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Recent research in education has revealed that ‘how’ a teacher teaches is as important as ‘what’ she teaches. Indeed, the ‘how’ largely determines effectiveness. It is related to the teacher’s level of self-esteem and the ability, or lack of it, to form close relationships with students. The ‘how’ also involves awareness and practice of positive classroom management approaches. Furthermore, an individual teacher’s effectiveness is enhanced by a whole-school management style and by effective leadership within the school system.

The three major sources of stress in teaching are role load, staff relationships and difficult students. Research indicates that the effects of role load are considerably reduced where there is strong staff cohesiveness and cooperation. Also, the teacher who has high self-esteem complains far less of discipline problems than the teacher with middle or poor self-esteem. These observations have been substantiated by findings that the effective school is characterised by high expectations, emotional responsiveness and effective leadership. High expectations mean believing in each student’s ability to learn and placing the emphasis on effort rather than performance. Responsiveness involves a democratic caring approach to students with an emphasis on students taking responsibility for themselves.

Following on the research evidence but, principally, on my own personal experiences of teaching in primary, second-level and third-level education, my involvement with teaching staffs over several years and my therapeutic work with teachers and others suffering personal, interpersonal and occupational conflicts, this book focuses on eight main areas:

stress management
self-esteem of teachers
staff relationships and morale
self-esteem of students
emotional and behavioural problems of students and staff
whole-school approach
effective leadership.

The book is divided into six chapters, each one focusing on a distinct area relevant to the development of more effective teaching.

Chapter 1 discusses the teaching profession, and why and how it has become highly stressed. It looks at the nature of stress, how to identify the signs of stress, and how to cope and develop personally and professionally from it.

Chapter 2 focuses on the teacher with particular emphasis on self-esteem. It identifies three levels of self-esteem and outlines its effects on the teacher herself and on students and colleagues. It introduces the reader to two communication patterns, introjection and projection, which are revelations of self-esteem problems and have serious effects on relationships within the classroom and staffroom. Most of all, this chapter shows how self-esteem can be changed.

Chapter 3 is given over to the staffroom, a source of much stress for many teachers. Staff relationships, effective communication patterns, staff morale, staff affirmation, responding to rigidity in oneself, principals or colleagues, and problem-solving are all discussed.

The focus of Chapter 4 is on the student. This chapter helps teachers to understand the nature of students’ emotional, social and behavioural problems within the school and classroom, and how to respond effectively to their manifestation. Particular emphasis is placed on students’ self-esteem: how to identify low self-esteem and how to raise it. The effects of students’ self-esteem on motivation and learning are also illustrated.

Chapter 5 attends to the classroom. It distinguishes between problems of overcontrol and undercontrol in students, and how the latter cause the greatest disruption in class, even though the former are indicators of a more at-risk pupil. The chapter also outlines behaviours on the part of the teacher that can precipitate problematic responses from students. It outlines essential aspects of effective classroom management, the design and implementation of effective systems of responsibility for students, and the positive use of sanctions. It also deals with responding to the student who is recalcitrant.

Chapter 6 talks about the school and discusses such issues as what factors make for an effective school, a whole-school approach, effective leadership, coping styles within schools, parent–teacher liaison and school ethos. This chapter emphasises the need for shared responsibility and the need for confrontation by teachers of issues within school systems that need to be altered. It also recommends the development of confidential counselling services for teachers and principals.

personal effectiveness
development of self-esteem-enhancing relationships within the staffroom and classroom
creation of a greater insight into, understanding of and positive responding to the emotional, behavioural and social problems of students and teachers
positive approaches to teaching
shared responsibility.

The aim is always practical. The book includes examples of problematic situations within staffrooms and classrooms and case-studies I have encountered, and offers tried and tested ways of resolving such conflicts. This book is principally developed from the many problems staff groups have presented to me during staff in-service days and our attempts at effective responses to those issues. At the end of each chapter there is a list of the key insights and key actions that will lead to more effective personal, interpersonal and classroom management.

This book is particularly aimed at primary and second-level school teachers but it has relevance to anybody working in the educational system. It is also relevant to policy-makers as it provides insights into the needs of students, teachers, principals, vice-principals, parents, and others within school systems. Parents will also find the book useful since it offers insights on the problems their children may be experiencing in school, and it also apprises them of how to create a positive environment for learning within the home. This book is for students in the education profession at all levels: in basic training and at diploma, graduate and postgraduate levels. It is also of use to lecturers in education.

A good idea is to read the book through so that you get an overall view of the themes and practices recommended. On the other hand, you may like to turn to a chapter or section on issues that currently concern you. Each chapter can stand on its own as it describes specific insights and skills. You can easily dip into particular sections within chapters. The book could also be usefully employed by a staff group or a group of teachers to work through systematically in order to establish greater school effectiveness.

