehumanize educators, and push back on punitive assessment policies and scripted curriculum that turn teachers into robots and students into depositories to be filled. With more energy and more resilience, we can build and strengthen the kinds of communities in which we can thrive, where we can engage in professional development that allows us to reflect on our own biases, and where we can observe and learn from each other.

I wrote this book, and The Onward Workbook, to begin addressing the first of these conversations: To offer strategies to boost our individual resilience. But I know that this book will contribute to the second and third conversations, because in acquiring the individual strategies, resilient educators can then transform their entire classroom as a subset of society, their school as a larger subset, and even the larger school district and system. Resilient educators may also have the energy to engage in conversation about the macro context and to take action to change it.

In order to create the just and equitable society that I know so many of us yearn for, we need tremendous reserves of resilience. We must change the macro conditions in which we live and work, and to do that, we'll need all the physical and emotional resources we can muster. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without demand,” and we'll need a lot of energy to make our demands.

A Conceptual Framework for Resilience

This book is anchored in a four-part conceptual framework, based on the key components of resilience and how it is developed. The four parts are who we are, where we are, what we do, and how we are. Figure I.2 represents this framework.

Specifically for Leaders

I'm committed to helping you build your resilience and the resilience of others. Toward that end, you'll notice sections of this book titled “Implications for Leaders,” which provide strategies and tips for implementing these ideas. My advice and suggestions for you are informed by my years of coaching leaders and my understanding of your role and context.

Contents

Each chapter focuses on a habit and how it builds resilience. It contains the following sections:

• A “dive into an emotion,” which explores a specific emotion, such as anger or shame, and how it is connected to that chapter's habit.
• “Dispositions,” which discusses 1 of the 12 dispositions and how it connects to the habit of the month.

Some chapters have a section called “Acknowledging Context,” in which our social, political, historic, cultural context is recognized, and the connections are drawn between the context and our work in schools.

The content of this entire book is about making big and little changes in your behaviors, habits, and routines. Appendix B, How to Make Lasting Change, offers a primer for how to effectively and even painlessly build and maintain new habits.

You might want to read that before you continue, or explore it later. It's treated as an appendix so that you can easily find it and frequently reference it.

Sequence

I've sequenced the habits of resilience to build on each other and map onto the rhythms of the school year. Onward could be read all at once, but the strategies in The Onward Workbook will be internalized best if they are digested, discussed, and practiced over the course of a year.

Each habit correlates to the month that best aligns to that particular theme. Ideally you could begin your study of this book in June, when you can focus on the habit of self-knowledge. In November, when most educators are exhausted from the launch of the school year, Onward offers a chapter on self-care, and then in May, a chapter on celebration—obviously an appropriate topic for the end of the school year. A Calendar of Learning, a table that follows this introduction, connects each habit to a month.

The first three chapters of this book should be read in order. They offer foundational approaches for building resilience. After that, if you want to jump to Chapter 9 because that's the one you feel would help you the most, or because it maps onto the current month, then go ahead! Appendix A, The Habits and Dispositions of Resilient Educators: A Self-Assessment, can help you make decisions about the order in which you might read this book.