By Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, July 21, 2020
Teachers across the country are preparing for a school year brimming with unprecedented challenges brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. A likely byproduct? Teachers’ stress levels could soar, making an already-tough job tougher.
By now, it’s a truism that teaching is stressful. Researchers have increasingly documented that stress, in surveys and in the trails of burned-out teachers leaving the profession. In the last decade, many professional development programs have sprung up that use mindfulness as a key tool to alleviate teacher stress, but there’s little rigorous research on how well they work.
“We have many well-meaning and really amazing practitioners who develop these programs, but they don’t often have the scientific foundation to know how to evaluate a program with really rigorous approaches,” said Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, a University of British Columbia professor who’s a widely cited expert in social-emotional learning, both for students and teachers.
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