Blog

Responding to Teacher Burn-out 

90% of NEA’s members say that feeling burned out is a serious problem. Becky Pringle, president of the NEA, said “Without exception, every stop I made, from Kentucky to Oakland, I heard those similar stories of educators who were exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling unloved, disrespected.”It’s not a surprise that the well-being of teachers and students has been on the decline for the past several years.  The CDC reports more than a third (37%) of high school students reported they experienced poor mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 44% felt persistently sad or hopeless during the past year. Students are not thriving. Educators are not thriving. If teachers are not thriving, how can they support their students’ thriving to do their best academically? This past year

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LISTENING GROUPS

Students are starved for listening, to have experiences where they are invited and encouraged to share and to be understood.

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Raising Resilient Students

Julie Lycott-Haimes, while Dean of Students at Stanford, noticed that incoming freshmen were less resilient to handle the challenges of college life.  In her book, How to Raise Successful Children:   Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, she describes how the over-helping done by parents and by educators, too, has crippled our youth so that they are less able to “#adult.”    Helicopter parenting has morphed into “snowplow” parenting in the winter, “lawnmower” parenting in the summer, describing how parents remove any obstacle in their child’s journey to adulthood.  The college admission scandal is an example of this level of parent interference. Of course, they are doing it out of love, not realizing that they are robbing their child of

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