Happy Teacher Revolution: The Educator's Roadmap to Claiming and Sustaining Joy

Happy Teacher Revolution

The Educator’s Roadmap to Claiming & Sustaining Joy

Danna Thomas

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All quotes from Deb Dana, Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory, published by Sounds True, 2021, are reproduced with permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available

ISBN 9781394195725 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781394195749 (epdf)

ISBN 9781394195732 (epub)

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

COVER ART: © GETTY IMAGES | YUANYUAN YAN

This book is dedicated to teachers:

past,

present,

and future.

To the Revolutionaries who so bravely pioneered this global movement, thank you for your vulnerability to commit to the radical act of claiming your own well-being and holding space for others to do the same.

You inspire me every day to keep going and keep fighting for the wholeness and wellness of teachers.

Visit https://www.wiley.com/go/happyteacherrevolution to access the videos and forms mentioned in this book.

FOREWORD

I choose to disconnect and detach with love.

In January of 2017, I resolved to swear off what had become a soul-sucking habit of daily doom-scrolling and replace that fear and dopamine-driven exercise with the intentional consumption of good news and bright spots, stories elevating everyday kindness, compassion, courage, servant leadership, brave truth-telling, and posttraumatic growth. A few months later, I came across an article in Education Week highlighting the now-well-known epidemic of educator burnout. This story was different because it was personal, hopeful, and solution-focused without the invalidating tones of toxic positivity. This story was about Danna Thomas and the beginnings of her grassroots efforts inviting us all to take more compassionate care of ourselves and each other by telling the truth, connecting in our shared struggle and strength, embracing our sense of agency, and choosing how we want to show up in any given moment. This was the story of a responsible revolution in service of equitable student outcomes and human flourishing, and I was hooked.

The following year, on the heels of significant loss in our community, we at Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Salem, Oregon, were awarded an employee wellness grant from OEA Choice Trust. We immediately decided to join Happy Teacher Revolution (HTR) and invite Danna to come train 30 instructional mentors, counselors, and administrators in how to facilitate peer support groups oriented toward providing the time and space to heal, deal, and be real about the social-emotional and intellectual demands we all face in schools today. This coalition of the willing didn't need to be persuaded that this was necessary work. Like many of us who suffer from bouts of harsh self-criticism, these Salem-Keizer professionals just needed validation, permission, basic resources, and moral support. They were already gifted, whole-human wellness champions fully invested in finding meaningful, low-burden, high-impact strategies to influence school culture. They were already committed to the mindset of not letting what we can't do yet prevent us from doing what we can do now.

Danna's contagious spirit and compelling story of personal and professional struggle, active healing, and posttraumatic growth profoundly resonated with our team, as it has with thousands of educators across the United States and Canada. Her elegant upstream solution to the downstream outcomes of empathic distress and burnout is particularly powerful because it is a veritable marriage of sense and soul. Sense comes from her deep understanding of the well-established research related to toxic stress, primary trauma, indirect trauma, educator burnout, and the complex systems-level variables influencing contemporary public education. Soul is reflected in how Danna honors the perennial wisdom traditions with a reverence for the art and ritual of gathering and holding sacred space for our lived experiences to be shared and for all participants to encounter the affirming power of community.

We started with pilot sites for HTR in 2019, supporting early-career educators, 50 percent of whom usually leave the profession within their first five years, and veteran educators who were particularly impacted by the rapidly escalating behavioral health needs of students today. Anecdotal feedback from educators was exceptionally positive—and worries that these peer support groups might devolve into prolonged venting sessions were alleviated when participants and facilitators quickly adapted to the norms, expectations, and structure of HTR. Little did we know how important it would be for us to build more capacity for nurturing a culture of care prior to March 2020. During the pandemic and ensuing global upheaval, virtual HTR groups and the 12 Choices became a lifeline for dozens of educators, counselors, and administrators.

