Teacher Stress: Impact on Performance and Retention

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A large number of teachers leave the profession long before retirement (Ingersoll & May, 2011). A lot of the research conducted in Australia and overseas confirms that one of the major reasons for this is teacher stress. Those who do not leave also report stress as a major issue. It is a challenge that remains to be dealt with, especially when the teacher well being is closely related to student well being. Briner and Dewberry (2007) found a significant association between teacher well being and student’s performance. Beginning teachers are particularly vulnerable to stress and burnout as they are yet to develop coping skills to deal with stress. Teaching is one of the few professions where beginners are expected to perform the same duties …show more content…

Between 40% and 50% of beginning teachers leave the profession within the first five years (Ingersoll, 2012). The main reason for teachers to leave is stress and burnout (O’Brien, Goddard and Keeffe, 2007). Exact figures are a lot of harder to obtain in Australia. A recent report (Attrition of recent Queensland graduates, 2013) estimated that teachers who leave within first five years in Australia range from 8% to 50%. In a large scale survey, this report found that more than 30% of teachers consider workload and stress as very important factors in relation to their decision to leave teaching. Since it is an important issue, due attention has been given to this in the literature. The synthesis of literature is done here in 2 parts – sources of stress and strategies to manage …show more content…

Buchanan et al. (2013) interviewed teachers in their first, second and fourth year of teaching. Apart from commonly known factors like excessive workloads and student behaviour, early career teachers also reported feeling physically and emotionally isolated. Strength of this study was that it studied teachers at different points of their careers in the beginning years. Even though this was a good way to identify the changing trends in stress factors in early years, the long term nature of study made it hard to retain participants in the study. By the final year of the study, only 14 participants were left as rest of them withdrew from the

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