Teachers are the problem. Can they be the solution?
How to challenge teacher’s identities so they stop damaging student mental health.
Originally published September 11th, 2020 (Blogger)
Hey, teacher…leave those kids alone
Once upon a time, when I was a hospital teacher, I was trying to get a very bright 17 year old girl back into her school. She fought every step of the way.
“Help me understand this,” I asked. “You’re smart. You’re capable. You have plans for your future. You’re so close to graduating. Why don’t you want to go back?”
Her response, in seven words, revolutionized my entire identity as a teacher.
“I love learning…but I hate school.”
She had a choice between school or self-harm. Like far too many high school students, she chose self-harm.
Am I the problem?
The British Journal of Special Education published research on student self-harm, and the results are concerning. High school students reported that hurting themselves was easier to deal with than the stress of school. Not only that, but when given the choice between speaking to a teacher or another youth they didn’t know, they would rather talk to the stranger.
The research indicates that students just don’t see schools as being supportive. My own informal qualitative field research, conducted in a large Toronto high school, supports this thesis. Of the 200 interviewees:
- 65% said school made them happy “rarely” or “never”
- 45% said their stress was “high” or “very high” …in September
- 82% said their stress was caused by homework
- 90% said they didn’t know where to access mental health support
This shows a community where stress is not only endemic, but normalized. So who is responsible for this?
Teachers are. We have to recognize the responsibility we have to our student’s mental health. We have to realize that we, willingly or no, are causing damage.
These students are asking for support and acceptance. These schools are responding with rejection and intolerance. How did we get here?
There’s one simple reason why teachers are letting their students’ mental health fall through the cracks; it’s that they barely have time to take care of their own mental health. An Australian study points to some disturbing trends:
- Teachers experience job-related stress at levels twice the national average
- 57% self-identify as having a poor work-life balance
- 71% say these levels of stress make them worse at their job
When the researchers asked what would help, the teachers in the study made it very clear: when we discover our students are experiencing a mental health crisis, we can’t do anything about it because we don’t have the time. This gave them an “overwhelming sense of powerlessness”.
Interestingly, the Australian study also shows that, more and more, teachers feel unable to understand youth culture. Their “gut instincts”, honed by decades of experience, are useless in an online world that is increasingly out of reach for them. This disconnect makes them feel that they’re just not good teachers anymore. But is that actually true?
I’m still a good teacher, aren’t I?
As a new teacher I was often told that once you’re part of a school culture, no matter who you were before then, you’d copy that school culture within 3 years. I thought this was an urban legend — it isn’t. Not only is it a documented phenomenon, it’s also based on the works of Jacques Lacan, sometimes considered the psychoanalytic heir of Sigmund Freud.
Stress, argues Lacan, comes from a bad fit between your two egos, or “sense of self”. There’s the ideal ego — the hypothetically perfect version of yourself you want to be — and your ego ideal — the practical, realistic, messy version of yourself you have to be. When you can’t reconcile these two opposing ideas of yourself, you get stress. Lacan says that when it comes to education, becoming a teacher means recognizing this tension by seeking “knowledge of the self and to knowledge originating in the other”, also known as…our students.
Thinking about individual students is hard. The average Toronto high school teacher interacts with 180 students from September to June, not including extracurriculars. Thinking about students, writ large, is much easier. If I apply general beliefs to all students, safely homogenizing them into broad categories that fit my preconceived notions, then I don’t have to get to know all their details. A student is a student is a student. Students are the “other”. It’s easy for me to understand students as a concept; understanding the particular needs of 180 human beings, on the other hand, is much harder. So who can blame teachers for thinking about students, but not their students?
The increased focus on student mental health is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of Canadian education. Many teachers have only just begun to grapple with it over the last four or five years. Mental health simply isn’t part of their ideal ego or ego ideal as educators. It’s not part of who they are, what they know, how they operate, or what they value. And they’ve been doing just fine without it, thank you very much (they might say).
It’s easy for me to understand students as a concept; understanding the particular needs of 180 human beings, on the other hand, is much harder.
Now, however, mental health literacy is an expectation. Lacking mental health literacy is at odds with a teacher’s sense of self-identity and brings about cognitive dissonance: “I can’t be a good teacher if I don’t understand mental health”, goes the narrative, “so if I don’t understand mental health, then I’m not a good teacher.” Rather than face this direct challenge to the ego, it is easier for the teacher to simply ignore mental health all together and maintain their sense of self as a good teacher.