I hope you will find it helpful in resolving many of the difficulties you face within the teaching profession. During my many years of working with staff groups and giving courses to teacher groups, I have witnessed and been impressed, and indeed overawed, by the commitment, dedication and ‘need to know more’ of teachers.

Finally, references to problems encountered with staff groups and in case-studies have been sufficiently masked so that anonymity is ensured.

❑	*The nature of stress*
❑	*Signs of stress*
❑	*Teacher stress*
❑	*Teacher ‘burn-out’*
❑	*Coping with stress*
	▪	Balanced lifestyle
	▪	Healthy diet
	▪	Physical fitness
	▪	Relaxation
❑	*Key insights*
❑	*Key actions*

Stress is a relatively new word for human problems in living. It has been borrowed from the field of technology and means ‘pressure’ or ‘strain’. The effects of stress on a population’s health are very great. It is reckoned that over two-thirds of visits to general practitioners are due to stress-related problems. The six leading causes of death – heart disease, cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, lung ailments, accidental injuries and suicide – are all directly or indirectly caused by stress. The three best-selling drugs are Valium, which is a tranquilliser, Idera, which is for hypertension (blood pressure) and Tagamet, which is for ulcers and other stomach problems.

It is important to distinguish between what I call necessary and emergency stress. Necessary stress occurs, for example, when you eat and you put your digestive system under stress; when you run or play games and you put your cardiovascular system under stress; or when, in preparing for a lecture, a certain amount of apprehension pushes adrenalin into your system, mobilises your intellectual resources, and increases your concentration and motivation. However, if you overeat or overexercise or overworry so that your stomach is in a knot, your heart racing and you feel pressure in your head, you are now into emergency stress. The word ‘emergency’ is very accurate because once you go beyond a certain level of stress you are in an emergency state and something needs to be done to return you to a welfare state. So, for example, a typical cause of stress is the daily hassles of rushing and racing, meeting deadlines, attempting to do too many things at once and so on. If you go into many houses at half-past eight in the morning you will understand the stressful effects of daily hassle. People rush, race, choke back food, shout, roar, argue, make mistakes, cannot remember. Their bodies will reveal the pressure they are putting themselves under: tension headaches, stomach ‘butterflies’, heart palpitations and other signs. The ‘emergency’ to be responded to is the rushing, racing and worrying by counterbehaviours such as getting up earlier, doing things calmly and thinking positively. If these corrective behaviours are effective, people will return to a welfare state; if not, the true causes of the emergency stress have not yet been isolated and further analysis is needed.

Certainly a wise course of action for everybody is to learn to live in the present moment. Few people do. Since beginning this book how many times has your mind wandered into the past or out into the future? The skill of present-moment living is to focus totally on the action of the moment, whether it is reading a particular word, peeling a potato or listening to someone. Some readers will no doubt say you have to think about the future and past. Planning for the future is, indeed, important but then planning is a present-moment activity. Worrying about what is going to happen is a future activity and totally redundant. Practising simple timemanagement will help you plan your day, week, month, or year ahead. It ensures allocation of time for all your essential needs, and the more you meet your different needs the less you are stressed. Likewise, it is important to learn from the past but not to live in it as many people do by regretting, bemoaning, complaining and comparing. Evaluation is a present-moment activity of bringing the benefit of experience to bear in the present.

It is not too difficult to determine your level of stress. Below is a list of the main signs of stress. Go carefully through them and list any symptom you experience. Ask yourself how frequently, for how long and to what degree of intensity (hardly noticeable to very debilitating) you experience the listed symptoms.

If you did not list any of the symptoms please consult a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist immediately as you are in massive ‘denial’. There is no one without some degree of emergency stress! If you listed most of the signs you should likewise seek help immediately.

Be wary of jumping to conclusions when you experience any of these symptoms. People tend to think the worst so that a persistent headache becomes a sign of a brain tumour, a pain in the chest becomes a sure indicator of heart disease and a discomfiture in the stomach becomes a cancer. Unfortunately such an alarmist response shoots your stress levels up higher so that the symptoms increase in intensity, which in turn convinces you of your catastrophic diagnosis, and the spiralling of panic continues. It reminds me of a teacher who came up to me at the end of a lecture and told me he had been experiencing three of the symptoms on the stress signs checklist for five years. The three symptoms were dryness of the mouth, lower back pain and frequent urination. He had been to a number of medical consultants over the years but no one could explain why he had the symptoms. Nevertheless, he was prescribed painkillers for his back, a spray for his mouth but nothing for the frequent urination. Despite the medical treatment the symptoms had not abated over the years; indeed, at times, they severely escalated. It is always wise to get yourself physically checked out, particularly for some persistent physical symptom. However, if you get a clear bill of physical health, you need to look at possible psychological and social causes of the symptoms. This particular teacher did not; instead he convinced himself that he had cancer and believed the doctors either were not telling him or had not discovered it. To go around believing you have cancer is extremely frightening and highly stressful and it was no wonder the stress symptoms had not abated.

