Surviving and Thriving as a Teacher: Exploring the Emotional Management Struggles and Strategies of Teachers

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the struggles teachers face when they first encounter the emotion work in teaching. Furthermore, I explored the strategies they had to develop to healthily manage this work. In this way, teachers are not just surviving, but thriving, in their role. To achieve this, I used a combined methodology of an auto-ethnography to explore my own lived experiences and empathetic semi-structured interviews with five other teachers. The main findings are categorized into struggles and strategies. Participants identified their struggles with the emotion work as the emotions of stress, anxiety, and caring. The emotion of caring was found to create challenges when the teacher tried to establish and maintain emotional boundaries. The common emotional management strategies were the creation of personal and professional support systems as well as direct and indirect mindfulness practices. As a result of these findings, there are three key recommendations. First, an understanding of the emotion work often experienced by teachers needs to be integrated into professional development opportunities for prospective, beginning, and experienced teachers. Second, teachers should be empowered to invest in personal emotional management strategies, such as support systems and mindfulness. Third, schools and school divisions should support teacher’s ongoing emotion work by providing professional development in emotional management, enhancing mentorship programs, and reframing sick days. Stress and emotions cannot be removed from teaching, nor should they be forgotten. A key tool to supporting teachers in this dimension of teaching is mindfulness.