And if most of the teachers in a school take this approach, then in 3 years, so will you.
Teachers are the problem; we must be the solution
At some point in my career I started pushing my mental health agenda a little more aggressively in schools. What I quickly learned was that you can group educators roughly into three groups: those who aren’t interested in mental health; those who are interested, but don’t know what to do; and those who are interested, and have specific training. Three different languages, three different foci, three different goals. The easiest solution often becomes “someone else will deal with it”. This was baked in to teacher identity and school culture.
So we have to change teacher identity, and school culture. Easier said than done. Where do we start?
The University of Ottawa — Comprehensive School Health Cohort
My alma mater is a good school, but when I was in my B.Ed year, mental health was just not part of the program. Now, over a decade later, the University of Ottawa offers an entire mental health cohort option designed around standards from the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. More research is being conducted at the faculty level on youth mental health in education. Members are encouraged to submit research to a peer reviewed network, publish, and share with other teacher candidates. Mental health conferences are held regularly. All this, and more, strikes at the heart of othering students and embeds mental health as a critical piece of teacher identity early on in their career. This can inoculate a new teacher against the 3 year apathy trap.
So we have to change teacher identity, and school culture. Easier said than done. Where do we start?
Miami — “The Jared Project”
At a well-respected public school in Miami, the suicide of a student led to a sea change in the relationship between staff and students. The teachers took stock of their approaches, embraced new pedagogical approaches, and made some much-needed self-criticisms. They realized their model was overwhelming students and not representative of how deep learning works in the real world — and, much more importantly, the stress was driving students to suicide. So they made one critical change.
Each staff member took stock of their area — a course, a club, a team, or the like — and detailed exactly how many hours a day they expected a student to spend on it, both in and out of school. Honest, difficult conversations were had about what level of work was appropriate. Once those levels were determined, students had to build a schedule and allow 8 hours for sleep. If their schedule included more than 24 hours of school, or if they allotted 7 or fewer hours for sleep, they simply weren’t allowed to have that schedule and had to fix it. If football expects 3 hours a day, but you only have 2 hours to spare, then you aren’t allowed to join the football team unless you drop something else.
The school called this approach “The Jared Project”, in honour of the student who took his own life. It is a community-driven, emotionally-based rethinking of what we’re actually supposed to be doing as teachers. And it’s working.
Educators cannot turn a blind eye to their responsibility in student mental health. We are often the problem. We need to recognize that problem and take steps to fix it not only in our students, but in our training, our school cultures, and in our very concepts of who we are as teachers. Our students’ lives, quite literally, depend on it.
Mario Mabrucco is a educator with almost 20 years experience teaching literacy, arts, and social sciences to youth in Canada, Greece, France, Italy, and Monaco. He has a M.Ed in Curriculum and Education Policy from the University of Toronto, and designs curriculum for the National Film Board of Canada. Read more of Mario’s work on Medium or follow him on Twitter: @mr_mabruc
WORKS CITED
Andrews, J. and Feurer, D. (2009). School-Related Stress and Depression in Adolescents With and Without Learning Disabilities: An Exploratory Study. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, v. 55, n. 1, pp. 92–108.
Clarke, M., Michell, M., and Neville, J. (2017). Dialectics of development: teacher identity formation in the interplay of ideal ego and ego ideal. Teaching Education, v. 28, n. 2, pp. 115–130.
Dimmock, M., Grieves, S. and Place, M. (2008). Young people who cut themselves — a growing challenge for educational settings. British Journal of Special Education, v. 5, n. 1, pp. 42–28.
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014) Foundations for a healthy school. Ottawa, ON: Queen’s Printer for Ontario.
Pope, D. (2010). Beyond “Doing School”: From “Stressed-Out” to “Engaged in Learning”. Canadian Education Association, v. 50, n. 1, pp. 4–8
Trudgen, M. and Lawn, S. (2011) What is the Threshold of Teachers’ Recognition and Report of Concerns About Anxiety and Depression in Students?: An Exploratory Study With Teachers of Adolescents in Regional Australia. Australian Journal of Guidance and Counselling, v. 21, n. 2, pp. 126–141.
University of Ottawa, Bachelor of Education Program. Comprehensive School Health. Retrieved from http://uottawa-comprehensive-school-health.ca/. Accessed Monday, April 23rd, 2017.