What often triggers stress is change. I asked the teacher had something changed in his life five years before – did someone close to him die, did he get married, were there marital problems, a new addition to the family, in-laws coming to live-in, loss of status? It was really quite simple; five years before he had taken over the principalship of a large secondary school. It was then the symptoms became apparent. He was very dependent on others for acceptance and approval, had a dread of failure and generally was a worrier. He would always have had a certain level of stress owing to these underlying vulnerabilities. The extra responsibilities heightened the risk of failure and disapproval, and his underlying fears now became heightened and more apparent. The man’s problem was certainly not cancer, nor was it lower back pain, dryness of the mouth or frequent urination; neither was it the change to school principalship but rather his long-term vulnerabilities of fears, dependency and low self-esteem. When these were corrected the symptoms which had so scared him disappeared.

Bear in mind that emergency stress is positive! It alerts you to change that is needed in some area of your life. It may be within yourself (self-esteem); it may be interpersonal indicating the need for change in some important relationship; or it may be professional indicating the need for change within some aspect of your work or, in some cases, a total career change. The possibilities are endless. Each person has to find the source of his own stress. If necessity is the mother of invention then stress can be the father of self-actualisation.

Stress in teaching has been getting a fair degree of press in recent years. The number of people wanting to get out of the profession is high and the number going into it is falling. The rise in early retirement on health grounds is unprecedented. What has happened to bring about these changes? Occupational stress is a function of two main factors: demands and control. When demands in an occupation are high and control is low you have a high-stress job. A low-stress position is the opposite: demands are low and control is high. Air traffic controllers have high-stress work because demands on them are very high as the least mistake may cause a major disaster and control is minimal as air space is taken up very quickly, particularly in the world’s busy airports. Librarians, on the other hand, have low demands made on them and they have high control over the rate at which they work. There has been a double shift in these factors within the teaching profession. Within the last two decades the role demands on teachers have increased enormously and control (discipline) issues have become a major problem for many schools. The combination of increased demands and control difficulties has turned teaching into a high-stress occupation. There are differences between schools but all schools will have experienced some increase in stress levels.

A research study carried out in the mid-western area of Ireland distinguished between advantaged (middle-class) schools and disadvantaged (more lower/working-class) schools. The study surveyed the prevalence of educational, behavioural and emotional problems among primary-school children. In the advantaged schools at least 10 per cent of children had serious behavioural and emotional difficulties; in the disadvantaged areas the percentage was considerably higher at 27 per cent. Little or no psychological or social back-up services were available to these schools and teachers, who, though not trained to understand or cope with these difficulties, were nonetheless expected to do so. Such children present many control difficulties within the classroom and, not surprisingly, one of the major causes of teacher stress is students with emotional and behavioural problems. Inadequate classroom and whole-school management systems or resortment to old destructive authoritarian methods serves only to increase control difficulties. Ineffective leadership is another major contributor to stress in teaching as many principals, who may have been effective as teachers, do not lead well. The skills of teaching are very different to the skills of leadership and it is not a Department of Education policy that principals be required to do management courses. Lack of cohesiveness between leaders and staff makes for inconsistency and unpredictability in the management of classrooms and the school. Consistency and predictability are the hallmarks of good management systems and their absence means many control difficulties.

If control problems are increasing in schools so also are the demands made on teachers. These demands principally come from an educational system that has put the emphasis on performance in examinations as the main criterion for successful teaching. The competition for ‘points’ to get into a third-level college has pressurised second-level educators into an educational philosophy that is discriminatory (students who are considered bright are more reinforced) and conditional (learning not for learning’s sake but for points’ sake). This is immensely taxing on teachers themselves as they tend to measure their professional effectiveness by examination results. What is even more worrying is that primary schools now view entrance examinations to secondary schools as a major goal, for which preparations begin in fifth class. There is also an increase in interschool competition measured by how many children get into the ‘best’ schools.

Examinations measure only an aspect of academic development. To evaluate teaching on such a narrow criterion would do serious injustice to teachers who help poorly motivated children to develop from low levels of learning to moderate levels of learning. It is little credit to teachers to bring highly motivated students to high examination results. Yet the emphasis and appraisal tend to be on these students. Furthermore, education is not just about academic development. Surely of equal importance is the emotional, social, sexual, physical, behavioural, spiritual and creative development of children? Indeed, educational research is now showing that the emotional development of children in the classroom and school is of primary importance. Children with learning difficulties generally have low self-esteem and unless their emotional problems are corrected remedial efforts tend to have minimal effects. Marital breakdown, unemployment, profound social and political changes, the fall in religious practice – all serve to make more demands on teachers. Bureaucracy and its obsessive need for paperwork makes for more demands, particularly on principals and vice-principals, who very often do not have any secretarial assistance. Many principals are also under pressure because of demoralisation among their teaching staff. Finally, the fact that the profession is not a well-paid one and that promotion is limited does not help matters.

