Teacher burnout and practitioner research
Jonathon Ryan
The experience of burnout is mostly associated with the ‘care professions’, teachers, nurses, social workers and others. I suspect that there's more than one type. I once observed a fairly new teacher who had the class fully engaged and motivated but was expending huge amounts of energy to do so. It was teaching by charisma and caffeine. I felt he'd burnout unless he added more tools to his repertoire, such as those you'd pick up on, say, a CELTA course. But I think that's a much less common burnout scenario. The typical case is succumbing to the combination of pressures that Michael mentioned last week, where against a background of stress, a persistent teaching problem can develop from mere irritant to something unmanageable.
And as Michael argued, this is where practitioner research comes in. This is where teachers identify an issue that's relevant to their teaching, and they set about systematically exploring it and making changes.
One approach is Action Research, for which I strongly recommend seeking out Anne Burns’ work in bringing this to the attention of English language teachers. This starts with identifying an issue you are curious about (e.g. The students struggle with X), which becomes a question (How should I approach in the class?), which you then seek to tackle through principled trial and error. For instance, you might do some initial reading about the issue, then develop or select a new activity, which you then try in class and collect data on to evaluate whether it worked. Based on this evaluation, you revise the activity before trialing it again. This cyclic process can go on until you’re happy that you’ve achieved some sort of resolution.
Another approach is that of John F. Fanselow, who has developed a fascinating range of techniques for seeing your teaching in a new light and keeping things fresh (https://itdi.pro/johnfanselow/about/). One of the core ideas is to become aware of what you currently do in the class: all of us quickly fall into countless routines that we take for granted and that have ever-diminishing returns for students. Many of these are seemingly trivial: playing the audio twice, standing at the front of the class, going round the class for answers, nominating volunteers, writing answers on the board, referring students to dictionaries and so on and so on. Whether the routine is profound or trivial, Fanselow encourages us to first notice it and then to consciously mix it up. As one of his book titles states, whatever it is, Try the Opposite. See what happens.
To do this in a systematic way, Fanselow recommends analysing videos of your lessons. As you re-watch a lesson, at each moment look for some decision that you made or some routine that you’ve adopted, and then identify other options that were available at that moment. The idea is not to beat yourself up about what you did, but to look ahead and open up possibilities: I could rather than I should have.
This approach to our own development as teachers puts power in our own hands to change the day-to-day experience of teaching, and is – surely – the most reliable way to avoid burnout.