DL - Teacher Burnout

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I work as a digital events specialist and I would like to address the issue of teacher burnout while teaching online FT. I see this type of burnout in my own industry frequently, however it is easier to be flexible and take time to recharge. Most of our teachers have not been trained to teach in a digital environment full-time very day. Teaching online requires vastly different energy utilization and I feel that the the current proposed teaching schedules will cause massive burnout for many of our teachers.

The learning environment for our children will be completely different and each child will have a different way of adapting to this new environment and the teacher will need to adjust to this new learning environment and be able to assist their students as well as parents. The facilitation of content will be different and teachers will need to be flexible to adjust if necessary. Parents will be able to observe and question teaching styles and this may cause additional stress for teachers. Keep in mind, contrary to my own job where I facilitate perhaps a few meetings a month, the teachers will be expected to be at peak performance every day during this entire 2020/2021 school year. Expectations from their employer and parents will be high.

I don't believe that this learning model will be sustainable over the long run.

I teach online already and have for a long time. I think it's really no different from what teachers do normally - which is to say, there is not enough time for proper planning, they are over-regulated and controlled and not allowed to be creative, they get burned out very quickly, and the quality of education is not great as a result of all that. In person, you have 6 hours with the students and usually zero planning time. I was shocked when I first started teaching - it just made no sense that I couldn't actually plan and teach a real lesson because I was basically performing mass childcare the whole day without enough time to make some copies much less really plan out and prepare for something that would be called high quality education. So basically, you're right, except this is how teaching K-12 has always been, at least in fcps.