Heading 1NDMTSS Conference
Description
Teachers have always needed to know and practice protective strategies in their social emotional first aid kits to manage the daily stressors of working on the front lines of a human-service oriented profession. That need has never been greater given the massive increase in uncertainty and unpredictability in the teaching profession and in one's personal life due to COVID.
In short, teaching is emotional labor-- the effort required to manage and metabolize strong emotions like anger, shame, guilt, anxiety, and overwhelm, as well as generate and stoke positive emotions like joy, hope, and compassion.
Stress significantly diminishes a teacher's capacity to regulate their negative emotions and cultivate positive emotions. Ironically, teachers who leave the profession often cite their inability to cope with their own emotional reactions to loss of control, unpredictability, and lack of purpose in their teaching as the primary reason for burnout.
There are many, many strategies and practices rooted in cognitive and affective neuroscience and social and behavioral sciences that teachers can learn, practice, and integrate into their personal and professional lives as teachers to metabolize stress, manage negative energy, protect themselves from the burnout cycle, and find joy in teaching the whole year through!
Learning Objectives
In this session, teachers will:
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Explore the core elements of the teacher burnout cycle and learn how to protect one's self from the 2 paths to burning out,
Career
Many teachers believe that teaching is more than just a "job;" they believe teaching is their calling.
Present TeacherTM professional development focuses on the personhood of the teacher. Foundational to our training is perpetually connecting and re-connecting teachers to their values and purpose that is core to their unique calling to teach. We know that teaching is a heart-centered profession that makes emotional, psychological, physical, mental, and spiritual demands on the personhood of the educator.
"You can't understand the teacher or his or her teaching without understanding the person the teacher is." (Hargreaves & Fullan, p. 63, 2012).
Present TeacherTM professional development draws a practical, systematic, and research-based path based on transformative learning theory, social/emotional theory, neuroscience, and mindfulness to teach teachers how to connect with their invisible, innate, and inexhaustible source of inner resilience and energy reserves.
Present TeacherTM professional development engages educators in "perspective transformation" processes that allow them to reflect on assumptions, beliefs, and styles of perception that create internal and external stress and shift their frames of reference of situations and another so that their behavior is more aligned with their core commitments and values.
The work of Present TeacherTM cultivates career professional from the inside out-- teaching teachers how in moments of teaching when they are most tempted to distance themselves from their students, their peers, their calling, and their very selves to actually get closer. Move in. Be curious. Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Be real. Be their fullest expression of their best teaching selves.