This project also coincided with what would become the first biannual survey of more than 5,000 district staff on the topics of belonging, well-being, and staff relationships—topics similar to those we started assessing with all of our students in 2018. The anecdotal data continued to reflect educators' profound appreciation for this resource—but now that perceived impact had reliable, valid data to support it. Our pilot sites that continued regular HTR meetings in a virtual format had among the highest overall levels of staff well-being in the district and showed some of the most dramatic improvements in positive and challenging feelings, from early Spring 2020 to late Fall 2020 and beyond. This further validated our belief that multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) for students must be accompanied by multi-tiered systems of support for adult social-emotional learning (SEL involves evidence-based programs, practices, and policies through which children and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.) and well-being. HTR provided us with an effective Tier 1/2 intervention to understand, support, and help retain our precious human resources, and we finally had a data-driven lever and a place to stand for advancing work that centers employee wellness as an essential driver of equitable student outcomes.

I have served for more than 25 years at the intersection of education, mental health, and social-emotional learning as a counselor, teacher, school psychologist, adjunct instructor, and district administrator. During that time I've burned out of two jobs, forgetting to care for myself with the same level of intentionality I aspired to care for others. I felt guilt, shame, and shades of imposter syndrome for not knowing better, especially given my training as a helping professional. I can't help but wonder if those episodes of burnout might have been prevented, or if finding joy again might have been easier if peer support groups like Happy Teacher Revolution had been available to me then.

If you've ever struggled to say no without fear of relational repercussions; if you've ever felt guilty for going to the bathroom during the school day, taking more than five minutes for lunch, or not answering all emails within 24 hours; if you often feel emotionally and physically exhausted; if you've felt shame for not being all things to all people, all the time; if you feel like you're in a near-constant state of hustling to prove your worthiness; if you've ever wondered what it might be like to work in a truly collaborative Community of Practice where you can lean into your own sense of agency and self-determination; if you've ever wondered what it might be like to feel seen, heard, and valued at your school, with no strings attached … then Danna Thomas is your person and HTR is for you!

—Chris Moore, Ed.S.

Director of Mental Health & Social-Emotional Learning

School Psychologist

Salem-Keizer Public Schools, Salem, OR

INTRODUCTION

My journey with the Happy Teacher Revolution Movement began before I was a teacher, before anyone referred to me as Miss Thomas, before I held the responsibility of educating a classroom filled with incredible minds. My story begins when I was still a student myself, a student suffering in silence from severe depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. Not only was I experiencing thoughts of ending my life, but I was expending so much energy pretending like I was okay when I really wasn’t by hiding my shadow from family and friends. But I couldn’t hide from my teachers. I refer to my educators as my emotional first responders who recognized the subtle changes in behavior and compassionately encouraged me to seek treatment and get help. They’re the reason why I’m alive today, writing these words, and sharing this very road map to claiming joy. I owe them my life.

After spending nearly a decade as an educator, I recognized both the lack of preparedness and the lack of ongoing support for the emotional demands of the job. I was shocked there was no such thing as a support group for educators, so I decided to create an opportunity for systemic change by organizing support groups through a grassroots network in my community. We called it Happy Teacher Revolution, and slowly our movement began to take root and spread beyond the city limits of Baltimore.

Over the past ten years, Happy Teacher Revolution has supported hundreds of individuals in leading communities to support themselves and one another by creating the time and space to feel, deal, and be real about the social-emotional demands that they face on the job. We’ve supported these educators in leading their own support spaces from the West Coast to the East Coast, in rural areas and urban areas, in small schools and massive districts across the United States as well as in Canada, Senegal, Nigeria, Brazil, and Kuwait.

MY WHY

This book is a necessity. While I don’t believe in operating from a sense of scarcity or urgency, I realize as I write this that we need a strong teaching force now more than ever. We are already seeing a reduction in the numbers of people choosing to enter the field, and enrollment in schools of education is down. The effect of educators leaving the field is absolutely immense.

The pandemic of educator burnout existed long before the pandemic of COVID-19. According to a 2022 EdWeek survey described in Forbes magazine, a whopping 60% of teachers expressed they were stressed out and many educators are considering leaving for the first time ever or have already left the profession altogether due to stress (Gomez, 2022). When we apply this research to the teachers in the United States alone, that means that of the 3.2 million current teachers—over 1.9 million estimated teachers—are stressed out … which means nearly 31 million children are sitting in the classroom of a stressed-out teacher (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).