The effects of occupational stress have become known as ‘burn-out’. The main signs of burn-out are listed below. Again, in checking through this list, evaluate the frequency, intensity and duration of the symptoms you have experienced.

Occupational burn-out is rarely a product purely of the job itself. Generally, a combination of personal vulnerability and occupational stress brings about burn-out. A case history will illustrate this point. This was a teacher who had been teaching for fifteen years. In the year prior to coming to see me she had an extremely difficult leaving certificate examination class. This teacher was very dependent on academic results as a measure of her worth as a person, and this dependency made her hypersensitive to any criticism or disapproval; certainly, failure in terms of poor academic results highly threatened her self-esteem. Consequently, she worked tooth and nail to bring this class up to ‘her standards’. She was under constant strain during the year. At the end of the academic year she was emotionally drained and physically exhausted. But, rather than sighing with relief that the year was over and she could enjoy the three best things about teaching, June, July and August, she now worried about what the examination results would reveal. When the results came out in August the ‘difficult’ class did quite well and now rather than clapping herself on the back for a job well done, she worried and fretted that if she got another class like that in September she would not be able to cope. By the time September came she had immobilised herself with fear and was unable to return to school. When she came to see me in mid-October absenteeism was total – she had not returned to school at all. There were dark circles under her eyes revealing physical exhaustion, insomnia and loss of appetite. She was on both antidepressants and tranquillisers. She complained of severe headaches and nausea. She felt she could no longer cope with teaching and students. Her discouragement was total and her loss of self-esteem was serious as she now saw herself as ‘a total failure’. She was pessimistic and fatalistic about the future, and her motivation and involvement in life had plummeted. She sat around most of the time brooding about her problems, which served only to increase them.

This description is typical of many teachers I have helped over the years. Her burn-out resulted from the combination of her own poor self-esteem with accompanying dependency and multiple fears and the increased pressure from the difficult examination class. The help that is needed in such cases is personal empowerment to elevate self-esteem and independence of others and of performance; more constructive approaches to teaching; and, whenever possible, the development of a supportive and dynamic staffroom environment. When at least some of these issues are resolved the stressed teacher is able to return to work.

As has been seen stress is positive as it indicates the need for change. Furthermore, each person has to detect the source of his own stress and on discovery take corrective action. Nevertheless, there are coping actions that help all people under stress even though they rarely resolve the underlying issue unique to each person’s stress problems. Stress management clinics have mushroomed all over America and they are beginning to appear in Ireland. These clinics tend to focus on four main coping skills:

balanced lifestyle
healthy diet
physical exercise
relaxation.

Signs of stress
Emotional signs	• Anxiety • aggression • apathy • boredom • depression • fatigue • frustration • guilt and shame • irritability and bad temper • moodiness • low self-esteem • threat and tension • nervousness • loneliness • hypersensitivity to criticism
Behavioural signs	• Accident proneness • drug taking • temper outbursts • excessive eating or loss of appetite • excessive drinking or smoking • excitability • impulsive behaviour • impaired speech • nervous laughter • restlessness • trembling • rushing • doing too many things at the one time
Cognitive signs	• Inability to make decisions and concentrate • frequent forgetfulness • negative thinking • mental blocks • living in the past or future
Body effects	• Increased heart rate and blood pressure • dryness of mouth • sweating • dilation of pupils • difficulty in breathing • hot and cold spells • a ‘lump in the throat’ • numbness or tingling in parts of the limbs • stomach butterflies
Health effects	• Asthma • amenorrhoea • chest and back pains • coronary heart disease • diarrhoea • faintness and dizziness • dyspepsia • frequent urination • headaches and migraine • neuroses • nightmares • insomnia • psychoses • psychosomatic disorders • diabetes mellitus • skin rash • ulcers • loss of sexual interest • weakness
School effects	• Absenteeism • poor staff relations • poor motivation • high staff turnover rates • poor staff morale • antagonism at work • job dissatisfaction

Main signs of burn-out
Absenteeism Physical exhaustion Appetite problems (under- or overeating) Insomnia Psychosomatic complaints, e.g. headaches, back pain, chest pain, stomach problems, bowel problems Irritability Reliance on drugs such as alcohol, tranquillisers antidepressants, nicotine	Pessimism and fatalism Increasing discouragement Negative attitudes to teaching and to students Poor relationships with colleagues Loss of self-esteem Loss of motivation to develop oneself Reduced involvement in life Loss of creativity