Ultimate Self-care - It’s OK to Stop
First Presenter's Institution
University of South Carolina
First Presenter's Brief Biography
Bob Stevens received his BS from The Citadel, MS from the University of Oklahoma, and PhD from Florida State University. He has over 40 years of experience in education as a classroom teacher, coach, school principal, and college professor. He was Vice President at Charleston Southern University, Director of Intervention Services in Charleston County School District, and Vice President of Research and Marketing at Benefitfocus.com. He is currently the Co-Chair for the 10th Annual Southeastern School Behavioral Health Conference, member of the Medical University Translational Research Community Advisory Board (SCTR), and PI for Stakeholder Engagement for the STAR Clinical Research Network at Vanderbilt University. Research interests include: data systems; behavioral health; tele-health, and school violence/bullying.
Second Presenter's Institution
Clayton State University
Second Presenter’s Email Address
nikkilenae@bellsouth.net
Second Presenter's Brief Biography
Nikki Jones is a LPC in the Atlanta, Ga. area. Her practice specializes in adults from the helping professions who are having difficulty with the stresses and demands placed on them.
Document Type
Event
Primary Strand
Mindfulness and Wellbeing
Relevance to Primary Strand
This session directly impacts the retention of teachers during a time when educators leaving the profession is impacting classrooms across the Southeast. It will also help those who find that they must leave the profession.
Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics
Professional Capacity
Brief Program Description
Those in helping professions continue to quit their jobs in alarming numbers, despite numerous self-care and mindfulness initiatives. For many, the disappointment and guilt as they leave the work they love is crippling. It's OK to stop, and when teachers understand, they discover having the option may help them stay!
Summary
Those in helping professions continue to quit their jobs in alarming numbers, despite numerous self-care and mindfulness initiatives. For many, the disappointment and guilt as they leave the work they love is crippling. It's OK to stop, and when teachers understand, they discover having the option may help them stay!
Given issues of; health, emotional conflict, economic pressures, pandemic requirements, and social divisiveness to name a few, the helping professions are under assault from both within and the outside.
Teachers are the single largest helping profession in the US. As of the 2020 census:
- 5.74 million teachers
- 2.39 registered nurses
- 331,407 firefighters
- 715,000 social workers
Job burnout rates higher for social service professions especially teachers continues to be high. One reason is that teachers care for children with trauma histories, they are at risk of developing compassion fatigue (CF), or a reduced empathic capacity. Additionally, teachers who left their jobs are saying that the pandemic played a role in why they resigned. Of the teachers who quit recently, 40% said the pandemic influenced their decision to leave. That's the highest portion of any category of workers to point to the pandemic as a reason for quitting.
In other sessions you will hear about many self-care activities including: Take a break; Set Goals: Say No: Create a Support System: and Connect with your Emotions. These are all good and important techniques for teachers. But despite self-care initiatives, teachers still leave the profession.
This session is designed to provide reinforcement for teachers who are at a point where they MUST leave the profession. This session will provide techniques for emotional support and care for those that have one foot out the school house door, or are already gone. But by providing this support for this option, some teachers are strengthened to stay, because they now understand it is their option and decision.
Evidence
- (1) Tabor M. Occup Health Saf. 1984 Mar:51-2. PMID: 6143291
- (2) Hupe and Stevenson in J Child Custody Res Issues Pract 16(4):364–386, 2019.
- (3) 2020 US Census, https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes211029.htm
- (4) Characteristics of Public School Teachers - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr/public-school-teachers
- (5) https://www.adoptaclassroom.org/2022/04/12/state-of-teaching-statistics-2022
- (7) https://notwaitingforsuperman.org/teacher-guilt/
Learning Objective 1
1. Participants will be able to understand the causes for teachers leaving the profession in large numbers despite many self-care and teacher support initiatives.
Learning Objective 2
2. Participants will be able to understand that teachers that leave the profession may have even a greater need for emotional support than teacher whom stay. They will learn how hard it is to leave the profession of teaching after such a large personal investment (time, economic, emotional, self-view)
Learning Objective 3
3. Participants will understand that if they can leave the profession guilt and trauma free, they might be empowered to stay.
Recommended Citation
Stevens, Robert N. PhD and Jones, Nikki L. LPC, "Ultimate Self-care - It’s OK to Stop" (2023). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 47.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2023/2023/47
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Ultimate Self-care - It’s OK to Stop
Those in helping professions continue to quit their jobs in alarming numbers, despite numerous self-care and mindfulness initiatives. For many, the disappointment and guilt as they leave the work they love is crippling. It's OK to stop, and when teachers understand, they discover having the option may help them stay!
Given issues of; health, emotional conflict, economic pressures, pandemic requirements, and social divisiveness to name a few, the helping professions are under assault from both within and the outside.
Teachers are the single largest helping profession in the US. As of the 2020 census:
- 5.74 million teachers
- 2.39 registered nurses
- 331,407 firefighters
- 715,000 social workers
Job burnout rates higher for social service professions especially teachers continues to be high. One reason is that teachers care for children with trauma histories, they are at risk of developing compassion fatigue (CF), or a reduced empathic capacity. Additionally, teachers who left their jobs are saying that the pandemic played a role in why they resigned. Of the teachers who quit recently, 40% said the pandemic influenced their decision to leave. That's the highest portion of any category of workers to point to the pandemic as a reason for quitting.
In other sessions you will hear about many self-care activities including: Take a break; Set Goals: Say No: Create a Support System: and Connect with your Emotions. These are all good and important techniques for teachers. But despite self-care initiatives, teachers still leave the profession.
This session is designed to provide reinforcement for teachers who are at a point where they MUST leave the profession. This session will provide techniques for emotional support and care for those that have one foot out the school house door, or are already gone. But by providing this support for this option, some teachers are strengthened to stay, because they now understand it is their option and decision.