As teachers leave the classroom, we have realized that they are a target market for other employers based on their tenacity, resilience, work ethic, and innovative approaches. Furthermore, social media celebrates individuals who share their stories around leaving the profession, with many posts going viral because so many can relate to hitting an absolute breaking point.

Poor-quality teacher self-care, the lack of systemic change, and the complete ignoring of financial well-being are all topics that folks have been vocal about especially recently, and the voices are only growing.

Here are some of the headlines at the time of this writing:

Superficial Self-Care? Stressed-Out Teachers Say No Thanks (2022)

Teachers Are Not OK, Even Though We Need Them to Be (2021)

US Teachers Work More than Teachers in Nearly Every Other Country (2019)

Teachers’ Pay Lags Furthest Behind Other Professionals in U.S., Study Finds (2017)

Teachers in America Were Already Facing Collapse. COVID Only Made It Worse (2022)

Violence, Threats, and Harassment Are Taking a Toll on Teachers, Survey Shows (2022)

More than Half of Teachers Are Looking for the Exits, a Poll Says (2022)

Educators Are More Stressed at Work than Average People, Survey Finds (2017)

There's a common thread through the voices and perspectives of the hundreds of humans who influenced this text, and that is an overwhelming craving for a sense of belonging. This desire of belonging—especially for new teachers who don’t know what it's like to not be a pandemic or postpandemic teacher. The mentor teachers I’ve talked to share that they are less in the space of coaching new teachers around curriculum, intellectual demands, or academic facets of the job but more so supporting the social-emotional lens from a humanistic perspective. They pick up the phone or start a Zoom call with new teachers who are sobbing, craving someone to just listen and connect with.

What does the teacher turnover crisis mean? First of all, it means there are fewer people in a field that is already experiencing historical shortages. Second, it also means that schools will be out of money, as it's expensive to hire teachers, and even more expensive to hire administrators. Third, it means that children will be missing out on an opportunity to have a stronger teacher—research shows that teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout much of a teacher's career. Every year that students get a brand-new teacher means that the students are missing out on the benefit of having a veteran teacher. Things are hard for teachers now. But, in truth, things have always been hard for teachers. We are at a turning point, which I pray will not become an absolute breaking point.

Self-care looks privileged because we think of it as an Instagram feed. Going places, doing things, spending money. But it's not like that. Self-care isn’t treating yourself, self-care is taking care of yourself. It's legit to take care of yourself. Love yourself. Accept yourself. It's noticing what you need. It's using your voice to advocate for your needs.

—Alexis Shepard, former Middle School English Language Arts Teacher, Clemson, South Carolina

In this book, a new definition of self-care works alongside systemic change. (See Part V about systemic change.) The enhanced aspects of the book, including its interactive design, videos, and shareable graphics, are designed to be digested in small doses without being overwhelming. Thus, they make well-being seem a little less daunting. The voices amplified in this text draw from teachers’ experiences in a wide range of locations, with a wide range of backgrounds and a wide range of experiences in their role. Steeped in mental health research, this is the opposite of a fluffy book and posits happiness as truly revolutionary not just to pursue but to claim as your own.

This guide is for you if you hope to restore your passion and your why for this work. It was created with you and your colleagues in mind as we collectively crave autonomy now more than ever. We are in the work of supporting the growing minds of the individuals we teach and also in the practice of building relationships (with students and with adults), and we know that the importance around social-emotional learning is only growing. In my decade of work as a national spokeswoman for mental health and well-being awareness for educators, the piece that has translated into financial investment is retention of quality teachers and also quality administration. In the United States alone, before the pandemic, we were spending over $7.3 billion on the constant recruitment and training of new teachers (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 2007). Our educators are not a renewable resource, and not only is it financially expensive to train a revolving door of new teachers and new administrators, but the emotional costs are even higher.

This revolutionary text aims