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Heading 1NDMTSS Conference

Description

Teachers have always needed to know and practice protective strategies in their social emotional first aid kits to manage the daily stressors of working on the front lines of a human-service oriented profession. That need has never been greater given the massive increase in uncertainty and unpredictability in the teaching profession and in one's personal life due to COVID.

In short, teaching is emotional labor-- the effort required to manage and metabolize strong emotions like anger, shame, guilt, anxiety, and overwhelm, as well as generate and stoke positive emotions like joy, hope, and compassion.

Stress significantly diminishes a teacher's capacity to regulate their negative emotions and cultivate positive emotions. Ironically, teachers who leave the profession often cite their inability to cope with their own emotional reactions to loss of control, unpredictability, and lack of purpose in their teaching as the primary reason for burnout.

There are many, many strategies and practices rooted in cognitive and affective neuroscience and social and behavioral sciences that teachers can learn, practice, and integrate into their personal and professional lives as teachers to metabolize stress, manage negative energy, protect themselves from the burnout cycle, and find joy in teaching the whole year through!

Learning Objectives

In this session, teachers will:

Present Well-BeingLLC

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Explore the core elements of the teacher burnout cycle and learn how to protect one's self from the 2 paths to burning out,

Culture & Contexts for Teaching

Teachers cannot fully engage their calling in isolation. While teaching can and often does feel like an isolating profession, a teacher's level of effectiveness, confidence, and competence is influenced by the culture in which they work and the relationships they have with their students, peers, and administrators.

In other words; the culture of a school represents the health of the relationships of the individuals who make up the school.

At its core, teaching is a relationship-based profession.

As an administrator, how you invest in your educators' mental, emotional, and psychological health matters to the ethos of the space where you and they work.

Hargraeves and Fullan (2012) remind leaders that when they are closely connected to their teachers' learning and in knowing their teachers, they build professional capital. Creating a culture of teacher well-being is about "leaders taking time to know their people and what their people do, and know how to bring out the best from the people collectively" (p. 166).

Cultivating an

Ethic of Care

& Ethos of Compassion

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Every session and every experience in our research-based curriculum cultivates an inner ethos of self-care and compassion for others. Our research shows that school buildings that engage their educators in this work for sustained and consecutive sessions co-create an ethos and culture of care among the staff that positively transforms relationships. As individual educators turn inward and cultivate greater self-awareness, understanding, and compassion, they begin to turn outward toward their peers and students with greater awareness, understanding, and compassion.

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