Fighting teacher stress
A growing number of mindfulness trainings help teachers cope, but critics say the real problem’s much deeper
A few years ago, Amy Lopes, a veteran fifth-grade teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, learned that teachers at her school could try a mindfulness and yoga training along with their students. Her immediate reaction: “What a bunch of baloney!”
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll try it, but it’s not going to work,’ ” recalled Lopes, who teaches at the William D’Abate Elementary School. “But, within a couple weeks, I just let go and became a learner along with my students, and my whole world has changed.”
That training was given by a nearby nonprofit that had recently changed its name — from Resilient Kids to the Center for Resilience — because, said founder and executive director Vanessa Weiner, whenever trainers visited a school to work with students, “we kept hearing from teachers who said, ‘We need this, too.’ ”
Teacher stress is growing, experts say, pushing educators out of classrooms and hurting learning. On top of chronic underfunding for education and the continued pressure of standardized tests, there’s also the unrelenting pace of newer education reforms. CONTINUE READING: Will resilience training exercises help teachers with stress?
